Finn Wittrock – Going Back Home

PopEntertainment
2 hours ago
7 min read

Finn Wittrock

Going Back Home

By Jay S. Jacobs

Finn Wittrock has played so many complicated characters that it’s a little surprising, once you actually speak with him, how down‑to‑earth the guy really is.

After all, he has worn the skin of some of the more disturbed and disturbing characters in Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story and Ratched. He has played a series of unsettling husbands and boyfriends, from the abusive ex of Renée Zellweger’s Judy Garland in Judy to Emma Stone’s emotionally checked-out ex in La La Land. In The Big Short, he was a young banker looking to make his fortune on other people’s ruin. Even when he takes on a romance, like in Long Weekend, his character is a depressive alcoholic, and his short‑lived girlfriend is from the future.

His newest film is Westhampton, written and directed by Christian Nilsson and co‑starring RJ Mitte, Jake Weary, and Amy Forsyth. Wittrock plays Tom, a film director who has made a movie based on the most horrible moment of his life — and returns to his hometown for the first time since then, only to find that people are not at all happy to see him again, nor his film.

In a few months, he’ll also take on a very different role in Hershey, playing chocolate mogul Milton Hershey.

A few days before Westhampton was due to be released for streaming and video on demand, we caught up with Wittrock via Zoom to discuss the movie, his career, Hershey, why he so often plays insane characters, and what it’s like going home again.

Westhampton has a very specific tone. It's part mystery and part character study. What was it about the script that made you think “I want to do this?”

I was really into the restraint of the script. There is a quietness and a lack of embellishment that you see in the movie, that was also in the script. The script was very sparse, and yes, a little spooky and a little mysterious. I was very interested in playing a character that most of his internal life stays internal. He's not that expressive in his words or anything else. I was very interested in finding a way into a quieter, tortured guy that didn't really know how to let it out. To see if I could pull that off.

The film also has a strong sense of place. How did the environment of the town shape your performance?

Yeah, it was very meta. I mean, we were literally in Westhampton shooting a movie called Westhampton, and the movie that I make inside the movie is called Westhampton. So obviously, Christian [Nilsson], our director, was dealing with some Westhampton issues of his own. (laughs) Also, the town, we think of the Hamptons as a summer beach town, but it was October. I remember because my birthday happened on the movie. It was off season, it was fall. It was foliage. It was cold, and very empty. The landscape really becomes a bit stark at that time of year. The tourists go away. It is much more emptied out. So the feeling of being in a small town off season was just right there in front of us. The people of Westhampton were at first a little unsure about us, but thanks to people like R.J. Mitte, who just charmed them all, they grew to appreciate us there (laughs again) I think, by the end.

Finn Wittrock and RJ Mitte in "Westhampton"

You're from Massachusetts, but I believe that you were even younger when you moved away than your character was. Have you ever been back to Lenox? And if so, did it feel a little bit weird to go back in time like that?

Well, actually, I now go back a lot. I have a house there, and I go whenever. I love the Berkshires. But yes, I remember the first time I went back, having not been for a while. Everything looks smaller. (laughs) Everything looked so giant when I was a kid. Then it's like, “Oh, this is just a place like any other,” because in your mind it becomes so mythical. But I didn't walk into the same minefields that Tom is walking through.

There's a subtle tension between nostalgia and unease throughout the movie. How much of that was in the script, and how much of that did you just bring to it?

A lot. I did feel it in the script. A lot was happening off the page, but the nostalgia and the unease are definitely there. I was using just knowing what his past was and what he was dealing with to come. It's like coming back to the exact place where the crime happened, which is the place you’re running away from your whole life. You have to come back to where the wound began to heal the wound in some way. I was just trying to get to the bottom of what he was going through. How he's been trying to not really heal all these years. He's basically trying to escape from himself. It turns out yourself is the one thing you can never escape from. (laughs)

If audiences walk away from Westhampton with one lingering question, what do you hope it'll be?

A question? I hope the question is, what will Tom do next?

You've said in the past that you were interested in directing. What was it like to play a director, even though he was going through a bit of a rough patch there?

Yeah, I thought about that a lot. I watched Christian direct a lot. It was a great education to watch the way he put the movie together. I really appreciated how thought through everything was. There was no figuring it out on the day [of shooting]. It was all very like meticulously planned out beforehand. That taught me a lot. And yeah, it is fun to play it, to play a director and think about the way he was. Although I don't think Tom is maybe the director you want to emulate. (laughs)

Probably not. Has acting in projects like this shaped your vision of the type of films that you'd like to make as a director?

Yeah, definitely. I think the word restraint, which Christian uses, is something I'm really interested in. It's like how little do we have to move the camera or have another scene. How economical can we be in terms of how to get the story across in an efficient bare bones way? Because it makes you have to really buckle down and make the story as tight as possible to do it that way. That's always the movies that I like the best. That's what I'm going for.

You've grown up in the public eye, but your choices have always been consistently eclectic. You've done stuff like horror, drama, animation, and music. How do you decide what's next for you?

(laughs) I'm in a place in my career where I'm not really choosing between multiple projects. I'm like something comes. It's either yes or no, and often it's yes. It's like that's the thing that I was supposed to do. You have to have a belief in some higher power, (laughs again) that the next is going to fall from the sky, and it's going to be the thing you're supposed to do. Generally, that's been the case. I've been very lucky that way.

Finn Wittrock and Tovah Feldshuh in "Westhampton"

On a variation of that, you've got this very normal guy next door type of look, and yet you've had the tendency to play some extremely troubled, even rather disturbed characters. Is that something that you've found interesting as an actor, and you were looking for, or did it just happen that way?

(laughs) Sometimes you question yourself. You're like, why do I keep getting these parts that are totally insane? What does that say about me? I think of myself as pretty level-headed. I think I do respond to the more outside of the box characters. That's just where I feel like I'm able to flex my muscle in some way. Or just it's what titillates me. It's what gets me going, to do something that's extreme, I guess, by normal life standards. I don't know where that comes from, to be honest. Maybe it's because I try to live a normal, level-headed life in my real life, and so that's where I get the ya-ya's out.

The character that you're playing next is probably a little bit more normal. Hershey, the movie about Milton Hershey – I actually happen to live about an hour away from Hershey, PA, and I do know one of your producers, Mary Aloe, so I've been really looking forward to this film. What can you tell me about it?

It was an amazing experience and education for me to learn about Milton Hershey and what an incredible guy he was at a time when the Carnegies and the Fords – all those Gilded Age titans of industry – were creating a lot of slums, treating their workers terribly and destroying the environment. He created a little utopia, Hershey, Pennsylvania. He insisted on paying people a decent wage. I think there was insurance. He built them housing, which still exists today. He made Hershey into a destination. It's like an amusement park. He has this… at the time, it was an orphanage school for boys. Now it's still the Hershey School, which he put hard in stone in his legal will that a portion of the Hershey proceeds have to go to the school, and it still exists today. It's a huge success story. It's like, “Oh right, you can be a millionaire and be a decent human.”

Yeah, imagine that.

(laughs) I wasn't sure it was possible, but this movie made it clear that it is. I'm very excited. It comes out on Thanksgiving.

Great. I'm looking forward to it. Do you have anything else coming up?

I do, but it hasn't been quite announced yet, so I need to hold off telling you about it. Things in the pipeline. I'll tell you that much, Jay.