The Year of Finn Wittrock

About a year ago, fans of "American Horror Story: Freak Show" were being treated to Jessica Lange's poignant turn (which could be her last) in that popular anthology series. Captivated viewers were probably quite surprised by the bold, beguiling choices being made by the ridiculously good-looking young actor playing a spoiled brat/psycho killer named Dandy. Finn Wittrock's chilling performance snagged him an Emmy nomination for Best Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television and kept his gay fans in Google and IMDB mode.

At the same time, in movie houses, the actor was featured as WWII bombardier Francis McNamara in Angelina Jolie's "Unbroken," based on the life of Louis Zamperini in which Wittrock had a few harrowing scenes with star Jack O'Connell.

Earlier in 2014, the actor was part of the ensemble of Ryan Murphy's powerful HBO adaptation of the Larry Kramer play, "The Normal Heart."

Broadway aficionados might recall seeing Wittrock in the 2012 Mike Nichols directed revival of Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman," where he played Happy opposite the late Philip Seymour Hoffman's Willy Loman and Andrew Garfield's Biff. Nichols first noticed the thesp when he attended the Signature Theatre production of Tony Kushner's "The Illusion," back in 2011.

He also appeared as Tennessee Williams' anti-hero Chance Wayne in a 2012 production of "Sweet Bird of Youth" at Chicago's Goodman Theatre with Diane Lane.

On cable television, "Masters of Sex" watchers might easily remember he played the sexy young hustler who seduces the Beau Bridges character in a few steamy episodes of the Showtime drama.

If you haven't picked up the thread, here it is, if you hadn't heard of Wittrock, you will certainly come into contact with the ubiquitous young actor soon.

Indeed 2015 was a banner year for Wittrock with double roles on the recently concluded season of "American Horror Story: Hotel," including embodying the great silent film star Rudolph Valentino. In addition, he's part of the ensemble of "The Big Short," now an Oscar contender for Best Picture. He also starred as as true-life athlete Freddie Steinmark in the feature, "My All American" which will be released on Blu-ray and Digital HD on February 28..

And he shows no signs of slowing down. This month he stars in the indie feature that he also co-wrote, "The Submarine Kid," which he and Eric Bilitch (his childhood friend and co-writer/director) have wanted to make since his senior year in college. The film is available on VOD and On Demand.

"Kid" is a unique look at a Marine suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and his battle to acclimate back into everyday civilian life after his third, most psychologically torturous tour.

EDGE spoke with Wittrock about "The Submarine Kid" and "American Horror Story," where he worked with Lady Gaga; filming "The Big Short"; his career journey to date; as well as "playing gay."

A passion project

EDGE: I really appreciated some of 'The Submarine Kid's' daring...

Finn Wittrock: I like that word, daring.

EDGE: And I know this was a passion project of yours. Tell me about the genesis of the script.

Finn Wittrock: It was kind of a meeting of the minds. My good friend Eric Bilitch and I had a conversation at a bar in my senior year of college. I was at Julliard and he was at Syracuse. He said I have this idea about this guy who is addicted to being under water. And I was like, that's cool. And I went home and started writing a short story based on that. But I had wanted to write something about PTSD -- about what soldiers go through.

And as I was writing this idea Eric gave me, I realized it was the same idea. So I wrote the short story and sent it to him and he changed everything and wrote a draft of the screenplay and sent it back to me. And that process continued for six years, really, until we were out of school and we started pounding the pavement with it, trying to get it out to producers. Trying a failing. Trying to raise money. And failing. And then, eventually, Deborah Del Prete, this amazing producer, said she was in love with it and then suddenly we were onset. It was a dream come true.

EDGE: Did you and Eric always write it with yourself in mind to play Spencer (the Marine)?

Finn Wittrock: He (Eric) says no but I think maybe in the back of his head he always thought he'd direct it and I would be in it. But I really did honestly think of it as a sort of 'other' person. And once it became a reality that it was going to get made, it was like, 'Finn, of course you're going to play this.' (laughs) So I did. But I didn't really write it with my own voice in mind. Obviously whatever you write, especially when you're writing someone close to your own size and weight and age, you're writing yourself to a degree. But it's mostly unconscious.

The casting process

EDGE: In doing the research, did you speak with any Marines/Vets?

Finn Wittrock: We did. I tried to do as much research on my own as possible. There were a couple of great documentaries about the history of PTSD, going back to the Civil War. And we had Jon Barton, who was our military adviser on the set and he introduced us to a bunch of real Vets. And we started picking their brain... the thing you really get from those guys is the camaraderie. How much they're fighting for their brother, for the guy next to them. Because a lot of these guys don't politically agree with what their superiors are telling them or what their government's telling them but they have this incredible bond between each other. And that's what keeps them going. And so being torn away from that is a big contributor to the PTSD -- besides the traumatic nature of war itself.

EDGE: Were you involved in the casting process?

Finn Wittrock: Yeah, I was a bit. It was interesting to sit on the other side of the camera. It's a very revealing thing. Casting his (Spencer's) friends was really important... so there were group auditions. And it's very interesting to sit there and realize the truth about what people have told you as an actor. 'You're really good, but you're just not right for it.' As an actor, you're like, 'oh no, I suck.' But being (on the other side), you realize, this actor is so good but he just doesn't work in terms of all the other people. I wish I could cast him in something but this isn't it. It was a bit of an epiphany to sit there.

Friendly chaos

EDGE: What was the shoot like?

Finn Wittrock: It was short. We had a limited budget. I think it was 24 days. And it's an indie movie so every single day there was some major catastrophe and some scrambling of location or person or something. Our producers were lucky to survive without too many gray hairs... it was a bit of friendly chaos. But I've been on other sets since that were also low budget and morale on this was above and beyond. Everyone just took it in stride. No one's there for the money on this kind of movie so the crew, the actors, everyone, they have to love it otherwise it just becomes really grim. And it felt like people came on board because they genuinely wanted to help tell the story and thought it was something worth telling. So that kind of positive energy about the actual story itself makes a really fun camaraderie out of those chaotic experiences.

EDGE: Process-wise, do you and Eric have a certain short hand?

Finn Wittrock: We did have a shorthand with each other because I also had opinions directorially. So we decided that if we were going to have an argument, let's just do it in private. That was a thing we agreed on beforehand. Let's talk, confer. And every single time there was a disagreement we actually arrived at a conclusion that was better than either of us originally had. And it's good to have a friend (who knows you) since freshman year in high school. He's got an eye as a director that I trust. And we can totally skip the bullshit of being nice to each other. Not that we were mean, but we could just be blunt.

Big break

EDGE: Tell me a bit about your background. Did you always want to act and what do you feel was your first big break?

Finn Wittrock: I think if I'm honest with myself, I really did want to act since I was young. My dad worked at this theatre company in the Berkshires called Shakespeare and Company. It was a beautiful outdoors stage in western Massachusetts. And I would go there every summer and I would be the pageboy or the messenger child in whatever Shakespeare play and I would sit back and I would listen every night, to the shows. And that's where I caught the bug. There were times where I was like, no I don't want to be an actor, but that was mostly childhood rebellion. Although my dad never pressured me. He knew how hard the life was so, he was like, let him find it on his own. Hopefully he'll just decide to be a lawyer. (laughs) But that didn't happen.

Then I went to this arts high school in LA, where I met Eric. Amazing place. LACHSA (Los Angeles County High School for the Arts). And then, Julliard. And after Julliard I did slog it out. I did original theatre and guest spots on TV. I waited tables. I was broke for a lot of it. I struggled and had full angst.

Then I got this Tony Kushner play called 'The Illusion' which Mike Nichols saw and then asked me to audition for 'Death of a Salesman.' So I would put 'Death of a Salesman' as what I consider my actual break, because that was the time that I was actually let into doors that had theretofore been closed to me. And it opened me up to a whole new realm. And playing in 'Salesman' was a pretty epic, amazing, really bittersweet thing now in retrospect because both those guys (Nichols and lead Philip Seymour Hoffman) have passed on and I knew I was lucky then but now I feel 10 times more lucky.

EDGE: I'm guessing working with Mike Nichols was a pretty extraordinary experience...

Finn Wittrock: It was pretty amazing. He was an old school guy. It's really true they don't make 'em like that anymore. His wit was unlike anything else. And he would launch into stories about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. It was a very special experience. And to have him and Phil in the same room, the meeting of those minds, it really opened me up artistically. I can trace a lot of my (subsequent) acting work to just having been onstage with Phil.

Most fun shoot

EDGE: You're in one of the most celebrated films of 2015, 'The Big Short.' Can you tell me what making that movie was like and what its overwhelmingly positive reception means to you?

Finn Wittrock: It was probably the most fun set I've ever been on. I've never been in an environment that was that loose in terms of improv and blocking-it was all fair game. There was a lot of research leading up to the shoot. I didn't know anything about this stuff. It was like an alien language to me. We had the gift of an amazing book by Michael Lewis, which I kept by my side for two months and read and reread and reread and reread. And I got this 'Wall Street Journal for Dummies' book, which had the most basic stuff about the economy and the stock market.

We were crammed and loaded with information and character work so that once you get onset you can just play. And so the actual shooting days were mostly just play. I remember when I first read the script it really just leapt off the page for me and I was like, I will do anything to be in this movie and I told Adam (McKay, the director) that. Everyone-Christian (Bale), Steve (Carell) and Brad (Pitt), obviously, whose company produced it, seriously believed in the story but even more so the way it was being told through Adam's wild brain.

So to see how Hank Corwin, our editor put it together. He so did justice to the way it was written in such a way I didn't even know was possible. And so now to see it really taking off, to see it building momentum and getting such overwhelming positive praise, it's very gratifying to me because I truly believe in it. It makes the endless press we're doing more bearable. When you're talking about a movie that you actually like to talk about it doesn't feel like work.

Working on American Horror Story

EDGE: You've played very diverse characters on 'American Horror Story,' last year's Emmy-nominated Dandy and this year both Tristan and Valentino. What would you say is your biggest challenge working on the show?

Finn Wittrock: Ryan (Murphy) was like, I have this idea, I've never done it before, but I was thinking of having you play another character, changing your look completely. This conceit/joke about all the guys looking the same was actually for a purpose because she (the Lady Gaga character) is trying to recreate Valentino, through the (decades.) So the biggest challenge was owning the fact that I could do that. And that people wouldn't think it was totally ridiculous. And transforming enough as Tristan. And making Valentino as specific as possible. And just pretending that Tristan didn't happen, in a way, was the biggest challenge, and gaining that confidence.

He (Ryan) gave me some really great writing, and just working with Gaga is a very creatively fertile place to be. She has this aura of inspiration around her. It's a very exciting inspiring, creative environment she helps create onset.

EDGE: Your LGBTQ fans appreciate your not shying away from play gay parts. Have you ever been pressured and/or are you pressured not to take on gay roles?

Finn Wittrock: My reps, agent-wise, have been understandably hesitant not to have that be a thing that is a trap to fall into, not in terms of being gay but in terms of the sexual situations, because the show doesn't hold back in that degree. So that's definitely been a thing to be mindful of. The show has shock value but I actually don't think it's gratuitous and (the sexual scenes) are done for a purpose. I will play any character that is written in a complicated and challenging way, no matter the orientation. And plus I get to sleep with women also, so it all evens out.

"The Submarine Kid" is currently available on Digital HD and On Demand. "The Big Short" is in wide release. "American Horror Story: Freak Show" is available on streaming services. "My All American" will be released on DVD on February 28.