Lucky Lucas’s screen dreams come true . . .
LuCAS HEDGES used to visit his film-director dad, Peter, on set, and daydream about becoming an actor himself one day.
‘I spent most of middle school and high school just wishing I could be in a movie,’ said Lucas, who is now the grand old age of 20. ‘Taken away from my mundane lifestyle — or what I perceived to be mundane, but which was quite exciting looking back.’
Well, Lucas got his wish to be in a film and have his name on IMDB (aka the Internet Movie Data Base).
He also garnered a best supporting actor nomination from the Oscars; and he’s on the Bafta Rising Star shortlist — recognition for playing Patrick, the teenager in Kenneth Lonergan’s great movie Manchester By The Sea.
Casey Affleck, in another knockout performance, plays the uncle who has known his own tragedy, and who is named as his nephew’s guardian when the lad’s father dies.
Patrick has two girlfriends. He’s in a band. He’s a jock. He has a hectic social life.
‘And on top of it all, he’s with a semi-robotic human being who shows very little sign of life; and his means of creating moments of levity, or just teenage good old-fashioned fun, is the humour,’ said Lucas, who was speaking from New York where he’s been appearing in Yen: a play by British dramatist Anna Jordan about two feral siblings who live on their own in a squalid flat in Hounslow, with an attack dog they call Taliban. Lucas said he and Justice Smith, his co-star in Yen, visited London last year and went to every location mentioned — schools in Feltham and surrounding West London districts — and met school kids to record their speech patterns. It was time well spent because both Lucas and Smith are terrific in Yen, which is being staged at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. Lucas said even if he’d known about his awards season nods, he would still have done the play. ‘Awards season can’t be your life! It has to just be like a dinner party that you’re going to that night. To live for awards season is dangerous,’ he said. The producers of Yen are letting him attend the Spirit awards and the Oscars over one weekend (extra performances will be added). Lucas told me he enjoyed working with Affleck and Lonergan, although there were a couple of days early on when he thought he was going to ‘ruin the hell out of the movie’. But after a few days, he relaxed, and got rid of ‘all the pressures I put onto myself’, and was able to enjoy listening to music and getting advice on girlfriends from Affleck. ‘I also asked him about his vegan snacks,’ he said. However, it wasn’t all chitchat. ‘Other times, he wouldn’t talk at all.’