Justice Smith doesn’t need your assumptions
Role as bold, brash Chester gives actor so much freedom
At 25, Justice Smith had outgrown teenage roles. When he auditioned for “Genera+ion,” a high school dramedy that premieres Thursday on HBO Max, he read for the part of the guidance counselor. It didn’t work out.
Another role was suggested: Chester, the alpha of the Gay-straight Alliance pack. An A student and star athlete, Chester has a molten core of loneliness and a thing for crop tops and maximal jewelry. “I’m like, a lot,” Chester explains in an early scene. Plenty of actors would have jumped at such a flashy part. Smith’s feet were planted. He didn’t want to play another 17-year-old.
But he did the audition anyway.
A particular mix of gross-out comedy and heartbreak, “Genera+ion” (the “+” is a reference to the abbreviation LGBTQ+) shadows a cohort of Southern California adolescents as they experiment with sexuality, identity and giving birth in a mall bathroom. (“Euphoria” lite? Sure.) Daniel Barnz, who co-created the series with his teenage daughter, Zelda, had wondered how he would find an actor capable of Chester’s complexity — the audacity, the emotional lability, the chic. When Smith read the lines, Daniel Barnz wept.
Offered the role, Smith took it. “I was ... ecstatic,” he said, during a recent video call. “Chester has this bold, brash, all-about-truth, loud, provocative personality that just gave me so much freedom.”
Smith — still baby-faced at 25, with pinchable cheeks and a smile like a solar flare — has never seemed especially confined. An actor of vulnerability and panache, he bounds from experimental plays to indie films to popcorn blockbusters. Not everyone can star, persuasively, opposite both Isabelle Huppert — who taught him, he said, to play not characters, but states of being — and a Pokémon.
The fifth of nine siblings, Smith grew up in the less glamorous parts of Orange County, California, in a multiracial family. (In his Twitter bio: “not will smiths son.”) He has wanted to be an actor for as long as he can remember. “I wanted to ... wear someone else’s skin,” he said. “I wanted to inhabit someone else’s language. I wanted to express something within me.”
He studied theater at an arts-focused charter school and soon booked an inhouse commercial for Apple. Hired onto the Nickelodeon family superhero series “The Thundermans,” he was fired after two episodes — mostly, he thinks, because he approached the role with the same seriousness he applied to his conservatory-style acting classes. “Oh, Nickelodeon’s not looking for nuance,” he realized, too late. (Nickelodeon did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
A year later, Baz Luhrmann cast him as Ezekiel Figuero, the sensitive young master of ceremonies at the center of “The Get Down,” a one-season Netflix prestige series set in the Bronx-is-burning ’70s. A New York Times review said Smith’s performance of the “hackneyed” part was “fine,” but “not revelatory.”
Revelation would come. In 2017, he appeared alongside Lucas Hedges in the off-broadway play “Yen.” The verdict this time? “A one-man fireworks display.”
“He is an astonishment,” said Trip Cullman, who directed him in “Yen” and opposite Huppert in the off-broadway drama “The Mother.” Cullman often works with young actors. Of Smith, he said, “He had the most extraordinary raw power, vulnerability and talent I have ever seen.”
As “Yen” finished, Smith left to make his first “Jurassic World” movie, then “Pokémon Detective Pikachu.” “Oh my gosh,” Bryce Dallas Howard, his “Jurassic Park” castmate, said of Smith’s acting. “It’s so remarkable and intimidating, because it is so honest.” Even when fending off a crabby baryonyx.
“It’s the best when you work with someone who doesn’t pretend,” she added.