Ansel Elgort: Hollywood man
He has eight million Instagram followers but lots of people seem to hate Baby Driver star Ansel Elgort. Steve Kilgallon finds out why.
While he waits for our interview to start, Ansel Elgort is giggling at a social media video on his phone of a runaway hay bale rolling down a hill and smashing some idiot.
Maybe society is getting more stupid, I venture, as an icebreaker. ‘‘I think we’ve always been this stupid, people are just filming everything now,’’ says Elgort.
He should know how these things work. The rosy-cheeked star of Edgar Wright’s new criminal caper movie Baby Driver has eight million Instagram followers, garnered from his young-adult-friendly films Divergent and The Fault in their Stars and by being what Vanity Fair called ‘‘Hollywood’s most approachable leading man’’. He posts his location for fans to come and say hello, and conducts marathon autograph sessions. In New Zealand, he posted shots of himself on Karekare Beach draped in some sort of shawl.
‘‘I love those fans ... I’m not just saying that because it is the right thing to say,’’ he says. ‘‘Being an actor, a lot of people are like ‘it’s not cool to embrace your fanbase’. Four years ago, I was doing this social media stuff and everyone around me – Miles Teller was deleting his Instagram, and Kate Winslet was telling me ‘you don’t need that, it’s not cool, and directors aren’t going to like that’. It wasn’t a cool thing to be on Instagram, that was for pop stars .. but I love the interaction I have with fans on a day-to-day basis.’’
Linked to this willingness to tell the fans a lot is his form for talking about almost anything in interviews, such as losing his virginity at the age of 14. ‘‘Luckily I don’t have too many bad things to say, so I can afford to be open,’’ he says. ‘‘I don’t have any dead bodies in my trunk. But who knows, as I get older, maybe I will get more jaded about things, but for now I guess I am a pretty open guy.’’
But the flipside is the contention of the British Daily Telegraph that Elgort is also ‘‘the most annoying man in Hollywood’’ for his namedropping, humblebragging and repeated reference to the Elgort brand. ‘‘It’s easy to hate me,’’ he has observed.
There is no such third-person malarkey as we chat in an Auckland hotel suite, but I begin to see their point when Elgort doesn’t, but sort of does, compare himself to Leonardo da Vinci and Renaissance Men in general when discussing the confluence of his music and acting careers (his music career, notably, includes the video for his Euro-poppy single Thief, in which he prances barechested beneath a leather jacket).
‘‘It’s not cool to limit yourself [to one art form],’’ he says, of his music ambitions and a long-term desire to become a director. ‘‘I’m not comparing myself to these guys, but da Vinci was not just a painter. Artists in the old days used to paint, and invent, and sculpt and write. There was such a thing as a Renaissance Man. These days, for whatever reason, it’s like ‘oh, that actor guy, he’s trying to do music’. Of course he’s doing music, he is an artist, that seems a natural thing to do.’’ He’s been bagged a bit then. ‘‘A little, but if artists let critics affect their art, then they are screwed. You can never allow it to affect your creativity, because that’s all I have. All I have is my creativity.’’ See? Actually, for this movie, Elgort’s interest in music is a remarkably good fit. The entire film is set to music, as it is told from the perspective of Elgort’s character Baby, a tinnitus-afflicted getaway driver who uses the tunes to drown out the noises in his ears, and at night, cuts strange disco tracks in his bedroom.
Baby cuts his own demos and drives away from bank jobs to his own upbeat soundtrack.
In his audition, Elgort was asked by director Wright which song he would know every word to instantly, and Elgort nominated the smooth tones of the Commodores’ 1977 hit Easy. Unusual choice for a 25-year-old. ‘‘Actually, I’m only 23,’’ he says. Even worse then.
Well, he says, he was 8 when his godmother gave him his first iPod (a scene paralleled in the film with Baby), pre-loaded with the sort of tunes kids of the time were listening to – plus Easy. ‘‘It was the first song I really loved, from the first second; the song, the piano, the ‘boom boom’ of the drums... it reminds me when I first started loving music and finding my own musical taste,’’ he says.
So they rehearsed him reacting to the music as Baby does – lipsynching and head-bobbing along. Wright liked it enough to work it into the script. The scene in question takes Baby to a car wrecker’s yard to watch a sedan with a corpse in the boot be crushed. He witnesses the deed, then clicks on his iPod as if to wash away the dirt of the crime. ‘‘So it ended up in the movie, and it is still my favourite part,’’ he says.
'As I get older, maybe I will get more jaded about things, but for now I guess I am a pretty open guy.' Baby Driver star Ansel Elgort