Théodore Pellerin Is a True Believer

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Théodore Pellerin has never been to Florida, but he seems to understand the swampy characteristics of the Sunshine State just fine in the new Showtime series On Becoming a God in Central Florida. As Cody, a mid-level member of an Amway-like pyramid scheme called Founders American Merchandise, the French-Canadian actor is deluded yet headstrong, single-minded in his pursuit of prosperity, an ambitious and devoted acolyte of a system that is clearly nothing more than a scam.

When one of his best protégés, played by Alexander Skarsgård in a disarming cameo, dies in a particularly Floridian accident (alligator attack), Cody wheedles his reluctant widow Krystal, portrayed by Kirsten Dunst, into taking over his business. Through her own sharp scheming, she finds quick success, overtaking her mentor, who becomes knotted in a complicated tangle of jealousy, pride, and lust. “Cody is passionate and desperate and I think he’s just looking to belong to something,” says the 22-year-old Pellerin. “It’s sort of a cliché, but ultimately all he’s looking for is love and the only form of love that he knows is validation. He says it himself in the first episode, ‘I don’t have friends, I only have business partners.’ He wants to be somebody, I think it’s very simple.”

Born and raised in Quebec, where he still lives, Pellerin has been steadily building a name for himself in his homeland, having appeared in Xavier Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World in 2016 and winning the Canadian Screen Award for Best Actor for his performance in the crime drama Family First earlier this year, but he nearly missed out on this breakthrough English-language role. He was at a film festival in Switzerland when he first received the notice for On Becoming a God and, exhausted from traveling, he pushed it aside. “I was very tired and it was very hot and I didn’t want to hear anything about taping for anything,” he laughs. “I was being a little bitch.” Back home a week later in Montreal, he picked up the script and was immediately struck by its idiosyncratic tone, an engrossing mix of dark humor, social commentary, and biting satire that he calls “very Coen brothers-esque.” “I read it and I was like, ‘Whoa this is amazing,’’ he recalls. “It’s so weird and there’s such a precise darkness to it, something so funny and yet human.”

Given his growing-but-limited visibility in Hollywood—recent American projects include small roles in the Lucas Hedges conversion therapy drama Boy Erased and Netflix’s otherworldly science fiction series The OA—Pellerin says he had low expectations for landing a lead role opposite Dunst in a series whose executive producers include George Clooney. After he sent off his audition tape, he prepared to move on, assuming it would end up just another experience to look back upon fondly. “I just enjoyed the fact that I enjoyed doing it,” he recalls. “I enjoyed the scene, I enjoyed the character, I enjoyed reading the script, so I had fun.”

Not long after, Pellerin found himself headed to Los Angeles for an unconventional chemistry read with Dunst. “I’ve never done this kind of big test and I think it’s usually in front of like ten executives and it’s very intimidating and very intense, but what was very special was that this was at Kirsten’s place,” he explains. “It was very intimate, it was very familial, very open and easy. We took our time to talk and I met her baby and I felt safe. I didn’t feel like I was going into this huge TV show—which it is for me—but I felt like I was going into something with people who really care about story and actors and making people comfortable and making everything feel easy and natural.”

Pellerin’s performance as Cody is a complicated and layered one. Alone in his dreary apartment, he is raw and vulnerable, punching holes in the wall and tearing up at the slightest hint of notice from FAM founder Obie Garbeau II in a robocall left on his answering machine (the series is set in the Nineties). But in public, and especially in front of his “downline,” he sparks with charisma and vitality. Pellerin says it wasn’t difficult to find real-life examples on which to model Cody, from televangelists to motivational speakers to pyramid scheme salesmen. “There are these men who are at the top and they wear these big sunglasses and they have all this very strange, terrible staging with fireworks and stuff,” he laughs. “It’s so cheesy but they have huge audiences, like thousands and thousands of people, and the way they talk and the way they move across the stage was very fascinating. I watched these people and it’s clear who they are.”

If Krystal is the skeptic, shrewdly using FAM’s gullible participants for her own advantage, Cody is the true believer—for him, it’s not coincidence that the company’s acronym is also the abbreviation of ‘family,’ but more like fate. Given the audience’s knowledge of how similar schemes work, everyone taking part in On Becoming a God comes across as either a swindler or a schmuck, but Cody is redeemed by his utter sincerity and earnestness. “He truly, truly, deeply believes in the system and I really think he doesn’t know that it’s a scheme, he really doesn’t,” Pellerin argues. “He doesn’t know that what he brings people into might make them lose their money. He really has this conviction that it’s going to bring joy and success and hope to all these people who are in his eyes miserable and don’t live the best form of their lives. I think he really believes that it’s a way to a better life. I think he is absolutely one of the victims of the system. He is completely oblivious.”

Pellerin comes from a creative family, but acting didn’t become an “obsession” until his teenage years after he began attending a school where every student was required to study drama. “It was the first time that I felt like I really belonged in a group and really enjoyed myself,” he recalls, “but it wasn’t a school like the schools in America where they really start forming actors and giving them an education on theater. It was more just to explore theater through your adolescence.” An open audition at the age of sixteen led to a regular role on the high school drama 30 Vies, an experience which cemented his desire to become an actor. “It was the only thing that I would think about,” he recalls. “I wanted to learn, I wanted to evolve as an actor, and I wanted to extend my understanding of what it meant to act and to live through a character. I went to bed thinking about it and I woke up thinking about it. It was very constant. Now I’m able to live and think not only about that, which is very nice, and I have friends and a social life, but before it was really only just that.”

As Pellerin continues to transition into working in English—he learned the language only a few years ago for the drama Never Steady, Never Still—he says he is encountering both new challenges and new opportunities. Having grown up inspired by American movies and performances, Hollywood was always part of the plan, “but I didn’t really speak English so it was kind of a weird goal,” he laughs. “It’s very, very different for me to act in English because it’s not my language so there’s a whole other type of work that I have to do to appropriate the language and the words, to make them mine, and to bring a certain depth to them that isn’t there naturally for me,” he explains. “Language is crucial in acting and in living. We form our identities with language, with sounds, with how you place your jaw and your tongue and everything. It’s very particular and it’s all connected through your body and your emotions, so it’s a lot of work but it’s very interesting because it’s new.”

On Becoming a God in Central Florida continues on Sundays on Showtime.