![]() ![]() There are, of course, many things that should have happened: a turn in Tennessee Williams’ play Orpheus Descending, for instance, potentially delayed until the summer. ![]() ![]() It’s been nice to do exactly what I want to do every day! To make your own schedule is nice.” “I do a lot of indies, but I was lucky enough to have worked a good amount that whole year prior, so at least financially … I wasn’t killing it, but it was enough to hold me over this year. Abbott thinks for a moment shuffles the hat. I wonder, for someone who spends his life pretending to be other people, how it has felt to spend a year being only himself. He finally put up a projector in his apartment and began watching movies: Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Christian Petzold, Lee Chang-Dong: “All for pleasure, all for complete pleasure.” Since then, he has navigated the “ebbs and flows” of this strange year: no new hobbies, no “Thoreau plain”, occasional trips upstate. Last March, as the pandemic descended, he was returning from shooting with John Michael McDonagh in Morocco. It is more than a year since Abbott took any acting roles. There is something quite unexpected about his approach to his career – the abrupt departure from Girls and its attendant fame and fortune, his tendency to mention John Cassavetes, his reluctance to analyse much of his craft in interviews – that has helped to mark him, potentially, as one of the left-field greats. Photograph: Photo 12/AlamyĪs a performer, he is a gift he has a presence, and a face, that can shift gently with the light: from beautiful and contemplative to brutish and surly. For some while, Abbott was best known as the sweet-natured Charlie in Lena Dunham’s series Girls, quitting after series two with the rationale that he could not relate to the character.Ĭhristopher Abbott in Girls, which he quit after series two. He bedded in to theatre, appearing in several off-Broadway productions, before making his screen debut in 2011 with Martha Marcy May Marlene, followed by 2012’s Hello I Must Be Going. He grew up in Connecticut, attended community college and worked in a video store and then a wine shop before deciding, at 20, to enrol at a performing arts college in New York. I wouldn’t want to give Larry that much credit to say that it affected my life afterwards.”Ībbott was a latecomer to acting. “It feels a little bit like a checklist: I’ve had that experience, I’ve had that feeling, now move on, now do something different. “I’ve got to be honest: usually when I’m done with something I don’t think about it,” he says. And it feels like there’s some Cassavetes vibes going on in there …”īut he is hesitant to delve much deeper – the creative trope of the cabin in the woods, the symbolism of the black bear, the nature of fiction largely, when he speaks about the film, he looks like a man trying to draw the Taj Mahal from memory. There’s shades of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Abbott says: “I thought it would be kind of interesting to do that on screen, especially as, at that time, I hadn’t done a play in a while, so I felt like I got close to that. “It was experiential, I guess.”Ībove all, the appeal of Levine’s script and premise was that “it felt like a play”. Long scenes, theatrical.” He remembers the remote location, the night shoots, driving home as the sun rose, the dreamlike quality of the set. It wasn’t as cerebral, maybe, but it was the being there and doing these scenes with these people. But I was more interested in the doing, in the playing. “As an actor, you’re playing two parts in a movie, more or less, so there’s something interesting about that. It was Black Bear’s experimental nature that appealed to him, he says. Behind him there are glimpses of white brick walls, framed paintings and a guitar case. Today, Abbott sits in his apartment in Tribeca, New York City, in a black sweater and gold chains, wearing a fleece hat that he shuffles about his head, from beanie to cossack and back again, as we speak. The film is, we gather, a rumination on fact, fiction and creativity. ![]() How much of this is real, and how much is the product of one character’s imagination becomes increasingly debatable. ![]()
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