Caleb Landry Jones: A whirlwind journey from Scotland to Venice
A surreal Venice experience
If anyone had a particularly surreal Venice in 2023, it was Caleb Landry Jones. The actor was in the city for barely 24 hours for the world premiere of Luc Besson’s DogMan, where he played a cross-dressing vigilante-thief with a pack of canines at his command. The 34-year-old was yanked from a muddy film set on a Scottish mountain early one morning, flown to Italy, dressed up, ferried from press conference to red carpet, and then flown back to Scotland the next day to shoot a crucial scene.
“I was in Venice, but all I was thinking about was this really important scene I had to do,” he says. “And I kept falling asleep in the screening and trying to wake up, and Luc would be like, ‘Man, it’s ok, go to sleep.'”
While in Venice, Landry Jones also created an air of intrigue by speaking in a Scottish accent throughout. During the DogMan press conference, Besson mentioned that his star was “in character.” Although Landry Jones never considered himself a method actor, he now appreciates that he probably is one.
The method behind the madness
“I don’t do everything my character does, but I do a lot of things that are going to trick me into thinking like it and enough to fake it,” he says, pointing to an interview with Nicolas Cage about Ghost Rider, where Cage surrounded himself with ancient trinkets to feel more like the character.
In a full-circle moment, the film Landry Jones had been shooting in Scotland is now bringing him back to Venice a year later. Harvest, the English-language debut of Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari, is bowing in competition. The film, based on Jim Grace’s Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, is a “tragicomic take on a Western” and an allegory for the perils of the modern world.
A challenging production
For Landry Jones, who won the Palme d’Or for his portrayal of an Australian mass shooter in Nitram, Harvest represented “something probably missing from cinema right now, a way of making movies and the kinds of characters we’re seeing.”
The production of Harvest was fraught with challenges. “Athina had everything pushed against her from every angle, including from me as an actor. I really gave her a hell of a time,” he says. “But I wasn’t the only one. It was coming from nature, the set, some of the crew, and even a stunt coordinator who left in a fury.”
Despite these challenges, Landry Jones is incredibly proud that the film has been recognized with a competition slot. “Her vision is very rare right now,” he says. “It’s very few and far between that people are built like this, their brains and hearts are built like this, and have become the kind of artists that they have become.”
A new collaboration with Luc Besson
Another director with a distinct vision in Landry Jones’s creative orbit is Besson. The two recently wrapped their second film together, Dracula: A Love Tale. Besson pitched this film to Landry Jones while making DogMan. This romantic take on Bram Stoker’s classic gothic tale features Landry Jones in the lead role and promises “some really wild ideas.”
“But I think it’ll also be a very touching story,” he says. “It’s all about love being ripped away from you and that staying in your mind for 400 years and becoming something else. But it’s very much [Besson] and filled with the things that make him laugh and excited.”
Reflecting on Hollywood and beyond
Landry Jones has become a muse for directors like Besson, Tsangari, and Kurzel, but he has also worked with Brandon Cronenberg, Jordan Peele, and David Lynch. Despite his success, he’s not sure if he wants to return to mainstream studio fare like X-Men: First Class.
“Every now and again, you’ll get an audition or something, but then you read the title and they give you a fourth of a page, and I’m just like, ‘I dunno,’” he says. He recalls an audition for Star Wars and thinking, “Is this what I’ve been working towards?”
However, Landry Jones believes there is the possibility to do great work on a big scale. He cites the Despicable Me movies as “great examples” of that. “I think there is the space to do good work in this kind of place. I haven’t seen the Joker movie, but I know people really like it, although it just makes me want to watch King of Comedy.”
The miracle of filmmaking
For all his complaints about Hollywood, Landry Jones admits that everyone is “so hard on each other” when it comes to talking about movies. “Because it’s impossible to make films and make a good film, period,” he says, adding that he subscribes to the notion that every film is a miracle.
“I remember talking to one director who makes a lot of romantic comedies, and he looked at me like I was taking the piss, and I was like, ‘No man, I’m serious, The Notebook is a miracle. You did something! You’ve got military guys sobbing!”
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