Charlie Plummer still thinks about the role that got away. It was last summer, and the then 19-year-old actor, whose star seems to have risen overnight, wanted it so bad he wrote to the director, begging for the spot. “I was like, ‘Please…,’ ” Plummer recalls, post-brunch at the Bowery Hotel.
The initial response was positive. “My agent was like, ‘Yeah, the producers are big fans.… They haven't started hiring assistants yet, but when they do, they'll let you know for sure,’ ” he says, laughing. The job was P.A. on the set of Joker. He got passed over. Plummer knows it's weird for a breakout teenage movie star, who has been compared to a young Leonardo DiCaprio by the likes of Ridley Scott, to try to score a gig grabbing Todd Phillips's coffee. But he's also utterly serious: “Joaquin Phoenix is my favorite actor working today, and he's playing my favorite character in all of pop culture, and it's shooting in the city that I live in. How could I not be there?”
Charlie Plummer and DeAndre Hopkins show you how it's done.
Plummer, now 20, was raised in Cold Spring, New York, by industry parents: His father is a film writer and producer, his mother a theater actor. He did the child-actor thing, against their advice. (Plummer’s enthusiasm can’t be contained, only redirected—at one point, he almost gave up acting to go to college in the hopes of becoming the G.M. of an NFL team.) Perhaps his parents sensed that, if he made it through the child-role gantlet, he would be expected to play a series of teenagers put in bad situations by their fathers, which is exactly what happened in Lean on Pete (alcoholic dad), All the Money in the World (heroin-addicted Getty dad), and The Clovehitch Killer (serial-killer dad). But Plummer dodges every pitfall of the emotionally damaged-teenager tropes thrust at him with that essential young Leo–ness. He broke out in Andrew Haigh’s Lean on Pete, playing a traumatized 15-year-old who steals a racehorse that’s bound for slaughter. The quiet intensity Plummer brings to the role is unsettling in the best way—at times you don’t know whether you want to scoop the poor kid into a bear hug or walk quickly in the opposite direction.
Plummer credits his Buddhist upbringing for helping him cope with the psychic fallout of acting in all these coming-of-age tragedies while also literally coming of age. “[Buddhism] has come through for me a lot of the time,” he says. “When I'm working, especially with some of the more intense stuff, it's really easy to lose a sense of reality. A lot of times I feel like all I have is the feelings I'm having right then. It's really nice to be able to have something to just send me back to that place of, okay.”
Nobody can accuse Plummer of not staying grounded. He’s not too cool to fanboy a little when he met DeAndre Hopkins on the set of this shoot. He frequently references his acting idols, though he admits he’s turned down “so many” meetings because he’s been too terrified to be in the same room as certain Hollywood icons. “Have you seen this photo of Keanu smoking a cigarette and drinking coconut water outside?” Plummer asks with the zeal of a true stan, before pulling up that photo of Keanu Reeves, the one in which he’s wearing a trucker hat, slouchy carpenter pants, and a sweatshirt as a scarf. It’s saved on Plummer’s phone. “So fucking cool,” he says, gesturing at his own faded Oregon Ducks sweatshirt. “And he’s got his shoes off too!”
The relative anonymity Plummer’s been afforded by the indie circuit will be broken in October by Hulu and Looking for Alaska, the series based on John Green’s cult-classic Y.A. novel. (His dad in the show, he notes with relief, is not a major character.) “It's just been crazy,” Plummer says. “I've never done anything where anyone's cared about the project before it's come out.” As an actor who has been getting compared to Hollywood mega-stars for a full quarter of his life, he feels ready to take on the next phase of his career. “If you're like, ‘Wow, man, I am the next fucking Leo, let's fucking go,’ or you're like, ‘Oh, my God, I'll never be that, I'm such a fraud,’ either way you're kind of in trouble,” Plummer says. “I'm making sure 100 percent of my focus is just on the work. Nothing is guaranteed, and all you've got is what's right in front of you.”
A version of this story originally appeared in the September 2019 issue with the title "A Word About Actor Charlie Plummer."
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PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photograph by Kim Reenberg
Styled by Jon Tietz
Grooming by Benjamin Thigpen using Revive Skincare