Will Poulter’s Big Sommar
At 26, Will Poulter has blasted past the broad comedy and Y.A. fantasy of his earlier years to emerge an acting chameleon. He is utterly distinctive, all eyebrows, but has become so good he’s hard to recognize.
If it seems like success came quickly, well, you weren’t Will Poulter at 12.
“I always say I had an early-life crisis,” he explains with a glint, outside a photography studio on a rare sunny London day. “How much can you know at 12? But I was going, ‘Is school forever? What the fuck am I gonna do?!’ ” In drama class, at the Harrodian school in West London, he impersonated singer/TV host/onetime Beatles weed carrier Cilla Black. From there he auditioned for everything: sketch, musicals, pantomime. At 12 he scored the lead in Son of Rambow, as a First Blood obsessive. It was a dream. “That film coming along—I feel like it saved me,” Poulter says.
A decade on, he works with serious auteurs. In Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit, he wormed his way into an ultravillainous cop. In Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant, he was dunked in Alberta glacier water, got hypothermic shock, and held his own opposite Tom Hardy and Leo. And in “Bandersnatch,” last year’s wildly ambitious choose-your-adventure Black Mirror, he tackled multiple versions of the same doomed gaming genius.
Playing so many versions of one wonderfully odd character, each existing at the whims of the viewer, was the toughest technical challenge he’d faced. “My head was like scrambled eggs. I barely had the energy to text at the end of the day,” he says. “It’s a paradox: I find acting really, really hard. But that’s what I like about it—the feeling of being emotionally exhausted.”
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10 Things Will Poulter Can’t Live Without
Just don’t spoil it for his folks. “My parents”—Mum’s a nurse, Dad’s a cardiology professor—“just got Netflix. I think I’ll have to ease them in with Our Planet before I go, ‘Fancy throwing me off a balcony with this interactive experience?’ ”
The next project is Ari Aster’s daylight terror Midsommar. Aster’s Hereditary was one of the most bonkers mainstream horror movies in years; the follow-up is the kind of mindfuck Poulter loves to dive into. “Ari comes at things from really obtuse angles,” Poulter says. “When people supersede your expectations, it’s the best. I got to watch a real genius up close.”
A guy nearby gets on a massive Kawasaki. Poulter gushes: “Dude, that’s your bike—that’s so sick.” He pauses. “I mean, obviously that’s your bike, you wouldn’t be getting on if it wasn’t.” I joke about the idea of him pulling up to the interview on it. He’s dismissive. “Umm,” he answers, “if I sat on that, you could tell instantly it wasn’t mine.”
He only lets himself go, bless his heart, when talking about rap music. Older siblings put him on—“It was Nas, ’Pac, Biggie, Fugees.” Then, hell yeah, “Nelly, 50 Cent, Ja Rule, Ashanti.” When he was 11, a song at a party blew his mind. With great trepidation, he asked the bored teenage DJs what it was, and they told him it was “P’s & Q’s” by the London grime artist Kano. “And I went, [deep breath] ‘Thank you so much,’ and repeated ‘P’s & Q’s’ until my mum picked me up and I LimeWire’d it.”
Now he talks about grime like a relative. “Wiley, Jme, P Money—all these U.K. artists didn’t have to compromise to get recognition.” He bangs on the table. “Skepta! Konnichiwa was an incredible album!”
Suddenly, we hear a small child screaming in the distance. “Shut up! Shut uuuppp!” the kid yells. Done with his rap benedictions, Poulter clicks back into his natural restraint. “Goodness,” he says. “Can we get a ‘please’?”
Amos Barshad is a writer living in London.
A version of this story originally appeared in the August 2019 issue with the title "Will Poulter’s Big Sommar."
Watch:
Behind the Scenes with British Phenom Will Poulter
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Meinke Klein
Styled by Richard Sloan
Grooming by Bjorn Krischker using Monat Haircare and QMS Medicosmetics
Originally Appeared on GQ
