CALEB LANDRY JONES IS AWARDS SEASON'S MVP

---

If you make it a habit to frequent your local independent cinema, chances are you saw Caleb Landry Jones quite a few times last year—even if, thanks to his ability to disappear into every role he takes on, you didn’t know it. He was there at the dinner table in Get Out, aggressively questioning Daniel Kaluuya, his younger sister’s black boyfriend, about his “genetic makeup.” He helped his father, a motel manager played by Willem Dafoe, clear out a bedbug-ridden mattress in The Florida Project. He was thrown out a window by Sam Rockwell in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Even if you preferred watching from home, there he was too in Twin Peaks: The Return, as the unemployed, drug-addicted husband of Amanda Seyfried. This run of performances in awards-season favorites earned Jones the title of “Best Supporting Oddball” in New York Magazine last fall, and it’s a measure of his talents that he seemed completely attuned to each of these variegated roles. “I got to be a part of I think seven or eight different jobs last year and I can’t believe I got to be a part of any of them,” he says in his Texas drawl. “Everything I got to be a part of I felt like I got to bite and chew the hell out of, which can’t be said about every job all the time. They were incredible experiences and every single one of them was so different from the others. I’m a very lucky young man.”

Jones’s track record over the past twelve months would seem to demonstrate a special gift for discernment, even if he modestly attributes the choices he has made to his agent and manager. He says he is particularly drawn to directors—from Doug Liman and David Lynch to Sean Baker and Martin McDonagh—with singular visions, but he otherwise appears to be guided largely by a preternatural instinct. “I don’t know if there’s one particular thing except that maybe you feel that you have the opportunity to do what you’re supposed to do,” he says about selecting a role, “which is a certain kind of work or to be a part of a certain kind of project, whatever that project may be.”

At twenty-eight, Jones already has more than a decade of experience on the big screen, having made his début at sixteen in the Coen brothers’ Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men as a teenager who stumbles upon Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh after a car accident, a role he landed after his first-ever audition. “It really was cool to get to be a part of that, but I also felt foolish that it was out there and other people could see it too,” he laughs. “I guess it taught me not to care too much, but at that point, I was thinking about it differently. I cared about what people thought and I felt, Oh no, you’re fat, Caleb! People will know you’re fat! Now you’ll never get a girlfriend!”

This newfound lack of concern about what others think is part of what makes Jones such a fascinating actor to watch. Unlike those who have a prescribed method—or Method—dictating how to prepare for a role, he approaches each project anew. His Florida Project director Sean Baker has spoken of how he had to ask Jones to take a less stylized approach to his performance, while Get Out’s Jordan Peele was willing to let the actor take his character in a different, ultimately more menacing, direction. “Sometimes you feel like you’re just putting a costume on and other times you feel like you’re just being yourself,” Jones muses. “Then other times you feel like you’re not sure what’s going on and other times you’re so emotionally invested because you really do feel those things in real life. It’s everything. It’s this giant collage of trying to experience certain aspects of someone else’s life or what you think their life would be like.”

As a child, Jones says he was drawn to the idea of acting from an early age, even if it seemed like just a fantasy for a long time. “It never seemed realistic, so then you dream about other things,” he recalls. “Before that, I think it was [being a] basketball player, but that proved pretty quickly that that would never happen.” An aunt gave his family a used television along with a tape of It’s a Wonderful Life, which he watched every Christmas for years. “For the longest time, I thought everything on the screen was black-and-white,” he says. “I didn’t know the difference between TV and a movie because we didn’t have television.” That screen promised him a sense of belonging and “as much fun and as much love as it seemed like there was within that little box. You go, Man, there’s a lot of screaming going on right now. I’d love to be inside that with all those other kids who have smiles on their faces. It was just wanting to be a part of it.”

He joined a theater arts program in high school and was signed after a local agent came by to watch the students perform monologues. Then came No Country for Old Men and a recurring role on the series Friday Night Lights. After landing a part in the horror film The Last Exorcism, Jones decided to make the move to Los Angeles. “I remember having like five grand to be able to look at and go, Ok, what are you going to do with this? I went to Los Angeles after hearing a Bob Dylan interview and being encouraged by some of his words. I tried to get a motorcycle license and build a motorcycle but couldn’t get it together in time, so I settled on a car and left.”

Jones had an early encounter with big-budget studio fare as Banshee in 2011’s X-Men: First Class—what would be the end goal for many budding actors—but he has tended towards more sophisticated work ever since. In 2014, he hit the festival circuit, starring opposite Callum Turner and Vanessa Kirby in John Boorman’s Cannes-anointed Queen & Country and as Ilya, the boyfriend of lead actress Arielle Holmes in Josh and Benny Safdie’s powerful breakout Heaven Knows What, based on Holmes’s own experience living on the streets of New York as a heroin addict. “It’s really wonderful when a director trusts you to be able to do something you would never ever think in a million years you could do or even attempt to do,” Jones says of the role, for which he spent weeks with the real Ilya in preparation. “I started to find myself trying to mimic him, but then it just felt silly, like putting on a fake mask that you made yourself so it looks terrible. It doesn’t look anything like the real person, but maybe the essence is there, hopefully.”

Years later, Jones remains an anomaly in Young Hollywood, making his way through the city with no car and, even more shockingly, no social media presence. He still uses a flip phone and spent part of the morning before this interview dealing with a threat from his cell provider to shut off his service. If he has made his name by standing out onscreen, it’s clear that he does so just as comfortably in his everyday life.

Coming off his banner year, Jones started out 2018 with his latest film, TYREL with Christopher Abbott and Michael Cera, bowing at Sundance and he stars opposite Tye Sheridan and Imogen Poots in the stark drama Friday’s Child, premiering next week at South by Southwest. Even after the last twelve months, he is still characteristically self-effacing when he talks about himself as an “actor.” “It took a few times getting a few jobs for me to go, Hey, maybe I could really do this for a little,” he admits. “I still feel like, Maybe I could do this for a little while. It still doesn’t seem set.” But if his track record is anything to go by, his instincts are as strong as his talents, and they will take him far. “I’ve been trying to do jobs that I truly feel that I can really give something to,” he says. “I’ve been trying to be careful about making sure that I am doing the things that I truly believe I’m supposed to be doing.”

Friday’s Child premieres March 11 at South by Southwest.