Anton Yelchin on Acting, Power of Punk, ‘Absurdity of Existence’
After starring in the Star Trek franchise reboot and a Terminator sequel in 2009, Anton Yelchin could have transitioned to making blockbusters full-time. But the actor, who died yesterday in a freak automobile accident at the age of 27, went in the opposite direction, putting his franchise clout to work on movies by cult directors like Jim Jarmusch (Only Lovers Left Alive), Joe Dante (Burying the Ex), Paul Schrader (Dying of the Light) and Michael Almereyda (Cymbeline).
Yelchin didn’t talk like a movie star, either. For someone who’d been in the industry since he was a child, Yelchin seemed remarkably unguarded when I spoke with him in March, just before the release of Green Room — another movie he signed onto largely because he admired the director, Jeremy Saulnier. Yelchin wanted to talk up Green Room, of course, but it wasn’t a dutiful promotional exercise: He was justly proud of the film, but more than that, he was excited by it, and by the ideas it stirred up. There was little chance that the connections he drew to the work of the French philosopher Georges Bataille would end up in a feature on the film — and indeed, they did not — but Yelchin was as engaged by them as any discussion of his character or his craft. (He also shared his enthusiasm for the Los Angeles punk band Egrets on Ergot and Rancid’s bass player.)
The son of Soviet figure skaters, Yelchin was raised in the U.S., but the way he describes Pat, the punk bass player who weathers a siege by neo-Nazi skinheads in Green Room, the character sounds like a Dostoevsky hero, a man who’s lived his life according to rational principles forced to confront, and embrace, the world’s fundamental irrationality. Green Room was clearly a personal film for Yelchin, who grew up going to punk shows and played in a band called the Hammerheads, but it also fit the way he approached his career, which might have been incomprehensible by Hollywood standards but yielded a body of work that, though now tragically truncated, yielded an uncommon breadth and depth of great performances that we’ll be watching for years to come.
I first saw Green Room at a midnight screening at the Toronto Film Festival, and the atmosphere was electric. I went in exhausted, on the verge of falling asleep, but two hours later, I was wide awake and buzzed.
It’s that kind of a movie. It’s a hard movie to sleep through. I’d be curious to meet the kind of person who sleeps through that movie. I’d be kind of excited to meet them. They’re like, “You know what? This is what I love to nap to. Punk rock kids getting murdered by skinheads puts me at ease. I wanna pass out.”
So what grabbed you about the script?