Ezra Miller on Beware the Gonzo and Dodging Teen-Actor Traps

I hope you're right. In Every Day, meanwhile, you play a kind of reversal: A gay teenager who seems more of an outcast in his own family than he is in school. How did you approach the role?

It was in consideration of what is a very real and common situation in our culture. To be a LGBT teenager is always going to be something that causes some altered dynamic in their family -- again, just in this response to sexuality, which is very confused at this point for a lot of people. Just this idea of his father's fears tying into his disapproval -- and then Jonah's need to assert himself as being not in any sort of wrong? At the same time he probes exactly what his feather fears [through] a stark rebellion against his father. Having that turn into such a nightmare -- and their struggle to come to a place of understanding with each other -- is a struggle that can never be won for a lot of queer [teens]. There are a lot of LGBT people who have their relationships completely severed with their parents. It's a constant struggle for a lot of people.

What's beautiful about Jonah, I think, is that he takes this struggle in stride and is able to come to some sort of middle ground with his father. At least it seems that way: that in this one very sensitive moment, that can start happening. That journey back toward each other. That's why I love doing movies about families. There's nothing more important than trying to rectify the purity of home. It's not necessarily your bloodline. It's your family -- those people who inform your psyche and your emotional self in such a huge way. it's so important to, if possible, make those relationships work.

You've played the sons (or grandson) of Liev Schreiber, Brian Dennehy, Andy Garcia and Campbell Scott. What are you picking up from these guys?

Oh, Jesus. Everything I can get my hands on. I'm scrambling like a hungry animal in the dark. They have so much. The people I've been privileged to work with... it's school for me. They don't know it, but that's how I'm learning. These people know how to do this really magical thing that I would like to be able to do for as long as I can. It's just something to be ever-thankful for and not take for any sort of granted.

What's an example of something you've picked up?

Well, Liev Schreiber is one of the most amazing American actors alive today. I really think he's very much the real deal. We did this one scene that I thought was a very important scene; we got some takes, and then Liev started tossing out ideas. Very pensively, stoically throwing out ideas, approaches, new approaches. "Before we move on, let's try something different." Just things -- some angles that would change little dynamics. I remember one of the things he said was, "Let's try this with the sense and the stakes that we're old friends who haven't seen each other for 50 years." This -- in a scene where we're father and son.

That actually tied in with something I learned from Andy Garcia on City Island. Everyday Andy would give me words of wisdom, and one day it was: "Break the slate. Give them a take, and then smash everything you were applying to that scene and give them something totally different. It'll improve your odds of getting something real and natural." If you can let go of everything you thought you were doing with the scene four minutes beforehand? That was a really valuable lesson of that year I made City Island and Every Day.

You've played the son in three fraught families, and you're playing another in We Need to Talk About Kevin. What drew you to this project?

Oh, man, this movie is kind of it for me. I'm attracted to everything about his film. This film is pieced together like a beautiful and brilliant puzzle, and the applications seem almost kind of infinite. It's the story of a mother and a son. And if you want to talk about the struggle to come together, then this movie is going to be quite a heightening of that theme for me. Kevin is a terrifying character. He's a very deep and twisted anomaly, but he's also very real and dimensional. There are parts of this character that I see extreme validity in. All hopes for the coming three weeks that that's what other people see, too.

That might be the scariest thing. That's what I'm attracted to. I'm attracted to the exploration of what dark -- bringing light to darkness and darkness to light. I've never read a story like this. A lot of storytelling is just other stories repeated, but this is a very real dynamic -- an extreme one, to the point of being almost allegorical -- about what exists between a mother and a son.

But the source novel is observed solely from his mother's point of view. How does the adaptation let you explore his inner life?

Obviously what's there -- but not in the same way -- is a spoken narrator. The movie is observed. It is through the lens of Eva [Khatchadourian, played by Tilda Swinton], but it's third-person. So a lot of the speculation that Eva does, the viewer will have to do that speculation themselves. Which is sort of accurate, actually, because you, like Eva, are an unreliable narrator. And the point of this is that it should require thought and a lot of speculation. What is a simple story is incredibly thought-provoking; at least that's my experience with the script. That's my experience with a lot of the book.

This is a revised version of an interview that was published last year on Movieline.

[Top photo: Getty Images]

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