XAVIER SAMUEL

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The path from Stephenie Meyer to Jane Austen runs, apparently, through Xavier Samuel. Perhaps currently best known for his role as the vampire Riley Biers in Eclipse, the third installment of the Twilight series, the young Australian actor is now embodying Austen’s words in Love & Friendship, Whit Stillman’s new adaptation of her unfinished epistolary novel Lady Susan, also starring Kate Beckinsale and Chloë Sevigny. “It’s not very often you get to work on material where there are wonderful turns of phrase,” he says of the film, out tomorrow. “It just feels like quite an elegant comedy, the way the Barry Lyndon score starts and you know this is splendid. You feel like you’re a part of that world too and it doesn’t alienate you.”

That Samuel, who is thirty-two, appears equally at home with either fangs or a Georgian frock coat should be no surprise, as he has demonstrated his range across dozens of varied projects since he began acting as a teenager, from rowdy romantic comedies to Chekhov on stage.

Growing up in Adelaide, Samuel hoped to become a football player, but ended up in the high school drama club after a knee injury. “I just enjoyed the search of it, basically,” he says of what drew him to his new pursuit. “It was about ideas and about investigation and trying to get to the bottom of something, but never quite getting there.”

That questing drive led him to the drama department at Adelaide’s Flinders University, and he quickly picked up roles in a number of Australian productions, including a small part in the multilayered suicide drama 2:37, which played at Cannes, and a leading role as a gay teenager in a cloistered seaside town in Newcastle, which brought him to international attention at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival. “That was when America kind of opened up and I got an agent and started doing American auditions,” he recalls. “It was still a bit of a stab in the dark, but the agent was like, ‘Why not give it a crack and keep chipping away?’”

Still, even with a Hollywood agent, Samuel says that he was careful not to get ahead of himself, and made sure to take advantage of every opportunity he was given. “I think when you first get out of drama school, an audition is kind of like a miracle,” he laughs. ”You’re just hungry to start to put what you’ve learned into practice before you learn that you should forget what you’ve learned and stop trying to show your tricks off and be an ‘actor.’”

Samuel continued working in Australia, and says that one day the offer to audition for Eclipse “just sort of arrived in my inbox.” He sent off a video audition and, after not hearing any response for months, assumed the role had gone to a different actor, until suddenly being told he was in the final round before flying to the film set in Vancouver to meet director David Slade. “By the time I arrived in Vancouver, they hadn’t released the second film, but it was being talked about,” Samuel recalls. “It wasn’t quite on the back of buses and all that just yet, but there was a sense that this could explode, so the feeling was you’d be stupid not to do this.”

Even coming into the third film with a role that he himself quickly admits was “quite peripheral in a way,” Samuel says he was quickly accepted by the cast and crew. And being removed from the center of the action allowed him a unique perspective on a blockbuster franchise with an overwhelmingly passionate fanbase. “They’re all picking sides about whose team of whatever,” he laughs, “so I was able to watch them from the sidelines and just look at this absurdity. The red carpet at the premiere in Los Angeles was over an hour, and that’s fucking crazy to be walking on this thing and being asked weird questions about stuff you don’t why you’re being asked about.”

Samuel’s next Hollywood film came in the form of Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous, which examines the theory that the Earl of Oxford was the actual author of Shakespeare’s plays. The son of teachers of English and history, Samuel says he appreciated the film’s theme of masked identities, but calls the idea “outlandish.” The project also gave Samuel the opportunity to delve into historical research to play a real-life historical figure, but he cautions against relying too much on fact when making fiction. “There’s a certain point where that’s no longer helpful,” he says, “because the figure that you’re reading and learning about in history is not the one on the page of the script—it can’t be. So all that reading becomes a bit of your own satisfaction and entertainment and some of those things can feed their way into the character too.”

Afterwards, Samuel performed in a string of Australian films, from the romantic comedy A Few Best Men to the thriller Plush from Catherine Hardwicke, who directed Thirteen, Lords of Dogtown, and the first Twilight film. He also starred opposite Naomi Watts and Robin Wright in the controversial Adore, about two middle-aged women who begin sleeping with each other’s sons. “I guess there is an element of not completely writing off an industry that supported me in the first place and trying to continue to be a part of it,” he laughs, “but I’m not doing anyone any massive favors by being a part of the Australian film community. It’s doing me all the favors.”

In 2014, he appeared in Fury, David Ayer’s brutally visceral study of life in an American tank platoon during World War II. The film, which also starred Brad Pitt, Logan Lerman, and Shia LaBeouf, was noted for its harsh realism and its refusal to romanticize warfare. “There’s something very documentarian about it, you feel like this might be close to what it actually feels like to be in this situation,” Samuel says of working with Ayer. “You know that it’s coming from a place that’s informed and not just sensational. You know he’s not just going to make a gory film, but make a film that reflects the horror as opposed to something that’s less intelligent, and it’s brave to put something like that out there, especially in a commercial context.”

Taking a much more genteel turn, Samuel can now be seen in Love & Friendship, Stillman’s latest comedy of manners, about a conniving widow set—as most Austen mothers are—on finding a suitable husband for her daughter. Samuel plays Reginald DeCourcy, the heir to an estate who is first enamored by Beckinsale’s Lady Susan before eventually setting his sights elsewhere. “He’s certainly one of those guys that you hope one day you get the opportunity to work with,” Samuel says of Stillman. “I was a big fan of Metropolitan. I think back when you went and bought DVD’s or even VHS, I remember seeing the cover and thinking, ‘This looks like a smart film.’ His films are a comment on society and class and there’s a real conversation happening. They have their own style and a very unique perspective. You can tell when you’re watching a Whit Stillman film, and that’s hard to do.”

The rest of this year will continue to prove suitably wide-ranging for an actor as curious as Samuel, who will appear as the monster in a modern interpretation of Frankenstein and opposite Eddie Murphy and Britt Robertson in the wholesome Mr. Church. He’ll also be seen as the title character in The Death and Life of Otto Bloom, as a man who experiences time in reverse. “I was inspired by the script and what it would be like to have already experienced the future,” he says, “and to be moving towards the past and having the past be something unknown, something new.”

It’s not hard to understand why Samuel, who seems never content to take it easy, felt a kinship to Otto Bloom. After wrapping Love & Friendship last year, he returned to Australia to perform the new double bill The Dog/The Cat at the sixty-seat Belvoir St Theatre in Sydney. No stranger to the stage—he played Hamlet in school and was the besotted playwright Konstantin in Chekhov’s The Seagull in a 2014 run in Adelaide—the change of pace was both comforting and frightening all at once. “It was starting to get a bit scary when I thought about it,” he says about performing on stage. “It was intimidating and it was good to feel intimated and that made me feel like that’s what I needed to do.”

Samuel is currently in Melbourne filming the miniseries Seven Types of Ambiguity with Hugo Weaving, a psychological mystery based on a novel that is also serving as his introduction to television, save a single scene on an Australian series he shot as a teenager which was later cut. But even with his varied experiences on stage and screens large and small, Samuel says he is still never completely relaxed—although perhaps that’s a good thing. “No,” he laughs, “I wouldn’t say that any of them are particularly comfortable.”

Love & Friendship is out tomorrow in New York and Los Angeles.