(upbeat instrumental music)
- Timothy, is there anything in the current climate
that made you choose to play a guy
wrestling with drug addiction?
- Addiction is the biggest killer
in the United States right now.
It's over 50,000 people a year die from this.
That's more than automobile crashes,
it's more than gun violence,
it's more than both of those combined.
And a lot of young people go through this.
Not necessarily Methamphetamine,
that's what Nic Sheff went through,
things that numb your environment,
and that's I think the most fascinating thing
when you think about addiction in the United States
right now, is in the 60s or 70s,
to my understanding, cause I wasn't here,
but LSD and marijuana, these were drugs
that maybe amplified your surrounding,
or helped people understand it in a new way,
and what you have now with opiates,
and I think it's not at all not linked
to whatever climate of disillusion we're in,
is they totally numb your surroundings.
So you could be in the worst physical setting,
you could be in the nicest physical setting,
it's going to give you the same effect.
And I know I'm not only speaking from my experience,
I can imagine you guys too know people
that have been serious affected by addiction,
and there's still like a moral failing around it.
And weirdly I feel like with people my age
there could be like a glorification of it too,
kind of like a martyrdom, like,
"Yeah, I'm destroying myself, it's my right."
And that's really sad, and I feel a real responsibility,
not in a fake way or in a facetious way,
not to be like inspiring but to point some way forward.
And 'Beautiful Boy', the irony of that movie
is it's not like the most uplifting movie in the world,
but at least there's a redemptive value in, okay,
here's story that maybe doesn't get honored all the time,
and spoilers but that Nic survives,
that he made it through, that there were four relapses
in the movie, he had 13 in real life.
- [Richard] Wow.
- And now he's eight years sober.
And I guess even what I just said is misinformation a little
bit too, because it's a day at a time, you never beat it.
That's one of the really interesting things
in talking to people about the movie,
sometimes people are like, "Why was he addicted?"
And like, "Is he going to be okay?"
And I kind of go, oh you didn't really get it,
because that's not--
- [Guest] Yeah, yeah.
- The why is purposefully not addressed,
because that's not as important as the fact
that one is addicted.
And secondly, you never really beat it.
- It's interesting, I guess you spent time
with him and with his father.
- Yes.
- The father wrote this very celebrated book.
What surprised you about the two then?
- Nic's book 'Tweak' is a dream for an actor.
I shouldn't maybe say it like that cause it was
such a treacherous, terrible experience for that family,
but 'Tweak' is written in the present tense,
it is moment to moment, he's not thinking ahead,
he's not thinking of what just happened,
it's, "I'm going to go do this, I'm going to go do this,
"I don't have drugs now, I need to get drugs here."
And David's is this beautiful 360 view
of how an addiction can affect a parent,
a family member, a loved one, a friend.
And the way that Nic describes it when he read it,
he didn't know how devastating
what he was doing was to his family.
And I think now what surprises me,
because we do Q&As with them,
is just like their strength of character
and the possibilities of love.
And it's something Greta Gerwig said to be
cause we're working on 'Little Women' right now:
"The most important things in life are cliches,"
and it is symptomatic of what we're living in
to be cynical or disillusioned,
and it can be harder but it's not like you're going to make
a whole difference pressing a little thing each time,
it's a little bit of this, you can impact a little bit.
What people want, they want accurate reflections.
They want a mirror, basically.
- Authenticity, right.
- [Timothée] Yeah.
- Yep.
- And the demand for content, whether that's Netflix
or Hulu or Apple's making stuff.
I saw a thing that said AT&T original
in the street the other day.
(group laughs)
Apparently they're making things.
So there's so much out there, especially as a young actor
I think your first dream is like,
how can I be economically self sufficient?
Like that first time you could pay your check,
and you didn't do any other job, you're like what?
- That's success right there.
- Yeah.
(group laughs)
- [Stephen] What surprised you most about fame?
- What has surprised me the most is,
I was rehearsing this play 'Prodigal Son'
which was in the same space that Mahershala
was rehearsing a play at Second Stage,
this was four or five years ago.
It's about a young person bursting out of their constraints,
and whether cause the tickets were too pricey at the theater
or something, basically no young people saw it.
Which was fine, I was happy to be working.
But I had this fear, I was like, oh am I getting
into something that's like opera or ballet
or something, that's becoming an art form
that is not as viable or something?
And what's been very inspiring about my experience
or something is I haven't really worked on
a commercial movie yet besides 'Interstellar'.
Like, 'Call Me by Your Name' was like an art-house movie.
- [Guests] Yeah.
- A lot of young people saw it.
And that makes me really hopeful,
because it makes me feel like I'm starting
a career in something that's viable,
and that as an art form is viable.
So anything beyond that, maybe I'll regret saying this,
but at least for now I'm like, this is fucking awesome.
(group laughs)
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