THOMAS MANN

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In 2017, the prolific actor Thomas Mann, star of Project X and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, will be seen in FX’s cult hit Fargo, the studio blockbuster Kong: Skull Island, and Andrew Haigh’s new film Lean on Pete, but he spent the beginning of the year homeless. Technically, he was “between apartments,” but it’s indicative of Mann’s packed schedule that he was able to give up his home in Los Angeles last year with little difficulty. “I worked almost all year, so now I’m just going to go back to LA and find a place to live,” he said last December, while in New York making his professional stage début in the Off Broadway run of Dead Poets Society. “Or I’ll live in my storage unit until I figure something else out.”

This year will likely shape up to be just as busy as the last—for starters, Mann joined the cast of Nicole Holofcener’s next film, The Land of Steady Habits, for Netflix, in January—but for now he is content to take some time to himself as his career continues to ascend. Raised in Dallas, Mann performed in school plays and local commercials as a child but saw acting as mainly a hobby at first. “I was always into movies, but I don’t know if there was one moment where I was like, This is what I have to do,” he recalls. “It’s not something that seems possible until you start doing it and then I was like, Oh, you can actually make good money.”

Mann, now twenty-five, spent his early commercial earnings on his first car, which he used to drive out to Los Angeles at the age of seventeen with his friend Logan Miller, who had just been cast in the Disney series I’m in the Band. Miller’s family moved out West as well and let Mann live with them, which helped assuage his own parents’ worries. “I don’t even remember what I said, but it must’ve been pretty convincing,” he laughs. “I think my mom just saw that it was what I really enjoyed doing and I had opportunities coming my way so she agreed to let me go for a little bit and try it out. It was supposed to be temporary and then I got my first job, so I stayed.”

Mann landed a few small parts on television and a role in 2010’s It’s Kind of a Funny Story, opposite Emma Roberts, Zach Galifianakis, and Keir Gilchrist, but it was the boisterous 2012 teenage party movie Project X that brought him his first major attention. “To get to do that movie as an eighteen-year-old was a dream,” he says of the film’s Hangover-like comedy. “Working on that movie was my real coming-of-age in life. It introduced me to a whole new world for good and bad.”

Originally told that he couldn’t audition for the role because the producers were looking for complete unknowns, Mann went through a grueling process of seven rounds of auditions before finally being cast in Project X. Luckily, he was able to commiserate with Miller, then still his roommate. “I think it would’ve been really depressing if I had tried to just go out by myself not knowing anyone, and I probably would’ve gotten frustrated,” Mann says. “There’s something nice about going through that same grind with someone else that knew you from where you came from.”

Mann followed up Project X with small roles in the Southern Gothic Beautiful Creatures with Viola Davis and Alden Ehrenreich, and Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton’s Hansel & Gretel update Witch Hunters before finding himself in two buzzy movies at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. The first, The Stanford Prison Experiment, placed him in an ensemble of rising young actors including Ezra Miller, Michael Angarano, Tye Sheridan, and his old roommate Logan Miller, but it was as the lead of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl that Mann really made an impression.

A coming-of-age story with plenty of wit and humor despite its inherently somber plot—the eponymous female, played by Olivia Cooke, is very literally dying—the movie gave Mann an opportunity to demonstrate a subtle grasp of emotion and nuance as he played a teenage boy falling in love with a sick girl. “When I read the script, the character was so unique and it just reminded me of myself a lot,” Mann explains. “There was something about it where I just knew that I had an insight to the character that I felt like no one else had, even if that wasn’t true. So I was like, I have to get this, there’s no one else that can do it better than I can. I really fought for it.”

Mann endured another long audition process for Me and Earl, having to read with Cooke again and again after she had already been cast, but he says it was all worth it in the end. “Once I got the movie, then I was really terri- fied that I was actually going to have to try to cry onscreen,” he says. “I was like, This is where everyone is going to find out that I’m just a fraud. But then everyone believed in me and I felt really close to the material. There was a weird, magical aura around that movie and everything just seemed to click. That doesn’t happen a lot, but there was something about that movie— everything really came together in a magical way.”

As with his breakout role in Project X before, Mann still views Me and Earl and the Dying Girl as a film that helped redirect his career in a fruitful way. “That was my first artist statement, like, This is the kind of actor I want to be,” he says. “It was the first time where I could really show people what I’d been trying to do. It takes a long time in any art form to get to that place where your art matches your taste, and that was the first time where those things really collided. I felt like that was the kind of work I wanted to be doing to show people that I was serious about it.”

Next month, Mann will be reaching another level in his career with a role in Kong: Skull Island as a Vietnam-era soldier. Mann is no stranger to studio films, but he says the scale of the project dwarfed anything he had ever experienced before by far. “I remember I auditioned for it and thought I blew the audition. I called my agent after and was like, ‘Never send me out for anything like that again,’” he laughs. “I thought that I made a fool of myself, then two weeks later I got a call that I got the part. They were like, ‘You’re shooting in Hawaii, Vietnam, and Australia and you’ll be working with Brie Larson, Tom Hiddleston, Sam Jackson, John C. Reilly, and John Goodman.’ I was like, Well it would be really stupid to say no. I thought, Whatever this journey is, I can make it work and I can enjoy it, and it ended up being the most fun I’ve ever had on any movie—or will ever have. It completely changed my idea of shooting a movie and what it could be. I was just in awe the whole time. I was just like, jaw on the floor, wondering, How did I get here? It was like a little kid’s idea of being in a Hollywood movie. It was really a dream come true.”

Later this year, Mann will also appear in the “very dark coming-of-age story” Lean on Pete, Haigh’s first film since 45 Years, which earned Charlotte Rampling a nomination for a Best Actress Oscar last year. Mann admits his role in the movie is small but says he relished the chance to work with Haigh, whom he calls a “classy guy who makes classy films,” in another step forward in his trajectory. “I want to work with people who are smarter and more experienced than I am,” Mann explains, “because I’ve worked with a lot of young people, which has been a lot of fun, but you want to work with people that are constantly challenging you.”

In another effort to push himself in a new direction, Mann spent the last few months of 2016 onstage in New York in Tom Schulman’s adaptation of his own Oscar-winning screenplay for Dead Poets Society. The Robin Williams role was filled by Jason Sudeikis, while Mann took over for Robert Sean Leonard, whose Neil Perry famously kills himself when confronted by his strict father. For Mann, the project was an opportunity to stretch beyond his film work. “It’s not like I got bored of doing movies or anything, but I wanted to have a completely new experience and challenge myself,” he explains. “It’s easy to get complacent on movie sets and I wanted something that was a little more grueling. I wanted to put myself through the ringer and just keep everything in check. [A play] is an evolving thing and you’re never finished with it, which is really cool. You learn more about yourself as an actor.”

The constant drive to improve and test himself has been a theme of Mann’s career to date, and he promises it will continue to be one going forward. “I want to work on movies that are going to be classics,” he laughs. “Doesn’t everyone? You want to be in films that you think are going to stick around for a while, that are really going to resonate with people, and not just take things because you’re bored or don’t know what else to do or feel bad saying no. I feel like I spent a lot of time doing that, and I just now have the courage I need and I’m lucky enough that I’ve been doing it long enough and I’ve made a name for myself and I can slow down and really wait for the right things to come along and do roles that mature with me.”

And after nearly a decade in Hollywood, Mann is finally ready to do so on his own terms. “It takes a long time to know what you want to do,” he says, “and I’m just now getting to that point.”

Kong: Skull Island is out March 10.