The Perks of Not Being a Wallflower

Actor Adam Pearson has his biggest role to date in a dark comedy inspired by his upbeat personality.

- BILGE EBIRI

ADAM PEARSON INSISTS his acting career started as something of a joke. It was 2013, and he had just received an email about a casting call from Changing Faces, a U.K.based nonprofit he had worked with that is dedicated to helping people with visible differences on the face, hands, or body. A film called Under the Skin, to be directed by Jonathan Glazer, was looking for an individual with facial disfigurement to play a part. Pearson, who has neurofibromatosis type 1, a condition that produces benign skin tumors all over his face, certainly fit the bill. But he had never acted before and had no intention of doing so. "Let's waste someone's time for a while," he remembers thinking as he sent off his CV.

Then he was asked to record a short video. "Next thing you know," he says, "you're in Glasgow with Scarlett Johansson wondering what the hell has happened."

Quite a bit has indeed happened since then. "I came in hot and high and wildly unprepared," Pearson says about doing Under the Skin, but his scenes in Glazer's moody sci-fi thriller, in which Johansson's human-harvesting alien picks him up and later sets him free, were probably the most memorable moments in one of 2013's most acclaimed films.

(Much of their dialogue, it should be noted, was improvised.) Since then, Pearson, who at the time was helping cast reality-TV shows, has hosted a number of TV specials and appeared on a variety of other programs, often as an activist for greater visibility and rights for the disabled.

Now, he has what is certainly his biggest role to date as one of the stars of Aaron Schimberg's A Different Man, a noirish, existential comedy that was one of the breakout titles at this year's Sundance Film Festival and will be released by A24 in September, right at the start of awards season.