Christopher Abbott expands as reluctant caretaker ‘James White’
Right now, he is enjoying the spotlight as the title character in longtime producer Josh Mond’s semiautobiographical directing debut, “James White,” for which Abbott has received a best actor Gotham Award nomination.
“On a personal level, it’s to try my best to expand myself, to try and learn something from doing this job,” he says on a trip with Mond to San Rafael.
Josh and I were kind of able to go down the road, whether it was improvising a little bit or to explore those weird parts of one’s psyche that I find it interesting.
Introduced in extreme close-up bumbling around a nightclub, James is an angst-filled mess, a slacker in his 20s who comes to shoulder heartbreaking and soul-crushing responsibility.
“I was writing the film, and we had made a short, experimental precursor to ‘James,’ and I had asked him to do it,” says Mond.
When I got into the editing room, a lot of the short was very close-up, and I was able see things that he was doing that I hadn’t noticed he was doing, and without hesitation, I called him and said, ‘I’m writing this for you.’
The two men met when Abbott auditioned for a role in a film that Mond produced, “Two Gates of Sleep.”
[...] it wasn’t their tight bond that convinced the fledgling feature director that Abbott was the right man to play James.
“It was the humanity he carries innately, but more his skill from take to take, how he can subtly change the tone and context,” Mond says.
To put the final touches on it, I think was more physical, the sagging of the pants, all of that kind of stuff.
Mond appreciates that attention to detail and the truth Abbott brings to the character.