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Guillermo del Toro and Richard Jenkins team up once more for Nightmare Alley, bringing to life Jenkins’ character, Ezra Grindle.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Nightmare Alley, now in theaters.
Guillermo del Toro’s new film, Nightmare Alley, centers on con-man turned mentalist Stan Carlisle (Bradley Cooper). Accompanying Cooper is a huge supporting cast filled with top-tier actors. While this marks Cooper’s first time working with the Academy Award-winning director, other cast and crew members have worked previously with del Toro — as was the case for Richard Jenkins (The Shape of Water). In Nightmare Alley, Jenkins plays Ezra Grindle, a desperate man who turns to Stan for help. During a press conference for the noir film, del Toro and Jenkins discussed Grindle and Stan’s complicated dynamic.
“I always wondered, do I like Stan?” Jenkins said. “I don’t know why that just kept coming up. I realized I didn’t. I needed him. I liked him when I needed him. When I didn’t, I didn’t. This is a fairly self-involved human being. I found that really interesting to do. There were times when I would look at Stan and feel great empathy for him, and then times I would look at him and think, ‘I’d like to squash him,’ so it was human. Yeah, that’s a good word for it, but I never tried to choose when those moments happen. They seemed to find their way in and out.”
Jenkins’ approach to acting, which included him doing what felt most organic was something del Toro took note of the last time they worked together. “Richard and I have made two movies together, and there was for me an evolution,” del Toro shared. “I started shooting everything completely. I didn’t cut. I didn’t do little pieces because I wanted to see these guys [act]. Richard taught me something beautiful in Shape of Water. Beautiful… He said to me, ‘Look, let me try two or three things. See what comes out.’ He said, ‘Because if you tell me what you want from the beginning, this is like ordering fabric in a store. I’ll bring the fabric you want, but if you let me try it, I’ll bring you the best fabric from every shelf in the store, and we’ll choose together.'”
Fellow Nightmare Alley stars noted del Toro’s practice of handing each actor an in-depth biography for their character. Thanks to del Toro and co-writer Kim Morgan’s words, Jenkins was able to connect to Frindle on a deeper level. “When I read the script, what I remember thinking was, ‘You spend your life, trying to connect with this vision, this person who you feel responsible for their death, that you loved, and then you see them.’ You see them, and all of your life, this is what it’s been geared toward, and you see them, and then you find out in a second and a half that it’s all not true.” Jenkins said. “What is the human response to that? How do you even wrap your head around it? I think that really interested me… You see those gardens — beautiful gardens — that [Grindle’s] built this to honor this woman. And for me, that was when I just said, ‘I would love to play this. I would love to see what happens here.'”
Jumping off of what Jenkins said, del Toro added how this theme goes beyond just Grindle. So many of Nightmare Alley’s characters learn who they really are in this film, and while these characters may think they are beyond these moments of revelation, that does not mean it cannot happen or that they do not need it.
“The movie is constructed around the idea of people finding themselves and who they are, and the moment of revelation, and it happens to Molly; it happens to Grindle; it happens to Zeena; it happens to Pete,” del Toro said. “The beauty of it, there’s a rule in magic — I’m a terrible magician, but I’m a student of magic — that says the audience thinks they can’t be fooled, but want to be fooled. That’s the same with spiritualism. Grindle… He built a garden. He’s ready to see her, and then when it’s all fake, his world crumbles. That’s a beautiful thing because most of the characters in this movie are built for their endings. The whole movie is constructed for the last two minutes of Stan to go, ‘Oh! This is who I am!'”
To see how del Toro and Jenkins bring Grindle to life, see Nightmare Alley, now in theaters.
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