VOYAGE TO STARDOM
East Texan Tye Sheridan, who stars in the film ‘Voyagers,’ makes a name in Hollywood. |
It all started as a lark. Austin-based film director Terrence Malick was on the hunt for a young boy to cast in his 2011 film “The Tree of Life” to play alongside Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and Jessica Chastain. One of the schools casting agents visited was a small public school in Elkhart, south of Palestine, where fourth-grader and baseball fan Tye Sheridan was a student.
Sheridan’s parents encouraged him to attend the audition. “They said, ‘Oh, you should go. You’ll be able to tell people you got to audition for a movie one time,’ ” Sheridan, 24, recalls now in a Zoom call from Boston. “I went and was excited for the opportunity but had no interest in really becoming an actor.”
That decision proved to be a turning point. He got the part, a move that would launch a career that landed him major roles in such other lauded indie movies as “Mud” with Matthew McConaughey, “Joe” opposite Nicolas Cage and “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” an ensemble production with other young actors such as Michael Angarano (“This Is Us”), Moises Arias (“The King of Staten Island”) and Nicholas Braun (“Succession”).
Then Big Hollywood came knocking. He was cast as Cyclops in the 2016 blockbuster “X-Men: Apocalypse” (and subsequently “X-Men: Dark Phoenix” in 2019) and then nabbed the lead in Steven Spielberg’s 2018 science fiction adventure, “Ready Player One.” Now, he stars in the science fiction film “Voyagers,” opening April 9, a film set in a future where a group of young people is sent across the galaxy to an Earth-like planet to keep humanity, on the brink of extinction at home, alive.
“It sparked a trajectory in my life and I followed it,” he says of “Tree of Life.” “I’ve always loved storytelling, in any form, in any medium, even if it’s just standing around the campfire and listening to people talk about things that happened in the past.”
The big leap
But Sheridan, who started out playing parts as a sort of everyboy, says he’s not specifically seeking out
blockbuster films these days. “It all depends on the opportunities that come your way,” says Sheridan, who was recently cast opposite Tom Hardy in “The Things They Carried,” a Vietnam War drama based on Tim O’Brien’s celebrated bestseller.
“It’s a story that speaks to you, no matter if the budget is $200,000 or $200 million, you can still have the same passion for a story, no matter the scale,” he says. “I was really influenced by directors like Malick and David Gordon Green (“Joe”). … They were all Texas-based, and these guys were telling stories that I loved, that I could relate to as a young guy growing up in a small town in Texas. Those experiences will stay with me forever.”
He looks up to actors who can nimbly navigate Hollywood and the indie world.
“I think you have to make decisions based on the what you feel for yourself,” he says. “There’s a handful of actors out there who have the ability to kind of cross genres and do something really intimate and then they do something on a grand scale … I’ve always admired those types of actors.”
Still, he admits he was a little nervous when he made that leap from the world of indie movies to franchise filmmaking. “I was more nervous that this was a preexisting franchise, where different actors had played the same character that I was going to play. So there’s the thing about filling someone else’s shoes,” he says. “But I think I was mainly just excited, and excited to learn and be on the set of a film that was a very different environment for me.”
Beyond acting
Sheridan, who now calls Austin home, is no longer just involved in front of the camera. With his friend Nikola Todorovic, he co-founded Wonder Dynamics, a company that he says takes “artificial intelligence and machine learning models and applies them to the film production process.”
“It’s something that been in the making for a long time,” he explains. “We’ve been working on the startup for several years. But we just recently announced our advisory board, which includes Steven Spielberg, (director) Joe Russo and Antonio Torralba, the head of the AI department at MIT, and Angjoo Kanazawa, a Google research scientist and assistant professor at (UC) Berkeley.”
He says this doesn’t mean he’s looking for an exit out of acting. “I love acting and I love telling stories. … The advent of certain technologies, they’re only as valuable as much as they help push this door to create more opportunities for storytelling and new ways of tackling a narrative,” he says. “I don’t know if I would ever stop acting. I think film is always going to be a part of me, working in film and making movies. It’s what I love to do, and it’s my biggest passion.”
Despite his rising profile, Sheridan says he hardly ever gets recognized on the street (“I’m glad that I’m kind of in a place where I don’t have to worry about that”) and he has no plans to relocate to LA or Silicon Valley.
“I can definitely stay in Texas and do what I want to do,” he says. “I mean, look at this past year, if anything that it’s taught us is how we can connect virtually. … I love Texas and all my family is there. Being a threehour drive away from them, you can’t beat that.”