While a longtime mainstay on New York’s Broadway and Off-Broadway boards, “Spring Awakening” Tony winner John Gallagher Jr. has become just as familiar a face on screens big and small since his 2012 breakout on Aaron Sorkin and HBO’s “The Newsroom.” With his latest feature film, gay conversion therapy drama “The Miseducation of Cameron Post,” he plays the Rev. Rick, an ex-gay counselor at the center to which the titular Cameron (Chloë Grace Moretz) is sent after she’s caught with another girl.
Rick provided plenty to explore as an actor.
“He believes he’s been cured and that he has seen the light—that he was sick and now he’s well. I find that interesting in any field: someone saying, ‘I was one way, and now I’m fixed.’ That’s very hard to come by in life. Things are not actually quite as black and white as we want them to be. And he was written with a lot of love. He could be written in a villainous way, and he wasn’t, and he really understood the plight of all the kids, having been there himself. I just found it really interesting, the idea of a person who needs to believe something so much that they then have to force that upon other people in order to keep themselves alive. It was handled really delicately, and you’re always kind of waiting for some big moment where you find out where this guy really lives or what he really thinks, and [screenwriter-director Desiree Akhavan really] never quite gave it to you in the film in a way…. He felt to me like a good guy with a good heart who’s making some really misguided decisions.”
You should say yes to projects that excite you.
“This is a very privileged place to come from, and I always think of it where it could change any day and in a couple years I might start saying yes to everything. But I have a hard time saying yes to things that I’m not, like, ‘Yeah!’ Because if I’m not like that, there’s someone out there who is, and I always feel like someone doing it should really want to be there. I wouldn’t want to come into something with an attitude because it’s such a shaky place to come from, and nobody else needs that energy around. So I look for things that excite me, challenge me, scare me.”
READ: 9 Questions With John Gallagher Jr.
Know what you’re getting into with indie films.
“It’s a labor of love when you make any movie like this because nobody’s doing it to get rich, and you shoot them really fast and it’s always a bit of a tightrope walk and a little scary. And then, when you finish it, you don’t even know if anyone’s going to see it, so you have to really love it because you don’t know what’s going to happen with it.”
Success is about balancing your expectations.
“I think there was maybe a slightly healthy dose of naiveté that I had [in the beginning] where I was really just putting one foot in front of the other. I had this really young, foolish notion of, ‘I’m going to do good stuff.’ [It’s] a balance of both; like, a big healthy dose of humility and patience, and a healthy dose of knowing what you want and going after it. I would recommend 10 to 12 years of theater before film work for anyone, but that’s just me; that’s the way it worked out for me.”
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