JACOB LOFLAND

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Some actors are known for their ability to change accents at a whim, slipping seamlessly from Mayfair to Malibu to Melbourne without dropping a single vowel. But Jacob Lofland likes to keep hold of his soft, slow Arkansas drawl, and his career since his début five years ago in Mud proves that there is plenty of power to be found in staying true to oneself, even—or especially—in a job that always asks you to be someone else.

A native of Briggsville, Arkansas—population less than five hundred—Lofland found his way to Mud after answering an open casting call his mother discovered while looking for ways for him to earn school credit. “I was homeschooled at the time and that was pretty much the only reason I filled out the application or sent in anything to the agency,” the twenty-year-old Lofland laughs. “I was just doing it for a grade in homeschool and then the job came out of it.” It was his very first audition, and a day later he was offered the part.

Mud, which competed at the Cannes Film Festival in 2012, may be best remembered for having come early on in Matthew McConaughey’s turn from romantic comedy to serious drama, but it also stands out for having introduced both Lofland and his fellow newcomer Tye Sheridan as young boys who help McConaughey’s titular fugitive, whom they discover hiding out in a tree in rural Arkansas. With no previous training and little knowledge of what the project would entail, Lofland admits to experiencing a strange combination of nerves and curiosity before arriving on set. “It was two different things,” he recalls. “One, I had no idea what I was doing because I had no clue what the industry was like, and two, I knew that not many people get to do this and I had this opportunity in front of me, so it was exciting and nerve-wracking all at the same time.”

Shooting in Arkansas with a largely local crew helped Lofland quickly feel at home, as did McConaughey, who welcomed him and Sheridan and served as a role model of sorts without patronizing them. “People expect that he told us things and gave us pointers—and he did sometimes—but I don’t think I learned as much from what he told me as from just getting to watch him work and watching how he interpreted and how he moved through a scene,” Lofland says. “You learn more doing that than by lectures.”

He also learned from his time on Mud that filmmaking is in fact a business in many ways like any other, and not one endless party, as it might sometimes seem from the outside. “It’s not as glamorous as everybody thinks—it’s actual work,” he says. “Everybody that doesn’t know thinks it’s just gold-plated everything. One thing that I realized is that it’s a job, it’s not just a beautiful thing. It takes effort.”

Since then, Lofland’s approach to acting has continued to be more instinctual than theoretical, and even the decision to keep working was not exactly a conscious one. “After Mud was over, me and my mom both were like, ‘Ok well this was fun. We did it and if we never do go any farther it’s been an experience,’ and that was my mindset honestly,” he says. “About a year later everything just kind of started happening. We came out to Los Angeles and I started getting auditions and working a little more. I don’t know, I still haven’t really come to the realization. I just keep doing it.”

At the risk of being typecast, Lofland has managed to find success in a run of projects that have played with and updated the western genre or southern tropes with a darker, more ambiguous contemporary perspective. In 2014, he had a recurring role on the neo-western FX drama Justified, as a teenager put on trial after he confesses to a murder he didn’t commit. Then he appeared alongside Elizabeth Banks and Boyd Holbrook in Little Accidents, a missing-child drama set in a coal-mining town which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Last year, he reunited with McConaughey to portray a Confederate soldier in the Civil War film The Free State of Jones. “I can play that part and I like that part,” he explains about his affinity for roles that feel close to home. “I enjoy the feel of it. I just like the atmosphere.”

The project that stands out on Lofland’s CV then is The Scorch Trials, the 2015 sequel to the hit dystopian thriller adapted from the young adult novel The Maze Runner. He played Aris, who joins the surviving teenagers who escaped from the first film’s deadly maze to avoid infected humans and an evil organization called the World Catastrophe Killzone Department. The chasm between an edgy independent like Mud and a studio blockbuster may seem vast, but Lofland insists that acting is, in the end, still acting. “It’s fun to do some green screen stuff every now and then, but I feel there’s really no difference in working,” he says. “There’s not a whole lot of difference in the feel, you’re just in a different location working on a stage.”

Lofland can currently be seen every Sunday on AMC’s The Son, a television adaptation of Philipp Meyer’s 2013 novel, about three generations of a Texan family coming to terms with a changing nation, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer. He plays the younger version of Pierce Brosnan’s Eli McCullough, who shares a birthday with the state of Texas and is kidnapped as a teenager by Comanches in 1849 after they attack his homestead and murder his mother and siblings. “You couldn’t say no to a script like that,” Lofland says of the series, which maintains its literary sweep thanks to continued input from Meyer himself.

Shot in Austin last year during what Lofland calls the “dead of summer,” The Son was both physically and emotionally draining, as the young Eli undergoes hazing as he is slowly accepted by the Native Americans who have taken him. The surrounding circumstances may seem distant, but Lofland says he relied on his own upbringing to find his way into the mind of a teenager growing up on the frontier nearly two centuries ago. “I feel like I just have an understanding for it,” he says. “Other than that, I don’t really have to do research. I kind of live it. I live in nowhere and that’s just the lifestyle.”

For Lofland, who continues to reside in Briggsville when he’s not on set, that lifestyle includes the usual pastimes of hunting and riding ATVs. He’s currently working on building himself a house in town and he says he’s looking forward to spending more time outdoors now that the “fishing’s about to get good.” “I don’t really miss home that much. I’m fine to live wherever, but I just enjoy home,” he explains. “I enjoy being able to go home and not worry about all of this. Nobody knows where I’m at. I can do whatever and I like the freedom of living in the middle of nowhere.”

Before summer comes, though, he’ll be back on set for The Death Cure, the third Maze Runner film. Lofland says that he tries to stay the same whether he’s in Hollywood or his hometown, and that sense of self is what comes across most clearly in his career so far. “I try to be the same no matter where I’m at, that’s how real people act,” he says. “I don’t change for anybody. You don’t like me, I’m fine with it.”

Five years in the industry might not seem like long, but it’s roughly a quarter of Lofland’s life so far, and he has grown up both onscreen and far away from it. His career might have started with a stroke of luck, but his continued success is proof of an innate talent that he has slowly come to understand and prize. “I started when I was fifteen and I hadn’t even really started making any plans for the future yet. Since I was fifteen, I’ve just been doing this,” he says. “Now that I’m twenty, I’m starting to see that there’s more things I could be doing, but why? I’ve got the best gig.”

The Son continues on Sundays on AMC.