The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘It was really, really lonely…’
What Caleb Landry Jones saw through the eyes of Australia’s deadliest shooter
When Caleb Landry Jones won the Best Actor award at Cannes earlier this year, he made his way heavily to the stage, took the trophy, uttered a despairing “fleurrghh” and said: “I think I’m going to throw up.” Looking as if he really might, he tried to thank director Justin Kurzel, doubled over the lectern, then added: “I cannot do this, I’m so sorry.”
It was the reverse of the usual awards-show gush, in which it’s the viewer who ends up struggling with nausea, but a mirror of Landry
Jones’s astonishingly physical performance in the film that won him the award: Nitram. The title comes from the childhood nickname of the perpetrator of Australia’s worst mass shooting, Martin Bryant, who killed 35 people – most of them at Port Arthur, a popular tourist spot in Tasmania – in April 1996, six weeks after the Dunblane massacre. Landry Jones plays a young man closely based on Bryant as the film traces his steps from wayward son to murderer.
What was it like seeing the world through his eyes? “Really, really f--ing lonely,” says Landry Jones who, remaining in character on set and off, came to realise “how invisible he might have been, or someone like him, and it’s really heartbreaking, this feeling like you’re not only out of place, but there’s no home for you, and there never will be”.
If that sounds as though the actor feels some sympathy for Bryant, it will only add to the controversy surrounding the film. Bryant took a video camera with him that day, and opened fire on his victims, aged
from six to 72, with a semi-automatic rifle. He executed men, women and children as they tried to hide under tables in the tourist cafeteria at Port Arthur. Last year, an op-ed in the Australian daily The Age described the making of Nitram as “intentional cruelty”, while others claim the film could retraumatise survivors and their families.
But Landry Jones says that he “saw within seconds” that Kurzel, the director, and Shaun Grant, the screenwriter, “were going to go about this properly, to dissect this character in an intimate and a respectful and a responsible way. And by knowing this, it meant that psychologically I could go further.”
The film-makers decided to show nothing of the attacks themselves. I wonder if there was also a decision against portraying the Bryant character as a proto-incel, driven by sexual frustration, like the Plymouth shooter Jake Davison? Some of that happened in the editing room, Landry Jones says. “There’s a lot of what I did in the film that we took out because we didn’t want to go about it in that way.”
It’s a considered response from an actor who otherwise disengages from the outside world. “I don’t watch the news,” he says, and only learns about it through his girlfriend, visual artist Katya Zvereva.
We’re on a video call between London and Los Angeles, but I can’t see him, so he fills in some details. He’s in the backyard. “It kinda looks like a jail because the house is made out of concrete. But there’s a lot of canopy trees outside. And it’s a bit overcast.” He’s dressed in a flannel shirt and black jeans.
Over the past decade, Landry Jones, 31, has developed a reputation for bringing a disturbing sense of inner reality and presence to some of the strangest characters on screen. He was the scary, racist brother in Get Out, the drug-addled Steven Burnett in Twin Peaks: The Return, and the guy who sells Frances McDormand advertising space in the Oscar-winning Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, who ends up being thrown out of a second-storey window. One headline described Landry Jones as “Hollywood’s Go-To Oddball”. Does he see himself that way?
“It’s only when I like look at someone pay like $900 for a T-shirt that I realise, ‘Oh, you’re not a weirdo Caleb, they’re the weirdos’, you know, these guys are nuts,” he says, in his gentle Texan stoner drawl, “but I think it’s just the way our system is, the way we are as a society, that sometimes makes me feel maybe stranger than I am, or more out of place.”
His music might suggest otherwise. While it’s not unheard of for pop stars to produce great movie performances, from David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth to Lady Gaga in A Star Is Born, the list of actors who have made decent records is altogether smaller – and Landry Jones is one of those fascinating anomalies. Last year he released The Mother Stone, which he calls a “ridiculous, crazy record”, its trippiness influenced by English music from the 1960s and 1970s: Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett, the Beatles and Bowie. Now he’s following it up with Gadzooks Vol 1. With tracks ranging from the 39-second psychedelic freak-out Gloria to the glorious 20-minute song cycle This Won’t Come Back, it’s fair to say it’s even further out there. All but two of the songs were written between takes on the set of the post-apocalyptic Finch, in which he plays a robot, opposite Tom Hanks. Did he play any of his songs to Hanks? “Ha, no I didn’t…” He was being the robot: “The last thing I wanted to do was, ‘Hey Tom, listen to this!’”
Landry Jones grew up in suburban Texas, on the outskirts of Dallas, where his maternal grandparents had both played in the Dallas Symphony Orchestra; his mother, Cindy, was also very musical, and a songwriter. Cindy and her father both lived with obsessive compulsive disorder – “he’d be washing the car for five hours” – and she increasingly noticed it in her young son.
“These textbook rituals that a lot of folks have, you know, the bleeding hands because you’re washing them so much… my mum saw it in me really quick and was trying to help me.” For a period in his teens, Landry Jones was on medication, but took too much – because he misheard the doctor. “It just made me feel really bad, so I stopped the medication and never took any again.” He still has OCD, but “it’s evolved into other patterns”.
He started off as a drummer for the worship band in his local church, then at 17 started writing songs on his Casio keyboard – they now number more than 800. He was also “arrested a few times for really petty things. I’d take things I didn’t even want. [...] We went to the Walmart and we all stole a T-shirt, but because I grabbed some bow ties as well, we went to jail that night.” When he moved to LA to pursue acting, he went six months without playing music. “I got a job on one of the X-Men movies” – he played Banshee, who can fly by making supersonic waves with his voice – “and I remember having a bit of a nervous breakdown. [...] I made like maybe five or six songs that I recorded in the hotel room, and I just instantly felt better.”
He’s been incredibly busy: off in Morocco shooting The Forgiven with Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain, and playing a 1980s punk in Viena and the Fantomes. “I met Ethan Hawke during that movie,” he says. “I was trying to be the character for that whole month. And I remember him saying, ‘This guy’s way too in it.’” If you need a description of Landry Jones as an actor, that would probably do.
‘These rituals that OCD folks have, the bleeding hands... my mum saw it in me real quick’