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Jack O’Connell, “Starred Up”Between now and the new year, the English actor Jack O’Connell, 24, will go from being relatively unknown to virtually omnipresent. Mr. O’Connell has been acting in Britain for about a decade, making a name as a bad boy in television shows like “Skins” and “The Runaway,” but this fall he will star in two films that will introduce him to the art house and then the multiplex.
“Not a lot feels instantaneous about it,” Mr. O’Connell said, in his thick cockney accent. “I had a long time to prepare myself and compare myself. I always wanted to be held in this kind of regard.”
David Mackenzie’s prison drama “Starred Up,” which opened in New York Aug. 27 and expands nationally this month, showcases his ability to channel mercurial rage and vulnerability as an impulsively violent son locked up in the same prison as his homicidal father (Ben Mendelsohn). (Above, Mr. O’Connell in the film.) At last year’s Telluride Film Festival, A. O. Scott of The New York Times praised Mr. O’Connell’s “superb” performance in a film “sensitive to the nuances of emotion underneath the macho belligerence.”
Mr. O’Connell said, “In the filmmaking we were going for a kind of neo-reality, and I knew Eric” — his character — “well enough, growing up where I did, to make those decisions,” referring to his working-class upbringing in Leeds. “I’m constantly relieved that I don’t have to think spontaneously like that no more, and that I get to exorcise it a bit and channel it in some creative form.”
On Dec. 25, Mr. O’Connell will take on a more heroic role as the lead of Angelina Jolie’s “Unbroken,” as Louis Zamperini, the indefatigable Olympic long-distance runner who became a Japanese prisoner of war in World War II.
“Angie, she’s queen bee,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong. She’s talking to you, and you can only comprehend the beauty at first, so I had to get over that fast. But she’ll champion you. You get knocked down, she makes you want to get back up.”Mr. O’Connell said, he often felt typecast. “I kind of had to stick to what I know,” he said. But he lacks none of his characters’ confidence and hopes to tackle a broader range of roles. " ‘Unbroken’ really took it out of me, but there’s nothing final about it,” he said. “I’m certain that I’ve validated my reasons for being here, but I haven’t fully demonstrated my total range yet. I’ve just got a foot in the door.”
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Teyonah Parris and Tessa Thompson, “Dear White People”Justin Simien’s provocative, crowdfunded satire “Dear White People” (Oct. 17) is set at a fictional Ivy League college where the melting pot of race politics boils over into a campus riot, when a controversial college radio show inspires a racist party. At the heart of the scrum are two dueling African-American women, Coco and Sam, played by two rising stars, Teyonah Parris and Tessa Thompson.
“The things we represent are totally opposite,” said Ms. Parris (above right, with Ms. Thompson), an Atlanta native and Juilliard grad best known for playing Dawn, Don Draper’s secretary, on “Mad Men.” Ms. Parris’s brash, aggressive Coco pragmatically attempts to exploit stereotypical expectations as she hopes to land a role on a reality TV show.
Ms. Thompson, a Los Angeles native with extensive television credits and roles in features like the indie “Mississippi Damned,” plays Samantha, a biracial, righteously indignant radical who hosts the radio show of the title. “Dear white people, stop dancing,” she decrees, adding: “Dear white people, the minimal requirement of black friends needed to seem not racist has now been raised to two. Sorry, but Tyrone your weed man does not count.”
Whereas Ms. Parris’s Coco is animated by a steely, hard-won cynicism, Ms. Thompson’s Sam is full of impassioned, intellectual, abstract outrage, but they aren’t so different at their cores. Both actresses deliver multilayered performances that undercut expectations, as each character strikes a public pose that’s more extreme than her private thoughts.
“A lot of what Sam says is not exactly a true representation of how she sees the world, and that’s true of Coco, too,” Ms. Thompson said, noting her character’s love of Taylor Swift and fear of Cosby sweaters. “To feel that something’s wrong in your gut and not really know how to respond to it — that’s where we leave them.”
During the film shoot, the two actresses became close friends. Since then, they have auditioned for the same roles and wished each other luck, which seems to be working. They reconnected in Atlanta, where Ms. Parris was filming the new LeBron James-produced Starz series “Survivor’s Remorse,” set in the world of professional basketball, and Ms. Thompson was portraying the civil rights activist Diane Nash in “Selma,” Ava DuVernay’s civil rights drama set to open Dec. 25 in the heart of the Oscar season.
It’s a heady time for two rising talents, but recently, in the wake of Michael Brown’s killing in Ferguson, Mo., and the #iftheygunnedmedown Twitter campaign, Ms. Thompson said she and Ms. Parris have been talking about how events “really changed the context of ‘Dear White People.’ ”
“Sometimes, we see a shallow version of the African-American experience which is so deep and vast,” Ms. Thompson said. “I was excited that the film speaks on issues that never get spoken about and isn’t banging you up against the head with them, but making you laugh and feel a little uncomfortable.”Ms. Parris agreed: “This is the kind of work I’ve been aching to do, that I can do forever.”
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Jaeden Lieberher, “St. Vincent”The slight, skinny actor Jaeden Lieberher, 11, moved to Los Angeles from Philadelphia with his mother in 2011 and snagged a few roles in commercials immediately. In short order, he played a Hot Wheels enthusiast, a miniature Iron Man and a bullied kid in a high-profile Super Bowl ad. But last year, when his mother got a call offering him a lead role in Ted Melfi’s “St. Vincent,” opening Oct. 24, he was confused and a little bit frightened.
“At first I didn’t know what happened,” Mr. Lieberher, below, said by phone. “My mom, she looked so happy, and I didn’t know what she was crying about.”
In the film, Melissa McCarthy plays a recently divorced mother who moves into a new neighborhood with her son, Oliver. In desperate need of help, she hires her older neighbor Vincent to watch him, without realizing that he’s a misanthropic, alcoholic, prostitute-frequenting gambler. Mrs. Lieberher was crying because her son would be on screen for almost the entire film, opposite the actor who plays Vincent, Bill Murray.
“I love ‘Ghostbusters’ and ‘Groundhog Day,’ and I was terrified to meet him,” Mr. Lieberher said. “I just was shaking. It was so awesome.” They make for a very odd couple. Mr. Murray’s Vincent is an unembarrassed creature of unrepressed appetites and bottomless bitterness. Mr. Lieberher’s Oliver is frail and hypersensitive, shy but precociously alert.
“He would call me Straight Face, because I was so nervous and stiff,” Mr. Lieberher recalled. “He said I didn’t laugh at his jokes, but he was really funny.”Films are overpopulated with child actors who hit their marks but seem to too polished to be believable as spontaneous kids. On the contrary, Mr. Lieberher’s vulnerable performance invites identification, from the quiet way he studies the adults around him and reacts, to his tremulous delivery of a crucial speech in front of an intimidating crowd.
“It was very nerve-racking being in front of the camera, and then all the people in the audience,” said Mr. Lieberher, who has already completed roles in coming films for Cameron Crowe and Jeff Nichols. “I practiced it every day, and it was really tough, and I would mess up a lot. But it was really awesome at the end.” His screen mother, Ms. McCarthy, said she was rooting for him to pull it off: “Jaeden’s final speech killed me. There’s power in his quiet delivery. You see him think and process before he speaks. He’s such a cool kid.”
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Katherine Waterston, “Inherent Vice”From a distance, it seems as if Katherine Waterston did everything right to land her breakthrough performance, with Joaquin Phoenix, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Inherent Vice,” which will have its world premiere as the centerpiece at the New York Film Festival on Oct. 4 and open in theaters Dec. 12. The daughter of the actor Sam Waterston, Ms. Waterston, 34, studied at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, the Stella Adler Studio of Acting and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. She acted in indie films and onstage with companies like Classic Stage Company and the Atlantic Theater Company. But the pieces never clicked together.
“The more I’ve pursued acting, the less I’ve felt there is a right way,” Ms. Waterston said. “It’s job to job. You don’t know what’s going to lead to something else.
One day, you’re playing this, the next you’re playing a paraplegic prostitute in some thriller” — 2012’s “The Factory” — “and worrying about getting typecast. Like, after that, is it going to be hard to get people to see you as something different, like a quadriplegic prostitute?”Ms. Waterston did get an audition at “Law & Order,” but she didn’t get the part, even though her father was a mainstay of the show. (“Having an actor for a father is not like having a producer for a father,” she said teasingly.) Then Paul Thomas Anderson happened to see her performance in the 2008 indie film “The Babysitters,” five years after its release.
In Mr. Anderson’s narcotic noir, “Inherent Vice,” set in Los Angeles in 1970 and based on the Thomas Pynchon novel, Ms. Waterston plays Shasta, right, the free-spirited, sensual ex-girlfriend who wakes the mutton-chopped private investigator Doc Sportello (Mr. Phoenix) from his stoner haze. Like a beacon shining through the counterculture’s druggie fog, Shasta bristles with the kind of wild-eyed, visceral energy Doc has self-medicated into oblivion: a romantic embodiment of what might have been, and what might be lost.
“Certainly, this whole film is sort of the smoke clearing after the ‘60s and everyone coming to, wondering what the hell happened,” she said. “There’s a lot of uncertainty on every page of the novel. Is it all in her head? Or not? Is she as afraid as she needs to be? Or not?”
Figuring it out by doing all of her scenes with the mercurial Mr. Phoenix was more relief than challenge, she said. “Working with a scared actor is scarier than working with a brave one.”
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