PortraitThe 30-year-old explodes in “Nitram”, by Justin Kurzel, in theaters on May 11, a role which won him the prize for best actor at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021. To this film inspired by a mass massacre, the Texan knew how to bring all the ambiguities of his game, both soft and disturbing.
Caleb Landry Jones, 32, is the best answer to those who say Hollywood has lost its luster, madness and creative genius. He is one of those faces of American cinema that remain in the memory. In Get Out, of Jordan Peele, he was the white supremacist brother-in-law of the hero played by Daniel Kaluuya. In Three Billboards, which earned Frances McDormand her second Oscar for best actress in 2018, he played a benevolent publicist who helped this mother on the brink of the abyss to develop her strategy to obtain justice.
In the third season of Twin Peaks, by David Lynch, Jones lent his freckled face and aura of a fallen angel to the violent husband of the character played by Amanda Seyfried. In Nitram, by Justin Kurzel (in theaters May 11), the actor finally has his first major lead role. He plays a misunderstood and disturbed young man, angry with society, who is going to commit a mass murder.
The overflowing emotion
He is from the family of “beautiful bizarre”, as was the singer Christophe. As are his colleagues Joaquin Phoenix or Willem Dafoe. An ambiguity that gives him access to independent cinema and to characters of tortured and disturbing young men, as well as to the world of fashion, which seems to appreciate his slender silhouette and his lanky look. Spotted by Saint Laurent’s artistic director, Anthony Vaccarello, Jones was, alongside rapper Travis Scott, the face of the brand’s spring-summer 2019 campaign.
At the closing ceremony of the Cannes Film Festival, in 2021, where he won the prize for male interpretation for Nitram, Jones staggered to the stage at the announcement of his name, declared that he was about to vomit, tried to collect himself before disappearing apologetically: “I can’t do that, I’m sorry, thank you. »
Inspired by the Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania in 1996, where a man fired into a crowd, killing 35 and injuring 23, Nitram is the portrait of a boy who does not find his place and of his disarmed parents. Here, if the political is in the subtext, it is the intimate that dominates. Only the last seconds of the film (Kurzel cleverly chose not to stage the massacre) give Nitram its scandalous dimension.
Looking back on his Cannes moment, Jones says he did not anticipate the emotion that overwhelmed him when he heard his name. “I thought I didn’t give a damn about prizes, he confides in a sleepy voice, from Paris, where he is preparing to shoot Luc Besson’s next film. But this distinction touched me, partly because it meant that the film would really be seen and that perhaps it would be more easily accepted in Australia, where some people even today refuse to hear about Port Arthur. »
You have 56.44% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.