The most difficult role of Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s career: “I was so out of my depth”
His name doesn’t immediately come to mind when you think of big Hollywood stars, but Aaron Taylor-Johnson has been in some huge movies in his time.
The actor broke through playing John Lennon in 2009’s Nowhere Boy before taking on the title role in the Kick-Ass series one year later. Then, in 2015, he joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the brief yet memorable role of Quicksilver, brother of Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch. Throw in appearances in Godzilla, The King’s Man, Anna Karenina, Tenet, and Robert Eggers’ 2024 version of Nosferatu, and that’s one impressive CV for a guy who’s still only in his mid-30s.
In 2016, Taylor-Johnson starred in Tom Ford’s psychological thriller Nocturnal Animals alongside Jake Gyllenhaal, Amy Adams, and Michael Shannon. He played a character called Ray Marcus, the sadistic leader of a gang in the world of the film’s fictional novel. Ray is a nasty piece of work, harassing and torturing the novel’s protagonist and his family with gleeful abandon. It wasn’t just audience members who were unsettled by the character’s actions, as the man who played him was also disturbed.
“I had a real issue taking on that role,” Taylor-Johnson told The Guardian. “I found it really, really difficult. I couldn’t understand why Tom [Ford] – who I knew, sort of, from dinner parties here and there – wanted me to play a serial-killer rapist. My feeling was: I can’t. I don’t see a way in here. I don’t even know what you want me to do. I was so out of my depth. Tom’s whole thing was: ‘I just feel like this character should have so much charisma. That’s what’s unpredictable about him.’”
“Ray is quite a fresh-faced, charming-looking individual,” Taylor-Johnson continued, explaining how he got into the role. “I went down a whole rabbit hole of serial killers: Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Ramirez. With Bundy, one of the big things is that he had charisma and charm. I took pieces from lots of different places. And I remember giving Tom a range of different things. It was definitely a life lesson for just being a little bit outside your comfort zone and putting the hard work in. What came out was something unique and different.”
The closest Taylor-Johnson had come to this sort of role in the past had been the 2010 movie Chatroom. The actor, who was still going by ‘Aaron Johnson’ at the time, plays a young man who makes a bunch of new friends online. As the plot progresses, the group encourage each other to take bigger and bigger risks, until their actions spiral rapidly out of control.
Taylor-Johnson’s character Will does bad things in that film, but not in the same calculated way as Ray. He was still in his mid-20s by the time Nocturnal Animals came around, which, combined with his previous experience in clean-cut superhero flicks, made it understandably difficult to get into the mind of such a brutal man.
Despite his initial hesitation, Nocturnal Animals turned out to be a fantastic career choice for Taylor-Johnson. He got great reviews for his portrayal of Ray, and the film itself also scored well among critics. At the Golden Globes, he was nominated for and won the ‘Best Supporting Actor’ prize, his first and thus far only major awards victory in his career.
