Caleb Landry Jones Takes Another Challenging Role With ‘Nitram’


Until recent events At the Oscars, the most memorable best actor speech of the movie season went to Caleb Landry Jones. In July, Cannes Film Festival gave Jones the award for best actor for portraying a mass shooter Australian drama “Nitram” (now in theaters and digital). The 32-year-old actor had been to Cannes twice before and had experienced nauseating tensions from drinking too much, sleeping too little and feeling the pupils scanning his face to gauge his importance. (“LA, but 50 times,” he said.) But this time, all eyes fixed on him gripping the awards podium like an unconscious chaise longue. “I think I’m going to vomit,” he hissed. The audience was trembling as he wasn’t sure if his panic was just the slightest bit. Then Jones fled the stage, leaving behind a few breaths that lingered like clouds of dust from a cartoon roadrunner: “I’m so sorry – I can’t do that. Thank you very much.”

“I wanted to be invisible,” Jones recalled. “I was forced to form words and thought, ‘I have to give up’.” Recreating the moment, he bellows “Caleb Landry Jooooones,” the seal clap and then pantomime his swaying heebie-jeebies.

The Texas-born actor, who still sings in one word, looked exponentially more relaxed the day we spoke in the backyard of his 101-year-old dilapidated rental home in Los Angeles. In a corner of the city that doesn’t yet have a noble name, people around him (mostly) don’t mind him playing the guitar at 2 o’clock or going to the newspaper with his girlfriend, artist Katya Zvereva. Tuna plates for stray cats. Here, it’s okay for Jones to get stressed out by rolling one joint after another in the sunlight, as he did during our conversation. That afternoon, she went to the dentist for four root canals. “So I load up as much as I can before I go in.”

“Invisible” is not a word used often for Jones. The red-haired actor has made a prominent on-screen presence since he first auditioned at age 16 for a one-act role in the Coen brothers’ movie. “There is no country for old people,” “Sir, a bone has come out of your arm,” as the boy riding a bicycle to the bleeding Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) gives the catchy line. Jones was threatened as the racist son. Jordan Peele’s “Get Out”; Brandon pierced his skin with diseases at Cronenberg bio-horror “Antiviral”; and set himself on fire at the Safdie brothers’ house. “What Heaven Knows.” For most of his career, he opted for lively small pieces for prestigious directors – Jim Jarmusch, Sean Baker, Martin McDonagh, Lone Scherfig, David Lynch – rather than fewer films that offered more screen time.

Jones is a strange type of rebel – not a cunning James Dean clone, but a self-made cowboy. He is meticulous and careless at the same time. After being diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder in her childhood, she became conscious of the need to welcome entropy into her life. At home, while her brain was running through the details—she put exactly two teaspoons of cayenne pepper in last night’s chimichurri? — foresaw the commotion: paint smeared on trousers, wrinkled sweater, scruffy goatee. (She certainly didn’t look like she had a comb ready for her spindly curls in Cannes.)

Zvereva, who came out to offer us more coffee during the interview, said that when Jones first approached her on the street in New York, she thought she was homeless, even after inviting him to her studio, and took turns walking next to her. He went to the set of the movie where his director was crying happily that Jones had found someone else on his wavelength.

Growing up just outside of Dallas, Jones was encouraged to follow his creativity. His parents, a special education teacher and a contractor, allowed him to scratch all the floors of the house until the plywood was replaced by hardwood planks. His mother enrolled him in ballet and music classes, encouraged him to audition for the local arts magnet, and played hours of British comedy “Monty Python” and “Wallace and Gromit” as well as “Only Fools and Horses.”

He was a church boy, wasn’t allowed to read X-Men comics, and She played Banshee in “X-Men: First Class.” Despite loving music—and, indeed, warbly psychedelia’s second album yet to be released—as a tall teenager, Jones rocked Nirvana for Christian band DC Talk (he had once opened them for Billy Graham). That was until she stuck to Bob Dylan and imitated her new idol by shrinking her shoulders and wearing tight pants.

“Something hit me hard,” Jones said. Each new obsession like Radiohead and Bukowski found a way to temporarily transcend his artistic temperament. “So it’s nice to find acting,” she added. Discovering a character, especially a cryptic character whose choices defy expectations, gives him the language he needs to grapple with his own desires.

“He’s the most gripping actor I’ve ever worked with,” said Justin Kurzel, director of “Nitram,” via Zoom. “He’s a true artist.” Although it’s hard to tell Jones that to his face. “Every time you praise Caleb, I can see he’s uncomfortable.” His films are inspired by the 1996 mass shooting in Port Arthur, Tasmania, which motivated the Australian government to pass the National Firearms Treaty banning automatic and semi-automatic weapons. It dominated the Australian Academy of Motion Picture and Television Arts Awards in December, earning Jones a second best actor statuette. (This time he succeeded pre-record your speech.)

His character, who is referred to only as Nitram in order not to glorify the real hitman left in prison, moves like a frighteningly big boy throughout the movie. He gets angry and pouts; He always suffers from feeling rejected for reasons he can’t control. And at the end of the movie, he finds a community that caters to him (and his money): gun shops that treat the seemingly unstable man well and sell him the rifles he wants.

Wanted to be wasted during filming time in Australia, Jones chose to sneak a meat pie to take up more space. “No, we’re going to ‘Fat Baby Man’!” he chuckled. Most of the movie was improvised. They play a scene out loud and then try to be quiet. To understand the difference between how Nitram sees himself and how others perceive the incomprehensible, angry young man, Kurzel assigned Jones tasks: to film himself with a video camera, to scribble in a diary. “I would draw myself with muscles and write ‘sexy’ next to it,” Jones said.

“I’m not sure if I’ve actually met Caleb,” his “Nitram” co-star Judy Davis said over the phone. “He always used an Australian accent.” During his punishing scenes as mother and son, Davis, an award-winning film master himself, was amazed by Jones’ frankness and unpretentiousness. “Probably the most sensitive actor I’ve ever worked with.” When she wasn’t on set, she accidentally tried to lure her into using her real voice. Just on his last day, before the end of filming, Jones surprised him by breaking out of character to run for a farewell hug.

As the shot drew nearer to the final eruption of violence that Kurzel chose to keep offscreen, Jones became more and more drawn into it. Painfully familiar with the real tragedy, the local crew began to keep their distance from Jones, especially after the guns arrived on set. “I just couldn’t find that many friends,” Jones said.

It can be painful for an artist to feel so alone from home on the other side of the world while dealing with such dense material.

“But it’s great!” Jones insisted. “It was really great for me because I don’t know how to act.” Maybe he should leave the final word to his awards.





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