Last year Will Poulter blew minds in the choose-yourown-adventure Black Mirror. How do you follow that? By teaming with a horror phenom for the bloodcurdling Midsommar.
AT 26, WILL POULTER HAS blasted past the broad comedy and Y.A. fantasy of his earlier years to emerge an acting chameleon. He is utterly distinctive, all eyebrows, but has become so good he’s hard to recognize.
If it seems like success came quickly, well, you weren’t Will Poulter at 12.
“I always say I had an early-life crisis,” he explains with a glint, outside a photography studio on a rare sunny London day. “How much can you know at 12? But I was going, ‘Is school forever? What the fuck am I gonna do?!’ ” In drama class, at the Harrodian school in West London, he impersonated singer/TV host/onetime Beatles weed carrier Cilla Black. From there he auditioned for everything: sketch, musicals, pantomime. At 12 he scored the lead in Son of Rambow, as a First Blood obsessive. It was a dream. “That film coming along—I feel like it saved me,” Poulter says.
This story is from the August 2019 edition of GQ.
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This story is from the August 2019 edition of GQ.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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