Will Poulter Tackles the Real World On Screen

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The night that actor Will Poulter finally watched his latest film Midsommar, the horror psychological drama from Ari Aster, he had the worst sleep of his life. “I’ve never been so affected by a film that I’ve seen, let alone one I’ve been in,” he says. “It was the most affected I’ve been by anything ever. It was truly disturbing and I was living with this quite sickening emotional hangover from watching the film.”

It’s a feeling that’s familiar to fans of Aster’s work—his debut feature Hereditary, which came out last year, contained numerous gut-punching scenes that left viewers emotionally exhausted and gained praise for showcasing a family experiencing grief and loss, ultimately a very relatable story, through the lens of supernatural horror. Midsommar is no different in the sense that it could easily be classified as a pure drama if not for a few explicit, gory scenes, a story about a toxic relationship between Dani (played by Florence Pugh) and Christian (played by Jack Reynor), held together by pity and obligation after the former experiences a family tragedy and the latter finds himself unable to leave her, bound to her only by a hollow sense of duty while becoming increasingly emotionally unavailable. He ends up begrudgingly inviting her along on a planned boys’ trip to Sweden to visit their friend’s remote village, much to the annoyance of his companions. The group is there to experience the local Midsummer festival, with rituals that quickly become increasingly disturbing, eventually exposing every character’s raw, emotional psyche and forcing each to confront his or her own limitations.

Poulter stars as Mark, an unsupportive friend of Christian’s who makes no effort to hide his disgruntlement at having a girlfriend crash their holiday—sarcastic and brash, he’s the embodiment of toxic masculinity. “Mark was an interesting character to me because he did feel like the poster child for what not to do as a man in a time where I think, and albeit late, there are conversations in the male community about how we better ourselves for the sake of both women and our own community,” says the English actor. “We’re letting go of regressive habits and being more progressive and developing our emotional intelligence and our appreciation for our privilege as males. Mark didn’t get that memo and certainly isn’t exercising any of that so he’s to me an example of what not to do and for young men watching this film, it’s like, ‘Don’t be a Mark.’”

Poulter himself is the antithesis of Mark, evident in the way that the 26-year-old Londoner discusses the shortcomings of the character and how the perception of masculinity needs to be opened up to a larger conversation. “It doesn’t have it be this taboo subject, talking openly about mental health and emotions, which you don’t talk about for fear of not living up to the expectations of masculinity,” he says.

The thoughtfulness with which he scrutinizes his character extends into his personal life: Poulter has aligned himself with multiple organizations to bring awareness through his visibility to issues he cares about deeply, such as the Diana Award’s Anti-Bullying Programme, aimed at making schools a happier and safer environment; Leap Confronting Conflict, which teaches youth how to manage conflict in their communities; and May Measurement Month, an awareness campaign about the lethal dangers of high blood pressure that he works with alongside his father; among many others. Despite this lengthy roster, Poulter calls himself a “work in progress” and says he still feels like he hasn’t done enough yet, hoping to continue to evolve as an activist in the future.

For such an empathetic person, it’s interesting that some of Poulter’s most notable performances came from being cast as the villain, from a racist, sadistic cop in Katheryn Bigelow’s Detroit to the arrogant antagonist Gally in the Maze Runner franchise to a preadolescent bully in his début film, 2007 Sundance favorite Son of Rambow, which kickstarted his career when he was only thirteen. “Son of Rambow came about because I was at school and a casting director came around to the school and was casting for the movie,” he recalls. “They were at the end of their search and I got very lucky and happened to match the physical description of what they were looking for and ended up auditioning and somehow getting it. That was eight weeks over my summer holiday. I did it, had the best time of my life, but didn’t really know whether anything was going to come of it. Then the film was successful and screened internationally and it was like, ‘What?'”

After such a serendipitous start, Poulter says that he’s just grateful that he found something he was passionate about after struggling with other areas at school. “Acting really saved me because I think I was in a place where socially I didn’t feel confident,” he says. “Also from an academic perspective, I felt displaced and at school, it can feel like there’s nothing more to life beyond the walls of your school. I had a very happy family life and homelife but I really hated school.”

Poulter speaks lovingly about the encouraging domestic life that allowed him to develop as an actor at an early age. His parents both work in the medical field, as a nurse and a professor of cardiology respectively, and always supported his career, even uprooting their own lives to move to Australia for six months during the filming of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in which he was cast as Eustace Scrubb, who accompanies his cousins Edmund and Lucy Pevensie to their magical land. By the time Poulter completed school, he already had a long list of British film and television credits but says it was being cast in the Hollywood grifter comedy We’re the Millers, his first project after deciding to pursue acting full time, that made him feel like he truly had a career. Relatively unknown in a cast that included Jennifer Aniston, Jason Sudeikis, and Emma Roberts, he received an overwhelmingly positive response for his hilarious portrayal of Kenny, an endearing but emotionally battered kid, even winning an MTV Movie Award for Best Kiss with his co-stars Aniston and Roberts.

He jokes that it was likely a tough job for the marketing campaign to sell his name alongside Aniston and Roberts, but Poulter has clearly earned his top-billing status now. Since We’re the Millers, he’s appeared alongside Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy as a trapper in the Oscar-nominated The Revenant, as a soldier with Brad Pitt in War Machine, and most recently as an Eighties video game developer in Black Mirror’s “Bandersnatch,” the meta choose-your-own-adventure Netflix hit in which he starred opposite Fionn Whitehead. Poulter brings a confident richness to each character, also the more impressive because he was never classically trained. Instead, he is constantly learning and developing as an actor through work experience, recounting his time working with Bigelow on Detroit as one of his favorite lessons. “One thing I learned from watching her is that the best leaders and the greatest directors are people who are not too proud to be open to collaboration and the opinions and suggestions of other people,” he says. “Katheryn will hear every voice in the room. She’ll also defy it and go with what her gut tells her, which is what is required sometimes as well, but she’s never too proud to hear a good idea.”

In the future, Poulter has intentions to “increase the amount of collaboration” by branching out into film production, but for now he’s focusing on his acting career, continuing to learn about the film industry from his vantage point in front of the camera. Recently, he starred in the short film “Bainne,” his Midsommar co-star Reynor’s directorial début, set during the Irish Great Famine. What unifies his choices is a certain tone. From taking on toxic masculinity in Midsommar to racism in Detroit to bullying in Son of Rambow, it’s evident that Poulter is willing to tackle the challenges of playing roles that reflect real-world issues. It’s not by accident that he’s attracted to these films—he says it’s important to him to try to work on as many projects as possible that have a social-political impact. “The encouraging thing is that now it feels like there’s an industry-wide push to cultivate that,” he says, “and it feels like there’s more and more of those projects popping up and also that generally there’s a move to being more inclusive and welcoming a wide range of voices as well in that discussion.”

Midsommar is out now.