There is a moment in every actor\u2019s career when they must confront their early dreams and their present reality. For Taylor Kitsch, that reckoning has been more painful than for most. \u201cIf you start marrying yourself to these phantom outcomes that don\u2019t exist, man, you\u2019re gonna go crazy,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Kitsch is talking from New York, thousands of miles from his home in Montana, where he has carved out a different life from his Hollywood years. \u201cI\u2019d rather be in the wild chasing animals with my camera than going to clubs or bars or Hollywood parties,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Today he\u2019s at a press junket for his new Prime Video series, The Terminal List: Dark Wolf, which expertly marries gun battles and spy intrigue with a neat consideration of what happens when red-blooded American males are confronted by the realities of war. Before our interview, I was excited to see the exact state of dishevelment that the wildlife-chasing actor would greet me in, but my request for him to turn on his camera is politely rebuffed and I have to make do with listening to his disembodied Canadian-cum-Texan boom.<\/p>\n
Lost action hero \u2026 Taylor Kitsch with Chris Pratt in The Terminal List: Dark Wolf. Photograph: Justin Lubin\/Prime<\/p>\n
The path seemed so clear in 2012. Kitsch was a 30-year-old Canadian hockey player turned model turned actor, blessed with the kind of looks that make casting directors reach for their phones and studio heads reach for their chequebooks. He had spent the back half of his 20s playing Tim Riggins, the brooding high-school running back and rebel heart of the critically acclaimed show Friday Night Lights. His first forays into movies were solid turns, among them Gambit in X-Men Origins: Wolverine and the photojournalist Kevin Carter in The Bang Bang Club. Stardom seemed inevitable. A few years earlier he had lived in his car on futile visits to LA \u2013 now he was looking up at billboards of himself. The Guardian proclaimed him a star \u201cabout to turn supernova<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n Then came the big swing: John Carter, Disney\u2019s $264m bet on Kitsch becoming the next great action star. The film was based on the 1912 novel A Princess of Mars, inspiration for a number of great 20th-century space operas (not least Star Wars and Dune) and was meant to be Disney\u2019s answer to Avatar. Hopes were high but the box office gods were ungiving. John Carter quickly became a punchline due to its lackluster title and marketing campaign, which one Disney executive deemed \u201cthe worst in the history of movies\u201d. The film itself is decent, certainly better than its 52% score on Rotten Tomatoes, and Kitsch received praise for the \u201cslyness\u201d brought to the title character<\/a>.<\/p>\n Still, John Carter felt derivative. Its similarities to Avatar in particular (Earth soldier is transported to an exotic planet and begrudgingly accepted by the native population before saving the day) made it a magnet for unhelpful headlines as the early box office returns proved disappointing. It went on to flop so badly (reported loss: $200m) that its title now refers less to the film than its accompanying cautionary tale of big-budget disaster. Meanwhile, the prevailing narrative around Kitsch was that he couldn\u2019t carry a blockbuster \u2013 a suspicion compounded by his next film, Battleship, a failed attempt to turn the board game into a Transformers-style franchise that is now primarily remembered for being Rihanna\u2019s film debut.<\/p>\n There\u2019s so many cogs in that wheel of movies, man. I\u2019m literally such a small part of it<\/p>\n The cruel irony is that while Kitsch\u2019s charismatic screen presence was honed on a naturalistic high-school drama, his potential big break came in that post-Avatar moment when movie studios looked to build franchises around groundbreaking special effects, without necessarily marrying them to strong characters or coherent narratives.<\/p>\n Kitsch is sanguine about his part in the John Carter debacle. \u201cThere\u2019s so many cogs in that wheel of movies, man. I\u2019m literally such a small part of it.\u201d The machine was so much bigger than any one person: \u201cI don\u2019t know if it\u2019s timing, or a million cooks in the kitchen, or it just didn\u2019t hit.\u201d At the time, he took it personally, feeling the weight of a $264m production, the studio\u2019s faith, the expectations that came with being positioned as the next big star. \u201cOver time,\u201d he pauses, choosing his words carefully, \u201cyou gave it the best you could. I\u2019m proud of the way I led that shoot. You move on.\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps the most telling aspect of Kitsch\u2019s story isn\u2019t the fall \u2013 it\u2019s what he did while he was down. Rather than chase another potential blockbuster or reinvent himself as a different kind of leading man, he disappeared into the work itself. The roles that followed show an actor no longer interested in being anyone\u2019s idea of a Hollywood heart-throb. In 2015, Kitsch played a repressed highway patrol officer in season two of True Detective, a role that laid the foundation for his subsequent TV revival, embodying wounded men in a country that\u2019s constantly redefining masculinity. He marks out his 2018 part as the cult leader David Koresh in the Paramount miniseries Waco as \u201ca big turn in my career, in the sense of preparation and understanding and not judging a character\u201d. The role of Koresh, a real-life figure responsible for alleged sexual abuse and the deaths of dozens, is certainly more complex than the parts that made Kitsch famous.<\/p>\n A different ballgame \u2026 Minka Kelly and Taylor Kitsch in Friday Night Lights. Photograph: NBC\/Kobal\/Rex\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n \u201cMy job is to marry myself emotionally to the circumstances and these guys,\u201d he says. \u201cI don\u2019t think: \u2018I hope you like Dave at this point or I hope you hate him now.\u2019 I just want to be as authentic as I can be to him and service that without judgment.\u201d It\u2019s an approach that would prove essential when Netflix\u2019s Painkiller came along in 2023, a limited series examining the opioid crisis through the lens of pharmaceutical executives, addicts and the families caught between them.<\/p>\n For Kitsch, the project was deeply personal. \u201cAddiction runs through my family pretty hard,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s really changed my perspective in a lot of ways.\u201d His sister is in recovery, so when the opportunity arose to play an opioid-addicted salesman, he asked her to advise on the role. \u201cI\u2019ve seen her detox on the floor of my house,\u201d he says quietly. \u201cThose scenes were very close to me and I had more people reach out than any other show I\u2019ve ever done, which meant a lot to me \u2026 to share it with my sister was amazing, to be honest.\u201d<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Inside Saturday<\/p>\n The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend.<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Earlier this year, in honour of his sister\u2019s successful journey to sobriety, he founded the nonprofit Howlers Ridge. The organisation provides support for veterans and trauma survivors and represents the kind of purpose-driven project that would have been impossible during his blockbuster years. \u201cI think I\u2019ve grown up a little bit,\u201d he says. \u201cIn my 20s, I would see people who\u2019d be like: Well, why aren\u2019t you doing more? You have the means to help people.\u201d<\/p>\n There is an interesting parallel between Kitsch\u2019s career and the characters he is drawn to playing. Many of them are men trying to figure out how to live with themselves, how to carry on when the world has shifted beneath their feet. The transition from movie star to television actor might seem like a step backward to some, but for Kitsch, it represented something more valuable: creative control and the chance to truly inhabit his characters and allow part of them to inhabit him.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n