Suddenly Sorta Spielberg

Gabriel LaBelle beat out 2,000 actors toplay a version of the famed director as a teen by embracing the meta-ness.

- By Jackson McHenry

Gabriel Labelle is not playing a young Steven Spielberg in The Fabelmans, but Sammy Fabelman is pretty close. He moves to Arizona with his family in the late 1950s, falls in love with making home videos, and observes the collapse of his parents’ matrriage—all events that happened to Spielberg, who directed and co-wrote the film. But LaBelle’s performance isn’t an imitation, not exactly. He emulates Spielberg’s stiffened posture but doesn’t try to match the current depth of his voice or speak in run-on sentences, in part because the director told him not to. He wears green contact lenses but has a rounder face. He evokes some core of one of Hollywood’s most famous auteurs while also inventing a particular character meant to serve this film's particular fiction. LaBelle draws a triangle with his hands as he explains it. There’s Spielberg, himself, and then Sammy somewhere in between.

The key to becoming sorta Spielberg, LaBelle tells me on the patio of a coffee shop in his neighborhood of West Hollywood, lies in his smile. He presses down the front of his lip and pulls up the sides of his cheeks to show me just how. This muscle doesn’t go up,” he says, the top of his lip covering his teeth. It’s an enthusiastic, slightly dorky grin that you might not have clocked on the director's face, but once you see it, things immediately align. It helped me transform into this character,” he says. It adds his essence.”