Daniel, after your Bond chapter — five films over 15 years — how did you wind up hearing from Luca Guadagnino about “Queer”
Colman, how did you wind up working on a film with cast of nonprofessional actors?
DOMINGO My director, Greg Kwedar, and his co-writer, Clint Bentley, have been volunteer teachers at Sing Sing for years. They kept saying, “If we can capture what we’ve learned from this Rehabilitation Through the Arts program, wouldn’t it be great to do a film about that?” Greg said he put the idea in his drawer and then pulled it out a couple of years later and wrote a quick treatment, and at the end, luckily enough, he wrote down, “Colman Domingo.”
Photographed by Beau Grealy
Paul, nearly a quarter century after Ridley Scott made Gladiator …
CRAIG You weren’t even born, were you?
PAUL MESCAL I was 4. (Laughs.)
Ridley begins planning a sequel and sees you in Normal People?
MESCAL My dad showed me Gladiator when I was 13 — I was obsessed with the battle sequences. But Aftersun and indie movies, that’s my bread and butter in terms of what I’m drawn to as an actor. But if I was going to make a big film? And Ridley Scott comes asking? Ridley organized a Zoom, which lasted half an hour — he spoke with me for 10 minutes about the arc of the story, 10 minutes about his dog and 10 minutes about Gaelic football, and then it was offered to me. I was like, “I could go and look at the first film and see what Russell did so excellently.” But that felt like a mistake because that’s not my lane. If Ridley’s entry point to me was something like Normal People and Aftersun and All of Us Strangers, I was keen to draw a performance style from those films and try to bring it to something bigger.
Brady Corbet is 36. The budget was less than $10 million. What made you want to The Brutalist, 22 years after The Pianist?
Photographed by Beau Grealy
Trump is probably the world’s most famous person. Was it intimidating to portray him?
SEBASTIAN STAN So much of what Adrien just said resonated for me in terms of wanting to be part of something that stands the test of time. I had a personal thing with the American dream because I came to this country from Romania when I was 12, and my father helped people escape illegally. I had heard all about the American dream and have been trying to this day to figure out what this dream is and what it gives us and what it takes away. That overrode any sort of fear about doing it because it was him. I played this little game with myself where I crossed out the names [of the characters], and there was still a Michael Corleone sort of story. And here was this filmmaker [Ali Abbasi] who was European, who’d fled Iran, who’s fearless and whose last film was all about his previous country, coming into this with a fresh perspective, not wanting to play for any team, just removing all judgment. I thought, “Can we just try to find out who the hell this person [Trump] is? What’s beneath this character?” And when you peel back the layers, you get to the core of a powerless child who has been enacting a sort of vendetta of revenge that we’ve all been subjected to, to no end. I think that we as artists, as actors, have to keep reflecting the times that we’re in as best as we can, no matter how ugly they are.
Sebastian, two big-swing projects this year, the other being Different Man.
BRODY Double feature. That’s so impressive.
STAN It’ll never happen again. It was thanks to the strike.
Sebastian, your character in film has neurofibromatosis, form of facial disfigurement
STAN With this one, I definitely feel like I took a little bit of what Adrien said about playing your director because [director Aaron Schimberg] also wrote it, and it’s so much about his experience of being a disfigured man. Sometimes I was like, “I’ll just copy.” But he’s been trying to figure out how he can get us to see a movie that represents this disability, and he was finding it very difficult. In his previous film, he hired Adam [Pearson, an actor who has neurofibromatosis] to be in it, and he got backlash because people were saying he was exploiting Adam, so the movie didn’t get seen. But if he was casting an able-bodied actor to play a disabled person, then he’s not really representing, and nothing happens. So he found a way with this movie of doing both.
CRAIG Every day I was thinking, “This is all failing. Where is this going?” From the moment I got there in the morning until the moment I’d leave at the end of the day, it was like, “What the fuck?”
DOMINGO I was working with men who had the lived experience of being incarcerated, and every day I was like, “I don’t want to be a fraud.”
STAN I was having panic attacks every night. There was not enough time to gain weight, and the prosthetics test failed badly, so I was fucked. And not only that, but the director, two weeks out, goes, “Originally, I was going to cast a woman to play Trump.”
BRODY That’s reassuring.
STAN “Why are you fucking telling me this two weeks before?! I’m going to die.”
Difference between an impersonation and a performance?
MESCAL Sometimes those things help though, right?
DOMINGO Yeah. The physical helps.
BRODY You have responsibility to represent the physicality and something that’s familiar.
DOMINGO (To Stan) When I watched what you did, I thought, “Oh, he’s taken away any judgment [of Trump].” I thought that was exceptional because everyone has an opinion about him, but you’re like, “No, I’m going to do the soul work.”
STAN Thank you. I always think of the great [acting coach] Larry Moss. The Intent to Live was a big book for me, about “everyone has a big emotional need.” Is it to be loved? Is it to be heard? Is it for approval? I mean, everything for Trump, from my perspective, is about power. It’s, “I want to be the most powerful person in the world.”
Being onstage makes you a better screen actor?
MESCAL Yeah, I think so. Somebody said to me that film is a director’s medium — they have the canvas and you’re the paint — but stage is very much a writer’s and an actor’s medium. Once previews are over, that’s your stage, that’s where you go and play. More broadly, something like Streetcar obviously has a very famous performance history, as does something like Gladiator II. Once I’d been cast in Streetcar, I was like, “I can never go back and look at the film until the dust has settled on it all.” And being onstage, you’re acting in a wide shot the whole time — there’s no hiding, there’s no going again. On a Ridley set, a lot of it feels theatrical because it’s not wide shot then tight coverage then medium shot; it’s all happening in one go.
MESCAL It depends. In the scenes in the cell, he would get as many cameras in there as possible — maybe he’d get to five, trying to cram a sixth in the door. Whereas when you’re shooting the battle scenes, it’s 12.
Twelve cameras, easy. Camera operators dressed up in costume like Roman soldiers.
DOMINGO Really?! That’s fantastic.
MESCAL So you save time with the amount of takes that you’re going to do because the coverage is there. But you also gain a sense of freedom because continuity goes out the window.
Daniel, you’ve often returned to the stage in New York
CRAIG The first movie job I ever did, I went on the set and the director kept saying to me [complimenting him], “God, you’re so still!” I was like [to myself], “Because I’m terrified!” On the stage, because I’d been doing that for so long, there was just the freedom to be. I didn’t go into film knowing how to do that. That I had to learn — and I’m still learning to this day how to be as free on film as I can be on the stage.
Colman, your story of the past 10 years is so inspiring. You were almost ready to hang it up, right?
DOMINGO Not almost. Full-out.
I was a journeyman actor for years. Sometimes in the same night, I’d bow and then get a cab across town and take my bartending shift — I couldn’t give it up because I was getting $400 a week. That had been going on for many years — I’ve been working for about 34 years now. I came back to New York and was really disheartened because I was still going in for under-fives [auditioning for parts of less than five minutes of screen time], and I just thought, “My talent is not being used. And I don’t want to be bitter about it.” Because you start to feel a little bitterness. After feeling disrespected in an audition, I’d take the sides and put them in the trash before I walked out. Then there was a series of auditions and no’s — like eight no’s in one week — and one just broke me. It seemed perfect for me. The casting director and everyone said it was perfect. I went and met with the director and the producers. And then there was the most insane reason why I didn’t get it. [Domingo has previously said that the audition was for Boardwalk Empire and he was told that the part required a Black actor with lighter skin than his.] I pretty much collapsed in the gym [upon being told that]. I was crying and thought, “This is going to kill me. I have to leave before it kills me.” And right when I said, “That’s enough,” a friend said, “Hey, my managers have been wanting to meet with you.” I said, “No, I’m good. I just dropped my manager, and I’m about to drop my agent and do something else.” He said, “Just meet with them.” I did. Honestly, I felt like it was the worst meeting I’d ever had because I went in there with my arms folded and said, “I know myself. I don’t fit in certain boxes. I know what you see is different, but I do all these different things. But I don’t think that there’s a place for me in this business.” They said, “Give us six months and we’ll make some changes together.” My first two auditions after that were for a Baz Luhrmann series and for Fear the Walking Dead on AMC. I thought, “Fear the Walking Dead? I don’t do things like that.” But then they sent me this monologue that felt like I was doing Richard III, and I thought, “This is beautiful.” Television was starting to change, and I felt like there was a place for me. I booked both jobs — which was odd to me because I hadn’t been booking anything, and those were off of self-tapes — and that gave me a new footing in the industry. I want to be useful in this practice of being an artist. I think what we do at our best is we’re in service. This is a service job. And I want to be in service to this work. (Chokes up with emotion.) I’m glad I stuck around.
What you know now that you wish you knew then?
BRODY That’s a lovely question. No one’s ever asked that. I don’t “wish I knew” because you can’t. You only learn things through experience.
CRAIG You wouldn’t listen. My younger self just wouldn’t listen. He’d be like, “Whatever. Blah, blah, blah.”
MESCAL This is a mad experience for me, just to clarify. I’m 28 years of age.
CRAIG Yeah. Why are you here? (Laughs.)
MESCAL When I was in drama school, I became hyperfixated on watching actors that I really admired talk about the work that they do. So I’m sitting here and I’m like, “What the fuck is going on?” For me, anyway, there’s this latent imposter syndrome.
CRAIG Oh, it doesn’t go away. I walk on the set thinking someone’s going to go, “Bluff.” It’s always there, that self-doubt. But I think as soon as you think you can do it, you can’t.
The way people interact with you after of these performances?
MESCAL People think I’m a tough guy. We had a premiere in Dublin, and we were walking past the pub, and there were these Irish lads, and for the first time ever, they were like, “Go on, the Glad [as in Gladiator]! Just walk!”
BRODY No one has seen this movie yet. But it’s funny, people will say, “My mom really likes you.”
MESCAL “My girlfriend thinks you’re great.”
STAN In New York, I went with Ali into Trump Tower. At the time, he still thought we could shoot in Trump Tower — I was like, “You’re out of your mind” — and I remember somebody going, “Is that the Marvel guy?” And I was like, “I’m out.” But weirdly, I still get Fresh callouts— it’s women with the cannibal thing, I just don’t understand it.
DOMINGO From playing Mister in The Color Purple, I get a lot of older Black women in airports going flirtingly, “Oooh, Mister” — but it’s weird because Mister is not a lovely person, he’s an abuser. I’m like, “Wait, you know he was a villain?” “It’s all good. Let me get a picture.”
What would you be doing today if you had not become an actor?
STAN Maybe something with young people because that’s always going to humble you.
CRAIG Serving cocktails on the QE2.
DOMINGO I wanted to be a chef. I still cook as an amateur — I love food.
MESCAL Something that would enable me to play Gaelic football.
BRODY I used to paint and draw before I was acting, and I loved that. I rediscovered it later when I put down acting for some time.
