Fierce People star Anton Yelchin gets ready to beam up from the middle of nowhere to the stars
Eighteen-year-old Anton Yelchin immigrated to the United States from Russia with his figure skater parents before he was even a toddler. Even though he’s grown up here, though, it’s that latent outsider’s perspective that has informed his own personal sociological curiosity, and helped him establish an occupational beachhead playing a variety of wide-eyed innocents, including in 2001’s Along Came a Spider and Hearts In Atlantis, in David Duchovny’s 2004 directorial debut, House of D, and in last year’s sweaty teen kidnapping tale, Alpha Dog.
In fact, listening to Yelchin take a tangential observation and rhapsodize about it, one is struck by how much it both belies and confirms his age. “I used to be really into philosophy, I used to be obsessed with it,” he says in a recent interview with Reelz, leaning forward and cocking a conspiratorial smile. “I read all these metaphysics, about whether we’re real or not. I was big into Hegel, and what influences the individual has over society, society over the individual. And then I thought about it, and I realized that philosophers would never get laid had they not thought of these things, because why else would you be interested in these people? They’re probably very dull. Hegel was one of the most hideous looking individuals I’ve ever seen, not to mention Sartre, you know? I mean, it’s great to know, it’s interesting, but what it comes down to is the sun shines every morning when I wake up, unless it’s cloudy. And then it goes down. And then I go to bed, and I have to get up in the morning. And regardless of whether I’m a product of society, or society is effected because of me, regardless of whether I’m real or not, I still have to get up in the morning, and I still get pissed off if I’m stuck in traffic.”
Such metaphysical musings are largely sacrificed at the altar of quirk in Yelchin’s latest film, Fierce People, directed by Griffin Dunne. An adaptation of Dirk Wittenborn’s novel, the 1980-set movie is a sort of flip-side mirror companion piece to next year’s Charlie Bartlett, in which Yelchin plays a high school rich kid, failing at school, whose easygoing charisma helps him finally come into his own and become the self-appointed psychiatrist to the popular clique. Here, Yelchin is 15-year-old Finn, a well-intentioned kid pinched buying drugs for his junkie masseuse mother, Liz (Diane Lane). This scotches his plans of spending the summer with his anthropologist father, studying the remote jungle Ishkanani tribe. Instead, Liz drags Finn out to a cottage in rural New Jersey, to spend the summer with her eccentric sugar daddy, Ogden Osborne (Donald Sutherland). There, observant, middle-class Finn makes his way into the “tribe” of wealthy country-clubbers that inhabit his new home, alternately embracing and rebuffing their rituals.
Yelchin, 15 at the time of filming, felt an affinity for his character. “He’s 15 (too), I get what he’s feeling — he’s undergoing emotions natural to somebody that age. I think the type of kid Finn is existed 100 years ago, he exists now; he’s kind of a smart-ass kid who has to take care of this mother, who he loves. It didn’t seem like anything that wouldn’t be relevant today. I suppose if it were of a story about some hippie kid in the summer of love, dropping acid, then I’d have to do more research about the time period and everything, but this is just a regular guy.”
Spanning time, though, will soon become second nature to Yelchin, whose genial speech is peppered with copious “likes.” He’s set to bring to life the role of Pavel Checkov in J.J. Abrams’ reboot of the Star Trek franchise, which starts filming in November. “I’m waiting to read the script, actually,” says Yelchin. “I guess they’re withholding that until they get casting done or whatever. I plan on… becoming as much of a Trekkie as a I can in the couple weeks before we start shooting — just renting all the box sets, not going outside, not seeing the sun rise, just having the shades drawn.”
In the interim, he’s sanguine about fan reaction. “Who knows, I may be (scared) later, because Star Trek is such a big thing that I hope I don’t let anyone down, I hope everyone is satisfied with whatever. But then again, it’s such a big thing that you can’t please everyone,” says Yelchin. “I look at all these movies like Spider-Man and stuff, and then I think of myself walking out of Spider-Man, saying, ‘Oh well, like, in the cartoon… when I was seven…’ Everyone’s got their own thing, and some people get very upset and take it personally. But the cool thing about it is if you just think about the fact that people have taken something so personally, it means so much to them. It’s kind of a great thing to think about — that Star Trek and Spider-Man, or X-Men could mean so much to someone that they’d actually really take it seriously enough to criticize the hell out of someone because they don’t fit their image. If I think about it that way, I’ll take it less seriously.”
In the meantime, before beaming up, Yelchin is growing out his hair and getting ready to head to Louisiana to film director John Stockwell’s Middle of Nowhere, with Susan Sarandon and her real-life daughter, Eva Amurri. “It’s just a really nice story about a kid that, right before getting sent to military school, gets a last chance to sort of redeem himself,” says Yelchin. “He gets sent by his stepparents to this little town where he has to work over the summer, and learn to be a normal human being. He ends up meeting this girl and starts selling pot in this town, and gets her to help him out by driving him around. And it’s a really nice, touching story about a girl that’s trapped in this town — she needs money for college, and her mother is literally spending all her money and ruining her credit history. And then this kid who is just sort of a wanderer — that’s who he is by nature, he doesn’t belong anywhere, he’s just kind of living, he has no goal in life — he meets this girl. And there’s no romantic side to it. At one point he kisses her but it doesn’t turn into anything. It’s a really platonic relationship, during which most of the time she doesn’t even really like him, they’re just working together. But he raises enough money to help her through college, without her even knowing. It’s just a nice, touching story, and a really cool character — this funny, kind of weird kid.”
If it sounds like another tale of adolescent naïvity’s blossoming, of its collision with the real world, it wouldn’t be the first for Yelchin, and it likely won’t be the last.
Star Trek starts shooting in November.