“The guy just doesn’t really miss”: the actor Will Poulter has always envied
In terms of British actors who are putting together a fearsome body of work while flying under the radar, Will Poulter can’t really be beaten. He’s done some absolutely fantastic film and TV over the last ten years, and yet you don’t hear him mentioned in the same breath as actors like Tom Hardy.
But he should be. Not only did he star alongside Hardy in the multi-Oscar-winning western epic The Revenant back in 2015, but he’s also shown he can do tough guy stuff in the brilliant Alex Garland-directed thriller Warfare last year, plus, unlike Hardy, he can do comedy too, as anyone who saw one of his earlier roles with Jennifer Aniston in We’re the Millers will attest to.
Annoyingly, Poulter is also a super nice chap who has remained resolutely down to earth despite rising to the top in Hollywood. Whenever he is asked about experiences filming like the arduous eight months on Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant, he will always couch it in the fact that he is still acting for a living and not having to go through the extremes that many other normal folk do.
The Revenant was the Leonardo DiCaprio film that scooped 12 Academy Award nominations in 2016, winning ‘Best Director’, ‘Best Cinematography’ and ‘Best Actor’ for DiCaprio. Several crew members either quit or were fired after complaining about conditions during the production, where the weather was consistently below freezing, and DiCaprio himself said there were tens of sequences that were the most difficult he’d had to do in 30 years of acting.
And it was on that film that he worked with another actor who has seen their star rise over the last decade, with the pair helping each other deal with the inclement weather and long hours under Iñárritu.
Speaking to GQ about the Irish Black Mirror and Ex Machina actor Domhnall Gleeson, Poulter said, “He’s got one of the most enviable IMDb pages; the guy just doesn’t really miss. He’s just a lovely bloke as well, and kind of a big brother figure for me in the industry.”
Poulter continued to butter Gleeson up by revealing how he helped him on The Revenant shoot, adding, “When you’re cold and hungry, and you’ve worked a 16-hour day, and you’re driving back in pitch black as part of a three-hour trip, you need those boys in the van riding with you, ‘cause it really does keep spirits up.”
The pair also starred together in a 2018 movie called The Little Stranger, a dark gothic drama that got mixed reviews, also co-starring Ruth Wilson, but Poulter has definitely had more hits than misses as he moves into his early 30s, even if major awards success has evaded him so far. That might change this year as he appears in a Netflix movie with Rachel Brosnahan called Saturn Returns, which follows two college sweethearts based in Chicago in the decade after leaving university.
As for Gleeson, he’s going to add to that already impressive IMDb page that Poulter mentioned by starring in Bucking Fastard, the latest movie from Werner Herzog, a fantastical tale about two sisters who speak their own language and become obsessed with a neighbour.
