Not Horsing Around: Charlie Plummer on road movie Lean on Pete

Rising talent Charlie Plummer speaks to us about his knockout performance in Andrew Haigh's downbeat road movie Lean on Pete, using acting to cure his shyness and just missing out on being Spider-Man

Feature by Jamie Dunn | 19 Feb 2018

Despite having just watched Lean on Pete, it requires a double-take to recognise the film's lead, Charlie Plummer, as we pass him in a private members’ club’s reception before our interview. Not because the 18-year-old American actor looks all that different in person from the 15-year-old boy (named Charley) he plays in Andrew Haigh’s low-key drama; save for having grown a few inches taller (and his whispy blonde locks a few inches longer) in the interim, he looks exactly as he does in the picture. It’s the sanguine fashion in which Plummer carries himself that throws us off for a second.

Where Charley the character is closed up tighter than a clam, Charlie the actor, who’s wearing a floral silk shirt and black cords, is gregarious and at complete ease with himself as he leans back in his chair and nonchalantly answers questions like a pro. And he’s smiling too, something he wasn’t called on to do often in Lean on Pete. It comes as a surprise, then, when Plummer tells us he initially got into acting to cure his crippling shyness.

“When I was about nine or ten, my parents basically just encouraged me to do a community theatre play,” recalls Plummer, “just to help with my confidence and public speaking and all that.”

Not only did his ego get a boost, he discovered his passion as well. “For whatever reason acting just clicked with me, it just became the most enjoyable thing on the planet and it was like this high that I’d never experienced before. I’d played sports in school, but that was always a stressful environment; I’d always got really nervous. But when I was on stage it was the most freeing experience in the world and that really connected with me and pretty soon after I said, I want to do this professionally.”

How did his parents – actor Maia Guest and television writer-producer John Christian Plummer – react to this epiphany? “Ha, not well. They were like ‘no, no, don’t do that.’” Asides from it being such a cutthroat profession, what were their concerns? “I think they were weary about me being a child actor, you know, especially in film. It just has such a bad history, you know, whether it’s abuse or that the kids just grow up to be arseholes.”

Understandably, they had a more average upbringing in mind for him. “They went to college and my mom went to grad school, and then after that they became artists. In their mind I think they thought I would have the same kind of experience, so they were pretty shocked by me wanting to get into it so young.” They’re resigned to it now, however. “I think they just realised ‘OK, our parents wanted us to have a normal life and we went off and became artists, so it would be hypocritical if we did the same thing.’”

And how could they object when he’s turning in such wonderful performances, such as that in Lean on Pete? Plummer recalls first receiving the script. “After I read it I told my mom I need to be part of this. I just love, love, love the characters, and I especially love the central character.”

It would be hard not to warm to Charley. He’s a sweet kid who finds himself in a series of terrible predicaments. He lives a somewhat chaotic lifestyle with his well-meaning but ill-equipped father (Travis Fimmel), who’s closer to a big brother than a parent. Charley finds a second father-figure of sorts in Steve Buscemi’s cantankerous horse trainer Del, who takes the boy under his grizzled wing and puts him to work at his stables. But in truth Charley is more enamoured with Del’s overworked racehorse Lean on Pete, who’s a few bad races away from a Mexican slaughterhouse. Charlie clearly feels an affinity: he too is one or two moments of misfortune away from misery.

“Part of who I am as an actor, my instinct is probably not what a lot of big studios search for” – Charlie Plummer

One might assume Lean on Pete follows in the well-trodden hoofprints of other equine tales of children bonding with horses (War Horse, National Velvet, Black Beauty), but this is a more rough-hewn tale and avoids sentimentality at every turn. While life is no picnic for Charley and Pete at the start of the movie, things gets much tougher when they take to the open-road on an ill-advised cross-country adventure.

Plummer’s immediate reaction after falling in love with the script was to catch up with writer-director Andrew Haigh’s previous work. “I remember watching 45 Years soon after reading the script and my mom was in tears watching it with me, and she was like, ‘You are so lucky that you get to work with this guy.’” The young actor clearly feels the same way: “I feel so grateful that Andrew trusted me with the role, because he’s at the top of his level as a director and makes the kind of films that I really appreciate and love, so to be a part of it was just so meaningful for me.”

In Haigh, Plummer describes a filmmaker whose sensibilities match up with his own acting style. “I started in theatre and I think the way Andrew likes to work is kind of similar to theatre in general in that he’ll set up the shot and a lot of time it’ll just be one shot, characters will move in and out of the frame. And he very rarely cuts or gets in close for close-ups or shoots from too many angles, so for me as an actor that was so appealing because it just gave me the freedom to try different things.”

Where Haigh’s films diverge from theatre is in the quiet naturalism of the performances. His are films of elegant silences, where gestures and body language say as much as the dialogue. This tendency toward the internal chimed with Plummer also. “When I’ve worked with other directors, often their notes will be ‘can you do that a little bigger?’ So it’s kind of in my wheelhouse to keep it a little more quiet.” He suggests his shyness as a youngster might of helped in this regard.

“I was just always listening as a kid, that’s where I learned the most,” he says. “And not to be creepy, but whenever I, like, see someone and they don’t necessarily think I’m going through a thought process or observing something themselves, I can register how internally they look, and I think for me as an actor, being able to take that in and work with that, it’s my favourite kind of thing in film.”

The performance Plummer gives in Lean on Pete is knockout, never straining for our sympathy but getting it anyway. He has something of a young River Phoenix about him, both in his delicate features, and in his casually naturalistic acting style and softly-spoken voice, which draws you closer to the screen as if to make out his faintly whispered dialogue. Phoenix’s signature film, it turns out, is one of Plummer’s favourites. “My Own Private Idaho is a real reference point for me, especially for Lean on Pete. I think a similarity between the two is that you really get to sit with the characters and really will spend minutes with them just sitting. There will be silence, there will be no music, you're really just spending time with the person.”

Plummer seems perfectly suited to Andrew Haigh’s cinema of delicate grace notes, or the kind of dreamy films in which Gus van Sant used to specialise. “Part of who I am as an actor, my instinct is probably not what a lot of big studios search for,” Plummer admits, “and if they do, I’m not even sure if I’d be the right fit…” Although he quickly adds: “But I’m open to anything.”

He’s certainly not averse to a more high octane cinema. We’re speaking to Plummer in October 2017 and he enthusiastically mentions his next role will be as a teenage John Paul Getty III in Ridley Scott’s kidnap thriller All the Money in the World. “I can’t wait to see it,” beams Plummer. “The trailer's out, it looks really great.” Little did Plummer know that just six weeks before All the Money in the World’s release, Kevin Spacey – cast as oil tycoon John Paul Getty – was subject to several sexual abuse allegations and was quickly expunged from the movie by director Ridley Scott. The costly reshoot saw him replaced by veteran Canadian actor Christopher Plummer – no relation. Suffice it to say, despite the young actor’s performance as the kidnap victim being very fine, it was slightly overshadowed by the Spacey revelations and the hasty reshoots.

Plummer also missed out (or dodged a bullet, depending on your take) on worldwide fame when he narrowly lost the role as the world’s favourite teenage superhero and youngest Avenger. “I struck out on Spider-Man,” he laughs when we ask about his screen tests with Robert Downey Jr to play the web slinger, “so I don’t know if they’d invite me back into that universe anytime soon. There’s always Batman, I guess. He’s cool.” With Plummer’s quiet on-screen intensity, he’d knock the Dark Knight right out of the park.


Lean on Pete screens at Glasgow Film Festival: Sat 24 Feb, Cineworld, 6.15pm | Sun 25 Feb, Cineworld, 1pm
Lean on Pete is released in the UK on 4 May by Curzon Artificial Eye

Read more about Glasgow Film Festival in The CineSkinny – in print at Glasgow Film Theatre and the CCA, and online at theskinny.co.uk/film/cineskinny