James Landry Hébert on lassoing Zendaya, reuniting with Brad Pitt, and being that guy from that thing you’ve seen: “I look different in everything”
If you’re in need of a scene-stealing character actor to play a supporting role in your acclaimed, massively popular, or headline-grabbing TV show, then you could do a lot worse than James Landry Hébert, and it’s a mindset that appears to be shared across the industry.
Hébert, who was most recently seen antagonising Zendaya’s Rue Bennett as Harley in the third and final season of Euphoria, a role that was tailored specifically to him by creator Sam Levinson after he’d originally auditioned for Toby Wallace’s part as Wayne, has become a small-screen fixture in recent years.
You might recognise him as Axel from Stranger Things, Slim Miller from Westworld, Major McFall from The Righteous Gemstones, Wade from Taylor Sheridan’s 1883, or the Manson Family member, Clem, from Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, such is his habit of popping up on the biggest TV shows on the gogglebox or the occasional movie from a renowned auteur.
In fact, when Hébert speaks to Far Out, he’s in midst of collaborating with another renowned auteur, having been busy shooting two-time Academy Award-winning ‘Best Director’ Ang Lee’s epic western, Gold Mountain, with another high-profile TV gig on its way to the small screen in the Snowfall sequel series, The Drop.
With Euphoria still fresh in the cultural consciousness, though, that seemed like the best place to start, and, as it turns out, the star has some anecdotes to share, only some of which involve him riding his own horse to the set in the morning or chasing down Zendaya on horseback and lassoing her.
“It was just a dream come true for an actor,” he marvelled. “There’s not a lot of slots available on that show, so when you get one, you really try to make the most of it. One of the coolest things for me is that we ended up filming so close to my ranch that I could ride my horse to set on lighter days.”
Levinson “got a kick” out of Hébert turning up on his own steed, which gave him an idea. He asked his Harley if he could chase Zendaya down on horseback if he needed to, which also gave Hébert an idea of his own: “I said I could chase her down and rope her, and a month later, he wrote it into the show.”
As someone who lives and works on a ranch away from the cameras and has appeared in a few westerns already, the actor was understandably surprised that Euphoria, of all things, gave him the opportunity to do “some of the most cowboy stuff I’ve ever done,” which is no mean feat, given his background and the set of skills that came in so handy.
“Oh man, it was so exciting,” Hébert continued. “I felt like a stuntman during the day and an actor in the evenings, and I was wearing a lot of hats on those days, but, damn, it felt good.” Obviously, a huge amount of trust was required for him to run down one of Hollywood’s brightest young stars and lasso them at full pelt, with both Levinson and Zendaya trusting him implicitly to pull it off.
“They let me do most of the stunts, besides actually dragging Zendaya, and it was pretty exhilarating,” he understatedly put it. “I always say nothing better than chasing a camera car on horseback. To actually get to do it was as wild as it’s gotten for me so far, and we were going so fast!”
Summing it up as “one of the most exciting things I’ve ever got to do onscreen,” Hébert is equally excited for different reasons to be working with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Life of Pi’s Lee on Gold Mountain, seeming pretty sure that his skills on horseback played a huge part in his casting.
“I tell you, I probably wouldn’t have booked the role if it weren’t for the horse wrangler on Euphoria who went over to Ang Lee’s movie,” he theorised. “Ang asked him if he knew an actor who could really ride and really act, and he was like, ‘Well, James Hébert just roped Zendaya’, so he looked me up, and he was like, ‘Let’s get him on tape.'”
While he’s not at liberty to share any details about his role, what we can say is that they’ll have an Irish accent. Why? Because Hébert was determined that the character would have one, and the Louisiana-born actor was so intent that he went directly to the celebrated filmmaker to state his case, not that he needed to in the end.
“I’ve done a lot of westerns, I tend to play Southern guys regularly, and I was excited to do something different with the accent, and so Ang brought us in for rehearsals on the Saturday before we started filming, and I almost didn’t say anything, because I was like, ‘Yeah, I don’t want to push it, even though I’d rather do the other accent,'” he recalled.
Throwing caution to the wind, he told Lee that he should be using an Irish accent, and the auteur agreed. “‘No, no, no, it should be Irish,'” he was informed. “And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I think it should be Irish, too!'” The downside was that he had two days to nail the brogue before the start of production, but the upside was that Hébert’s dialect coach had previously worked with Lee on Brokeback Mountain, among others.
“She was like, ‘Tell him to call me if he wants to win another Oscar,'” the actor laughed. “And I said, ‘Well, he’s probably going to get you for cheaper, and we’re filming in two days.'” The film, which has been largely shot on location, including caves and rock quarries, sounds like anything but a high-pressure environment, a surprise given the scope, scale, and presumably budget of Gold Mountain.
“I’ve never been less nervous on set,” Hébert claimed. “I just felt like the vibe on set was very chill, and they always say it kind of trickles down from the top, and I think Ang Lee is such a zen dude that there’s no bad apples around them, and so it was just such an incredible crew to work with, and it very much had a zen vibe.” The director’s son, Mason Lee, is also part of the cast, which led to a quick history lesson.
Although it’s currently on hold, Ang’s Bruce Lee biopic with Mason in the leading role remains in development, but he’d never seen the famous video of the martial arts icon on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1973, and if that winds up making it into the movie, then he wants some credit.
“I was like, ‘It has to go in the movie!'” he recalled. “And he’s like, ‘Yeah, I think so, too.’ If that ends up in the Bruce Lee biopic in a couple of years, you know where they heard it first!'” As mentioned, Hébert has been in more than a handful of westerns, and his connection to the genre is deeply rooted in his personal life and upbringing. “I mean, I grew up riding horses, I was actually adopted by a Native American couple, grew up on an Indian reservation, and my talents certainly lend themselves to the western genre,” he shared.
“For me, and maybe not other actors who are less comfortable on horseback, but there’s nothing better than doing a scene sitting on top of a horse, or with one by your side, and it’s a calming thing for me.”
James Landry Hébert
Obviously, he acknowledged that not all actors would feel the same way about calling a horse “the best scene partner you can ask for,” but from his perspective, as “a kid who grew up playing cowboys and Indians,” it’s all he could ever ask for. However, The Drop: A Snowfall Saga is most definitely not a western.
Whereas the original series dealt with the crack cocaine epidemic on the streets of 1980s Los Angeles, with Damson Idris’ Franklin Saint as its protagonist, the continuation follows Isaiah John’s Leon Simmons and Gail Bean’s Wanda, with the booming West Coast hip-hop scene of the 1990s as the major backdrop.
Hébert, who’d never seen the show until he auditioned for a role and promptly binged the whole thing, and while it’s another upcoming part that he can’t say much about, the actor did offer a tease: “One of the first things the showrunner said to me, I’m playing a CRASH unit cop in the ’90s, he said, ‘Don’t play him like a cop; play him like a gangster.'”
That’s all he needed to hear, and he was ready for a change of pace. “After living in this western lane for so long, it’s cool to do something different and show my range, which I feel like I was able to do a lot in the beginning of my career,” Hébert offered. “It’s been a good time to be a Southern guy who can ride a horse and swing a rope, but it’s nice to do something different, too.”
Speaking of the beginning of his career, the rope-swinging expert didn’t get started in the business until he was in his early-to-mid-20s, and as far as introductions go, serving as Brad Pitt’s stand-in on David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and making his big-screen bow with a small role in Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables must have been quite the introduction for a newcomer.
“Oh, it was,” Hébert agreed. “That was the first big set that I had ever been on. Post-Katrina, New Orleans passed a tax incentive to try to bring New Orleans back to life, essentially, and that was one of the biggest productions to first show up. Being on that set made me realise that this is what I want to do for the rest of my life.” He didn’t know how he would do it, but he was determined nonetheless.
So determined that while studying theatre at Louisiana State University, he convinced the right people to let him chase his dream, and when he auditioned for casting director Liz Coulon, he left with the job of her casting assistant, reading lines with other actors, and when “some of the veteran actors had mentioned how much they liked reading with me,” his responsibilities increased.
He quickly became Coulon’s casting associate, which meant he was reading with “the actual talent in the film.” He was happy with where he was at, and he would have been “perfectly happy doing that for the rest of my life,” but when he started booking acting jobs, he faced the decision of whether to continue as her associate or “roll the dice and audition.” Since we’re talking to him about Euphoria, Ang Lee, and Quentin Tarantino, you’d have to say he made the right call.
With that in mind, a decade after Benjamin Button, Hébert and Pitt were reunited on the set of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, sharing a scene together when Cliff Booth descends upon the Spahn Ranch. It was a full-circle moment, but he didn’t think the A-lister would recall his stand-in from ten years before.
“He’s probably not going to remember me, so I’m not going to say anything,” he told himself. “As soon as we showed up on set, and he saw me, he said, ‘Hey, man, how you been?’ Literally, the first thing I said to him was, ‘Bullshit, somebody must have told you.’ And he was like, ‘No, no, I remember you; you grew up on an Indian reservation. I always that was really cool.'”
“He was like, ‘You know, Bobby and Leo and Marty’, talking about Scorsese, De Niro, and DiCaprio, ‘Are doing a movie, I can’t remember what it’s called’. I’m like, ‘Killers of the Flower Moon‘. He was like, ‘You should look into that’. And I was like, ‘Well, you should tell him about me!'”
Sadly, Hébert doesn’t know if Pitt passed a good word along to another top-tier director, and he didn’t end up landing a role in the recent epic, leaving him to “wish I could add Scorsese to the list of great directors I’ve worked with.” Based on who he’s worked with so far, it’s hardly an unattainable goal.
Another one of his early parts came in Ruben Fleischer’s 2013 film, Gangster Squad. While it’s hardly what anyone would call a universally beloved classic, in its own way, Hébert points toward the big-budget crime caper as one of the most important moments of what was then a burgeoning career.
“Just to finally be working with these heavy hitters in a big blockbuster movie,” he reminisced. “I had scenes with Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Sean Penn, a bunch of great actors in that movie, but I’m in trouble with Sean Penn, and it’s still one of my favourite things that I’ve done.”
In the scene, Hébert’s character, Mitch Racine, “was shaking in his boots, and I was shaking in my boots in real life, Sean Penn was playing Mickey Cohen, and he was just so in it; it was quite intimidating.” He used that fear to inform his performance, and Penn did much the same with an unexpected improvisation.
On one take, the three-time Academy Award winner screamed directly into Hébert’s ear right before they started acting, and the terror displayed by Racine when he and Cohen walk into an elevator was a case of art imitating life, with the former genuinely taken aback by Penn’s odd way of increasing the tension.
“I think those moments are like when you’re on a tightrope like that, and you’re not really sure, that’s when you’re really in the moment, and that’s where the good stuff lives,” he noted. “It was so cool and bold of Sean to just do that out of nowhere.” When director Ruben Fleischer called cut, Penn looked at his scene partner and, still in character as Cohen, said, “Good work today, kid.”
“I was like, ‘Hell, yes!’. That was a really cool moment for me on that one.”
James Landry Hébert
That was his first experience of playing a sizeable role in a big-budget Hollywood production, but it was a smaller-scale film that gave Hébert his first full-circle moment, long before he reunited with Pitt on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, with 1997’s The Apostle planting the seed for his ambitions to become an actor.
The movie was written and directed by the late, great Robert Duvall, who also played the leading role and earned an Oscar nomination for ‘Best Actor’ for his troubles, and 16 years after the slow-burning drama opened his eyes to the possibilities of a film career, they worked together on the western, A Night in Old Mexico.
“Bucket list check for me, working with Duvall,” Hébert concurred. “I’ve always looked up to him as an actor, and grew up watching Lonesome Dove, and then, of course, seeing him in other movies, like The Apostle, which was shot in Lafayette, Louisiana, which is where I was born.”
“My cousin was an extra in the movie that summer, and that was the first time it dawned on me that even a Cajun kid like me could be in a movie,” he reflected. “It planted the seed that got watered over time, and was always kind of secretly a dream of mine, and it wasn’t until LSU that I started to learn more about the craft and the discipline and the structure of it all, and I think that that sent me in the right direction.”
Describing working with Duvall as “a dream come true,” and beyond having the chance to share the screen with an industry legend and “an incredible actor and human,” leading him to reflect on the lasting impact the Godfather alum made on him, especially as it relates to being a character actor.
“I look different in everything, so I appreciate you connecting the dots,” Hébert told Far Out. “Because a lot of people don’t realise that the guy with the beard in 1883 is the guy with the mohawk in Stranger Things, or the guy with the mullet in Euphoria, or with the busted teeth in Once Upon a Time.”
“Just like Duvall was always himself, kind of like De Niro, they’re just present in the moment, and they’re just super authentic, and they stick to that, and it always gave me hope that I could potentially have a career somewhat like that,” he suggested. This being Hollywood, though, not everyone was convinced in the beginning.
“One of the first things my first agent ever told me was, ‘First you’ve got to do is lose the Cajun accent,'” Hébert recalled, but he stuck to his guns, albeit with a caveat: “It’s funny because now when I go back home, my family thinks I lost my Cajun accent. Everybody out here thinks I still got it!”
Between Euphoria, Stranger Things, 1883, Westworld, The Righteous Gemstones, and the rest, the actor has developed a habit of popping up on some of the most-watched and most talked-about TV shows in recent years, never mind movies like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Super 8, and Looper, but when a script comes his way, a certain set of criteria need to be met to capture his imagination.
“As far as what grabs my attention, it’s hard to say,” Hébert pondered. “I guess, I feel like I’ve been so lucky to be on these bigger titles, and a lot of times they’re led by these directors who are a name themselves, whether it’s JJ Abrams or Frank Darabont, or whoever. It’s like they can get whoever they want, and I think a lot of times they’re looking for a fresh face.”
“And when they see one that’s interesting to them or that feels authentic, they have the power to put somebody who’s not been in a bunch of stuff at the time in their thing alongside all these other guys, and I really tried to make the most of that.”
James Landry Hébert
Excluding Euphoria from the conversation, since that’s probably the current answer, as a character actor, does Hébert have such a thing as one role that gets him recognised and stopped in public more than any other, or is it the curse of the character actor to be known more broadly as ‘that guy from that thing that everybody’s seen’?
“Typically? Yeah, I’m that guy from that thing that everybody’s seen,” he smiled. “But I tell you, I’ve never gotten more action from just a couple of lines in a movie than Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Luckily for me, it was a super memorable scene in the movie, so people remember it, and sometimes I got to tell them, ‘Oh, I was the guy in that thing and this thing’, and they’re like, ‘Oh, that was you that got beat up by Brad Pitt. How was it?’ And I often say, ‘It hurt so good.’ I was like, ‘Thank you, sir. Can I have another?'”
“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is probably the one,” Hébert pontificated. “I mean, when it comes to the western world, 1883 definitely was a big one for me, and I’m still so grateful to Taylor Sheridan for taking a chance on me and putting me in that, and I think he liked that I was a cowboy in real life. Even growing up on the Indian reservation, I think probably influenced me being the choice for him, so I’d be lying if I didn’t think that that had something to do with it.”
It hasn’t been a career based solely on supporting roles, with 2014’s Two-Step giving Hébert his first major leading role in writer, director, and producer in Alex R Johnson’s crime thriller, where he plays a small-time criminal who earns his illegal living from conning old people out of their life savings.
Now that he’s becoming more established and recognisable, has the time come to start actively chasing more leading roles, or is he happy to continue being the guy who can reliably steal whatever scenes they’re given, so long as he’s getting the chance to do it with material worth sinking his teeth into? As he explained, the ideal scenario would be a little bit of both.
“Ever since David Fincher on Benjamin Button, I love being on these big sets with these big directors, and I gotta pinch myself sometimes,” he understandably confessed. “It’s just a dream working with some of these heavy hitters, and I think in the beginning that was always the goal.”
He described the ability to steal scenes from bigger names as “sort of my secret weapon,” but at this stage in his professional life, he’s at the point where he’s “got enough life experience to maybe step into some of these lead roles, that’s something I would like for the next chapter.”
Summarising Two-Step as “a big stepping stone in the journey, even though it was a smaller movie,” Hébert drew comparisons to another one of his upcoming projects, Andrew and Isaac Lewis’ neo-western, Bethesda, which he teased as having “a No Country for Old Men vibe,” with his character Leland, “playing the Javier Bardem” of the piece as a hitman for a cartel.
“It was nice to finally be back to playing the big bad in a movie, as opposed to just popping in and trying to steal some scenes on these bigger sets,” he ruminated. And yet, as happy as he is to be a scene-stealer, if there was one lead role the actor would do anything to play on the big screen, he doesn’t have to think twice about who it would be.
“To be in a music biopic would be the dream role for me: specifically, Willie Nelson,” Hébert grinned, and you can totally see it. “I mean, if I could play young Willie in a movie like that, it would just be a dream for me. I’m such a huge fan of him, and I feel like a lot of the themes that he carries with him innately, I do too, and he was just such a rebel and an outlaw.”
“I appreciate you letting me put it out there into the universe,” he added. If the Willie Nelson biopic starring James Landry Hébert in the leading role ever becomes a reality, then Far Out should realistically be entitled to a cut of the profits. If you’ve seen any of his work, you know he’d be able to knock it out of the park, so who knows? Maybe the universe will answer back.
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