Dylan O’Brien names his most unfairly treated role: “The disrespect is fascinating”
All of us have to start somewhere: from small acorns grow great oak trees, and it’s no different in Hollywood, where some of the finest actors to grace the big screen began their careers in adverts, in school plays, as extras, or in panned straight-to-streaming, low-budget films.
In the case of Dylan O’Brien, star of The Maze Runner and acclaimed new movie Twinless, it leads back to the young adult TV show, Teen Wolf. Not that there’s anything wrong with having been one of the lead roles in the MTV remake of the Michael J Fox hirsute 1980s basketball movie, a part that O’Brien won by spending a couple of years making his own short comedy films and uploading them to YouTube.
But, according to O’Brien, it seems now that he wants to move into more challenging movie roles, people seem to undermine him solely due to the fact that he was in a mainstream popular youth hit, with Teen Wolf running for six seasons between 2011 and 2017. It was the show that got him his own franchise in the form of The Maze Runner, which would go on to be a trilogy of films adapted from a sci-fi novel from 2009.
The first movie, especially, was a huge success, bringing in $350million on a budget of just $35m, and it put O’Brien on bedroom wall posters all over the world, but while filming the third instalment, 2018’s Maze Runner: The Death Cure, the actor suffered a horrific incident involving a stunt harness and an oncoming vehicle which smashed into his face.
He then had to have reconstructive surgery in addition to suffering brain trauma, and the whole production was shut down for several months while he recovered. Since then, understandably, he has slowed down considerably in terms of the number of projects undertaken.
He was excellent in Mark Rylance’s underrated The Outfit from 2021, and again as Dan Aykroyd in 2024’s razor-sharp retelling of the forming of SNL, Saturday Night, but O’Brien discussed the complex nature of how, when people compliment him on his more recent work, they feel the need to qualify the praise.
He told the In the Envelope podcast, “People are saying, ‘Hey, you’re great in this,’ right? They’re complimenting my performance. But so often they’re starting that sentence with, ‘It’s shocking, given where you started’, and it’s almost like what they’re saying is ‘I’m so surprised that you’re, like, good in something’. Like, it’s bizarre. You’re just kind of like, ‘Whoa, what do you mean?’
He went on to explain, “And they’ll mention Teen Wolf. They’ll literally mention it. You know, it’s so funny. And I’m like, ‘Well, yeah’, I mean, the blatant disrespect is fascinating here, but I guess that’s how it works… I went to the school of Teen Wolf, you know. But it was the best school that I could have had.”
O’Brien is now starring in Twinless, the genre-bending film directed by and starring James Sweeney, which tells the story of a grieving twin who goes to a support group after losing his sibling in his early 30s. He’ll also be seen in the new Sam Raimi movie Send Help with Rachel McAdams, which is about an employee and her boss (who sexually harasses her) ending up stranded on an island after their plane goes down, forcing them to reckon with some harsh truths.
