AnOther Performance: Joe Bird

In the first of a new series spotlighting our favourite new stars, we ask actors to name the performances that inspire them most

Every rising star has their breakout role, but few involve as many broken bones as Joe Bird’s did. In the gnarly possession film Talk to Me, the Liverpool-born Australian actor played Riley, a teen who insists on playing with a haunted embalmed hand and ends up in critical care. Bird was only 14 when he simulated cracking his skull open for the film; a few years later, his first lead role brought him back to the growing subgenre of bleak Australian horror. Adrian Chiarella’s Leviticus is a film that splits the difference between violent possession scares and sensitive queer drama in rural, repressed Australia. As the 19-year-old actor puts it, “It’s a love story as much as it’s a horror film.”

Bird plays Naim, a sensitive and lonely kid with a quiet, comforting mother Arlene (Mia Wasikowska) and a not-so-subtle voyeuristic streak. He explores the first clumsy stages of desire with his classmate Ryan (Stacy Clausen) before their strict church community forces a horrific conversion therapy ritual on to them both: they are each cursed and stalked by a demon invisible to everyone else, who appears as the person they desire most. For Naim, that’s Ryan, and he can no longer trust that his first love won’t try to maul him to death.

Indie horror movies fusing terror and metaphor are all the rage, but Bird latched on to the clandestine, hiding-in-plain-sight nature of Leviticus’s demon. “It reflects society today, where people often will choose to look away from homophobia or pretend they can’t see it. Fear is a big part of these characters, especially Naim.”

Bird knew he had to play the part when he first read the screenplay – on a bus to meet his friend at the beach. He was so swept up by Chiarella’s writing he missed his stop; fittingly, two of Naim and Ryan’s most moving scenes take place on cross-country buses. Talk to Me co-director Danny Philippou encouraged Bird to jot down all his impassioned feelings about the script, and Bird took the liberty of sending his thoughts to Chiarella’s email address.

“It was very raw, it was very authentic, and it was just very honest,” Bird says of the script. “I’m always drawn to characters who don’t live in that perfect [zone], who live in that kind of grey area of life. You don’t necessarily speak about it; it’s that very internal place.” 

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For Bird, the actor most masterful at those complex grey areas and one who brought a startling humanity to flawed characters, was Philip Seymour Hoffman. The late actor’s open-hearted turn in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1997 drama Boogie Nights above all is a touchstone

“Philip Seymour Hoffman in Boogie Nights is one of the performances that really inspired me. I remember watching him as Scotty [the awkward boom operator on the film’s porn sets] and I was fascinated with how much he was able to communicate without saying very much. He’s uncomfortable, vulnerable, funny, and you feel incredibly sorry for him as well. But it feels like he never tries to make you feel that way for him; he makes the character feel completely real without telling the audience how they should feel about him [...] He never pushes it. The audience can see everything when they’re looking at his face.”

“While that might not be the biggest role in Philip Seymour Hoffman’s career, it always stands out to me because it’s one of those quirky roles that is very authentic and lived-in [...] Performances like that go unappreciated a lot of the time; they’re so real that people forget to give them acclaim. I'd love to be in a Boogie Nights-type film in the future. You watch films like that, and every single character is so different, they’ve all got different motivations and that is real life. Everyone is different.”