Will Poulter: ‘Hanging out in Soho House LA, that’s my worst nightmare’

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/oct/06/will-poulter-interview-maze-runner

Version 0 of 1.

“You find that there are a lot of disappointing movies,” says the actor Will Poulter, drawing a breath, gearing up to make a long point. Already I like where he’s heading.

A child star who grew up on the set of idiosyncratic British films including Garth Jennings’ Son of Rambow and Dexter Fletcher’s Wild Bill, Poulter is now 21. He’s tall and fluent and right now something of a US studio favourite. A major player in last year’s money-raking comedy We’re the Millers, he is soon to appear in Fox’s adaptation of The Maze Runner, a Hunger Games-like blockbuster, adapted from a popular novel series, that’s already gone to No 1 at the box office in 50 foreign territories including the US.

Poulter was recently anointed one of Hollywood’s impressive youth, included in Vanity Fair’s “next wave” issue in June, and won Bafta’s rising star award in February. But forget all that for a moment. He’s by far the most candid and answerable member of the big-movie machine I’ve yet encountered, a young man who grew up in the age of recession, of hoicked-up university fees, left mortified by what he sees as the “embarrassingly irresponsible” use of money in Hollywood.

“Now,” he says, continuing his point, “some disappointing movies do make a lot of money. But from a creative perspective? It’s a shame that we’re filling our box office with that when there are great movies that just don’t get funded, or fantastic fucking movies that just don’t get seen by anyone. I think we have a responsibility to shape the zeitgeist with the movies we put out there. Because After Earth isn’t going to do it. The Expendables3 isn’t going to do it. You could make one million amazing films for the amount of money they spend on those films. I get frustrated. There’s no other industry in the world where you could spend $100m as frivolously as they do in the film industry. Think about how much good you could do with $100m… it can be spent in 20 minutes on a movie.”

I should say that, as much as I’m interested to hear all this, I didn’t instigate the line of conversation (in a Soho coffee shop, late summer). Talk rarely tends this way with an actor who’s found a good slot, more inclined as a result to play safe and spray out buttery praise in all directions, at co-stars, crew, studios, cheque-signers.

And Poulter does have lots of positive things to say about his new film The Maze Runner. It tells of a group of kids held captive in a labyrinth, a thriller that initially appears to be a “Monsters – run!” thing before it grows into something tricksier, cleverer. Playing the group’s “arsehole, the closest thing the film has to a villain”, Poulter says he was fascinated by the process of adapting a work that already had thousands of fans, each with their own expectations as to how the novel should be put on screen. “A tough task, but a nice pressure too … the film has a great heart.” But his keenest words of praise are reserved for his director, Wes Ball – a first-timer who, Poulter believes, recognises Hollywood’s chaotic relationship with money, and who showed good budgeting instincts on the film. “We made it for a quarter of what people expect. It only looks like a $100m movie.”

I think Britons of Poulter’s generation – now in their late teens and early 20s, spectators while the economic fiascos of recent years shredded their odds of financial stability in the future – are more inclined to be aware of money, and more inclined to be aware of its reckless use. Even so, I’ll wager the promotional interviews conducted by Poulter’s Maze Runner co-stars, including Kaya Scodelario (once of Skins) and Thomas Brodie-Sangster (Game of Thrones) do not focus quite so squarely on their new movie’s bottom line. Why does Poulter care so much?

Background might play a part. He is the only actor in a tight-knit family of healthcare workers and financiers. (His mother is a nurse, his father a professor of medicine, his two sisters are healthcare workers, his brother is in finance.) When discussing the frightening ease with which a film can eat up money, Poulter says: “Think of the healthcare prospects with $100m!” Later, talking about acting, and the impossibility of ever being “a perfect actor”, Poulter draws comparisons with his brother’s career. “There’s such a thing, if you’re a finance man, as hitting the figures you need to hit. But there’s no equivalent in acting. It’s a creative field. It’s subjective. That’s what I love about it.”

He had an unusual introduction to the trade: he was taken, along with a dozen classmates from west London’s Harrodian school, up to the Edinburgh festival fringe, to perform in a sketch show. The show, called School of Comedy, traded heavily on the fact that its young cast performed material, written by Poulter’s drama teacher, that was too old for them. In one sketch Poulter donned a wide-shouldered suit to play a lizardy 1980s businessman, quipping about fax machines and nouvelle cuisine. (He was born in 1993.) It was an Edinburgh sellout and went on to get a two-series deal on E4. Watching clips now, all the big laughs are Poulter’s. At the fringe, he remembers, “people would laugh when I came on stage. Just laugh at my face – which happens.”

He does have an unusual face, heavy eyebrows sloping in so that, whatever his mood, he looks rather like a dubious policeman. In Poulter’s first film, 2007’s Son of Rambow (a weird and affecting rite-of-passage drama about young boys who obsessed over Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo) he was cast as a bully. The eyebrows – “demonic”, Poulter had called them – served him well in that sort of role. Perhaps too well. “After Son of Rambow, every script that came through was for the bully.” He was cast as Eustace, the weaselly kid in the third instalment of The Chronicles of Narnia films, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010). He played a troubled teen in the drama Wild Bill (2011). Work on The Maze Runner came about, he says, because his director watched Son of Rambow “and knew I had some bully-ish qualities in my acting locker”.

His casting in We’re the Millers went a little differently. Poulter played a nerd in this comedy, starring Jennifer Aniston, Jason Sudeikis and Emma Roberts, about a quartet of frauds who pretend to be a family to smuggle dope across the US border. In one scene he is taught how to kiss by Aniston’s character. In another he is bitten in the groin by a spider. It was that sort of movie – and Poulter’s first proper Hollywood gig.

He won the part, he says, only after “going through the wringer”. He remembers having to impress his credentials on a casting team who’d definitely never seen Son of Rambow or Wild Bill, and had probably skipped the lustreless Narnia 3 as well. “I was a total unknown.” When the film came out, he says, “I was almost surprised the marketing campaign wasn’t: ‘Jennifer Aniston! Jason Sudeikis! Emma Roberts! And who the fuck is this guy?!’ I’m grateful they took a risk on me.”

We’re the Millers earned a massive £170m. It raises an interesting question in my discussion with Poulter about movies and money, because talks will have begun, you’d assume, given its success, about a Millers sequel. And if they have, Poulter’s agent will be working out how much money his client can ask to appear in it . How does Poulter square his feelings about silly-money Hollywood with negotiations like these? His answer is interesting: not completely waterproof, but still honest, I reckon.

“People might assume that I’m, like, rolling in money. Couldn’t be further from the truth at the moment.” But say he did move up the ladder, grow in prominence and price. The choice might come to take a front-end fee or a back-end fee: front-end, “you walk away with an outrageous amount regardless of the film’s success”; back-end, you take a cut of profits. “And you might argue that because you contributed to the saleability of that movie, and its success, you deserve to.” Instinctively he feels that the back-end deal is the morally sounder option. “Although I’m confident in my own work ethic to know that even if I take a fee upfront I’m still going to apply myself to the absolute maximum.”

Poulter was 18 when filming We’re the Millers, finished with A-levels and with an offer of a place to study drama at Bristol University. After a Hollywood shoot, it must have been some adjustment to take up the place, and move into shared student digs. Poulter explains that the film was still a while from coming out in cinemas. “I hoped I’d be able to go to university and have a very normal portion of life.” He guessed an increased public profile “was on the horizon”, with all the mixed rewards and demands that brings – selfie requests, freebies, random cat calls, increased interest from the tabloids, who recently linked Poulter with Prince Harry’s ex, Cressida Bonas (falsely, he says). He went to university because “I knew I might only get a few more opportunities to do some really normal shit”.

He lasted a year. “A job opportunity arose on The Maze Runner. I thought: how much is getting a degree in drama, at the price of £18,000 for two more years (before I’ve even bought a single Jägerbomb), going to better my acting career? Or my overall life experience? On a cost-benefit analysis I just didn’t think it was worth it.”

The young cast of The Maze Runner are mostly Los Angeles-based, and Poulter says he’s made some terrific friends out there. But leaving university, plunging into acting full time, was never going to involve relocation to LA. “I just find the vibe over there superficial. I feel like there’s a dangerous culture among young actors of going to posey joints and socialising – not doing hard work. I don’t want to go and hang out in Soho House LA. That’s literally my worst nightmare. I’d rather be at home reading scripts.”

Home is in Chiswick, west London, where he grew up. There, at a remove, he’s picky about the stuff he’s offered. “I’m not interested in being in a movie that’s about really fast cars, hot women and helicopters. There’s not a cheque in the world that would make me wanna sacrifice my feelings about those films. As long as I possibly can, I don’t want to make that sacrifice.” To that end, Poulter has set up his own production company, called Good Soil. The aim, he says, is to generate scripts, not just receive them, and to try to circumvent the wider industry problem of “money people, to be crude about it, making decisions I think more creative minds should be making”. His partner in the production company is a young British actor and screenwriter called Seb de Souza.

“Talking about bad movies!” Poulter says. “I made Plastic with Seb.” I’d been wondering how to bring that up. A glossy British caper, released earlier this year, it told of a crew of young sunbed types who go on a crime spree with stolen credit cards. Critics loathed it; Mark Kermode, writing in this newspaper, offered a one-word shaming that pretty well summed up the response: “Yikes!” Even after time has passed, actors generally don’t like to call a dud a dud. There are so many people involved in the production process, too many to let down by being honest. But Poulter has been frank with me today and it seems a good opportunity to find out, what it feels like, being in a film everyone knows is “yikes” bad.

He winces. “It’s really tough, man. Because it’s shaming. And the worst thing is thinking someone will think you did it for dishonourable reasons.” He means for money. “I’m not shifting the blame. I recognise my responsibility to that film. But I’ve tried to shake it off since.”

It’s why he’s so interested in mistakes, industry blunders, in bad choices, he says, “because I’ve made them. You know, I’ve been saying today that people need to be more meticulous when it comes to making creative decisions. I’ve learned that through my own experiences as an actor. I need to be more meticulous when it comes to assessing whether a project is a right one. I’ve got the one film that I regret out of my way. And I don’t intend to make another one.”

The Maze Runner is released on Friday