‘Asteroid City’ Was Part of a Decade-Long Journey for Jake Ryan

Jake Ryan first met Wes Anderson when he was just seven years old and cast as one of the protagonist’s little brothers in Moonrise Kingdom, the filmmaker’s 2012 feature set at a summer camp — and the two’s work together has come a long way since then.

Over the years, they’ve kept in touch, with Anderson directing a 2012 stop-motion commercial for Sony that a young Ryan wrote, inviting Ryan to participate in conversations for Criterion Collection editions of his films, and casting Ryan a small part in the animated feature Isle of Dogs. But now, at 19, Ryan has his biggest role in an Anderson film to date.

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In Asteroid City, Ryan plays Woodrow Steenbeck, an awkward teen and award winning “Junior Stargazer,” who arrives in the eponymous desert town with his morose father Augie (Jason Schwartzman) and three incorrigible little sisters. Woodrow, who recently lost his mom, is drawn out of his shell by his fellow Stargazers, geniuses who spend their time playing a memory game where they name famous figures. To make matters more complicated, given the structure of Anderson’s film, Ryan is also playing an actor, an understudy, who portrays Woodrow in the play titled “Asteroid City,” which is the subject of a television program in Anderson’s universe.

“I guess he saw something in me, and we’ve kept in touch ever since,” Ryan tells The Hollywood Reporter of getting to know Anderson over the past decade.

During a recent phone interview, Ryan discusses his long relationship with Anderson, learning from Schwartzman and bonding with his fellow Stargazers on set.

How did your relationship with Wes develop over time? 

I always remember how he made me feel, which was, he made me feel at home. He made me feel cozy. I guess that’s just how he is with most other actors, most other people that he works with. There’s this gravitational force, almost, that surrounds him, that he can use to bring people together. We kept in touch mostly through emails, I guess. I would wish him happy birthday every year or so. It was nice.

What was the audition process like, knowing that this would be the biggest role you would take on with him yet? 

At first, it started out as a standard audition process. They gave us dummy lines to read, and eventually, you would work up to getting bits and pieces of the actual script. Near the end of the process, he actually sent over all of Woodrow’s dialogue in the entire movie, and asked me to recite them in one take, really keeping up the pace of someone from 1955.

How did you figure out the pace of someone from 1955? Was that something you had to figure out on your own through research? 

Wes likes his dialogue relatively quick, especially for this movie as well. It was just another way to help figure out the pacing on my own. At that point in that process, I would send him voice clips, reciting the lines of something that I thought was fast enough, but he said, “Faster. More, more, give me more.” I think there were clips on YouTube that I looked up, just from people who were talking from 1955 or clips from a movie from 1955. Eventually I got it so that was fun.

What was your initial interpretation of Woodrow and how did that change as you worked on the character? 

Obviously, something that hasn’t really changed is, I knew he’s a very smart individual, way smarter than I’m ever going to be. He’s obviously going through a lot right now in the film. He’s very shy. After I ended up getting the role, Wes, Jason Schwartzman and I had ended up pretty much doing biweekly Zoom sessions, just rehearsing and discussing the character relationships and the meat of the actual movie. Something that really stuck with me was, it goes for all the Stargazers as well, they’re all very lonely people because of their intelligence. They’ve outsiders from their usual groups. Once they actually come together, and realize that they’re pretty much the same, now there’s so much more to life that they’ve found each other, that they’ve become peers. It was that angle that really stuck with me. Another thing that gave me something to grasp onto, Woodrow is very ambitious, and he wants to leave something behind for future generations, be it a scientific theory or an invention of some sort. I’m kind of the same. As an actor, I want to leave behind something.

Tell me a bit more about those Zoom sessions. Did you interact with Jason on Moonrise?

I did a promotional video for Moonrise Kingdom. He played cousin Ben. I didn’t end up reprising my role, I ended up playing a new character. We met then. My first initial impression was he was eating a bunch of Milk Duds or something. I also had to eat some Milk Duds for the actual video, I believe, and I was like, “Man, these suck. These are sticky.” He was like, “Right on kid,” and he spit one out. I was like, “Man, this guy is so cool.” It was the first time I met him.

On the Zoom call, Wes and Jason have worked together for so many years now, they obviously have rapport, and it was really just nice to sit there and listen to some of the stories they would tell, how they started out, stuff like that. How they connected with the actual scripts, some of the similarities between them. Really, I was so impressed by Jason, and the dedication he took to getting Augie, the character that he plays, just right. Watching the development in Zoom, and then working alongside him, and then watching the movie again, just to see how far we’ve come, it was a fantastic experience.

In the film you are also playing an actor who is playing Woodrow and, as that character, have a scene opposite Scarlett Johansson on a train. What was that scene like? 

Obviously, I was nervous, but I felt really good, because the last couple of days before that scene, I was getting little to no sleep, and the night of that scene, I finally got a full seven to eight hours, and I was feeling fantastic. Because I practiced and I prepared for that scene for the last three days, but obviously, I was very nervous. There was also the training for the actual running along the train. They had set up a treadmill, so I was training on that for the last few days. I’m not the most athletic person, so I had to make up for it in attitude, of course. Maybe there was something in the water, because I was feeling really good that day, and I think it turned out excellent.

What was it like working with the other young actors who played the Stargazers? 

I don’t want to speak for any of the other stargazers, but I had a fantastic time getting to know them. We actually set up chemistry read Zoom calls in the year before shooting, and compared to me, they were so put together. They definitely got the roles by then, and I remember having the worst first impression, because my mic was muted. I was picking stuff up off of the floor. I was very excited to get to know them, and to work with them.

We had dinners pretty much every night as well, just getting to know them, setting up a rapport with them. We would play a lot of games just to pass the time. We would play chess, we’d play UNO. We actually had set up a name game of our own. It was a little bit more streamlined, as opposed to some of the more obscure names in the movie. That was a great part of working on that movie.

What was it like being on set in Spain? 

We shot in Chinchón, and Wes and his team built an entire desert town on top of this watermelon patch. You really had to be there, because for me, it was probably the most authentic set that I’ve ever been on, in the sense for the film. Again, like you said earlier, there’s that aspect where it does take place inside of a play, so there’s this uncanny valley-type feeling. Overall, most of the stuff was real. The little cots, they ended up being green rooms that they kept us in, they were very cozy. The diner was pretty much real. They had real gasoline for the gas stations. It made it very easy to slip into character.

***

Asteroid City is in limited release in theaters before going wide June 23.

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