Caleb Landry Jones on Starring in Folk Thriller Harvest

Mutants, outcasts, bad seeds, loners: Caleb Landry Jones excels at playing people who’ve strayed outside the bounds of normal human society, but maybe none so infuriatingly nice as Walter Thirsk, the quote-unquote hero of Athina Rachel Tsangari’s hallucinatory period piece Harvest.

The film, a hazy allegory for our own age of divide-and-rule inequality, follows a community of farmers in medieval Scotland, whose life of plenty is threatened by the arrival of outsiders into their world: first, a group of ‘foreigners’ taken for criminals and placed in the public stocks, and second, a sneering English nobleman (Frank Dillane, with a touch of Alan Rickman about him) whose claim on the land unleashes the forces of capitalism on the unsuspecting villagers.

Walter, a former houseboy on the estate where the well-meaning old landlord (Harry Melling) grew up, sees better than most where all of this is heading. He’s an educated man whom we sense has the qualities of a leader, but he’s grieving the loss of his wife and seems to retreat further into himself as the community comes under attack. You keep waiting for him to go all Braveheart, but he never does. Which is precisely what drew Landry Jones to the role in the first place.

“That’s kinda what I loved about the script,” says the actor, who describes Walter variously as “miserable”, “pathetic” and “limp”. “At one point I was trying to lead the group, and Athina made it clear that that is not Walter’s role, that is not what I’m here to do. So then I was thinking, ‘Well, if I’m not leading, I must be away with the fairies, you know? I must be up in the trees while everyone is working.’ And she made it clear that that wasn’t it [either]. So for me it was really about trying to navigate, ‘Where is Walter in all this?’”

Landry Jones came to the role via cinematographer Sean Price Williams, a collaborator on Heaven Knows What, after his agent rejected an initial offer out of hand. On the advice of Tsangari, he turned to New Hollywood classics like McCabe & Mrs Miller and Two-Lane Blacktop in developing the role, which also required him to master a Scottish accent. As part of his research, he took to downing pints in the local boozer – the film was shot in Argyll, in a remote corner of the western highlands – and watching episodes of 2000s old-folks’ sitcom Still Game. He’s still not sure he got any of it right.

“I don’t think I nailed it at all,” he says. “I had this drunk guy in the pub telling me, ‘Hell, for 40 grand I could teach you Scottish!’ I don’t know where he got 40 grand from; he went in way too high. But I was always getting the piss taken out of me in the pub – it’s the Scottish way, you know, which is great.”

Landry Jones is quite relaxed in real life. I first run into him on a smoke break outside the hotel where we’re due to meet, deep in conversation with the doorman. When I ask him about his childhood in the same Dallas suburb Mike Judge grew up in, he talks admiringly about King of the Hill’s astute portrayal of the Texan character. But when it comes to a certain kind of analysis of his work, he tends to clam up. “I don’t know … I don’t know … I really don’t think about those things too much,” he reasons. “As soon as I start to intellectualise it, something, uh, works against me. I just find that acting is a very physical thing.”

It’s an approach you can feel in all of Landry Jones’ work to date, from his role in Get Out as the mixed martial arts-practising brother who first clues us in to his family’s terrible secret, to his devastating turn as the young man behind the Port Arthur massacre in Justin Kurzel’s Nitram, eyes glassy with pain. Watch his clips online, and the comments are full of people demanding that someone cast him as the Joker, which is perhaps the Gen-Z equivalent of playing King Lear at the Old Vic.

It makes complete sense when he tells me he first rocked up in LA wanting to play in a “Lindsay Anderson movie”: like Malcolm McDowell in Anderson’s establishment-baiting boarding-school drama If, there’s a challenge implicit in his amorphously handsome features, the kind that makes him catnip for a certain kind of auteur. But in fact, it was a blockbuster franchise that gave him his first big break, as an ultrasonic scream-emitting mutant in Matthew Vaughn’s 2011 X-Men reboot.

“When I first met my agent, I gave him a copy of [Luchino Visconti’s] The Leopard and told him, ‘This is what I want to do,’” says Landry Jones, laughing. “He still hasn’t watched it! I mean, I was an idiot. Eventually I realised that was not the world I was going into. I was auditioning for things like Glee and CSI, you know? But I was broke and I needed every opportunity. And X-Men was a great opportunity for me.”

Soon after he played in the Safdie Brothers’ breakout Heaven Knows What, mesmeric as an abusive drug addict opposite Arielle Holmes, whose hard-hitting memoir the film was based on. “The Safdies brought me into a kind of work I was always looking for,” says Landry Jones, “which is really about space, this freedom to exist in a real space with real people, [where] you don’t have anywhere to hide, in a way. Working with real people, there is something that’s asked of you [which means] you need to be committed, because what they are sharing is very personal, very open.”

The experience left him shaken – “I never wanted to work again afterwards,” he says – but it opened the door to eye-catching roles in Get Out, The Florida Project, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Nitram, for which he won best actor at Cannes. His performance in the latter is sensational, surely one of the best by an American actor currently under 40, and established his chops as a serious character actor as well as “Hollywood’s go-to oddball”, as Vulture had it in 2017. 

“The actors I really liked felt to me like they were doing something a bit different, whether it’s Philip Seymour Hoffman or Jack Nicholson or Marlon Brando or whoever,” says Landry Jones, citing an eccentric turn by Brando in The Missouri Breaks, which reportedly flummoxed his co-star Jack Nicholson, as a performance he particularly treasures. “I felt like I identified with this aspect of where they were able to go. And I felt like I could do that myself in some way.”

For Landry Jones, every new project he takes on is about how to get to that place. Sometimes, he even has the feeling he might have arrived. “Usually it goes away pretty quick, though,” he says with a smile.

Harvest is out now in UK cinemas.