on the hunt

AARON TAYLOR-JOHNSON has spent years dodging the spotlight while dazzling in character roles. With Kraven the Hunter, the British actor is seizing his action-hero moment and showing he's ready to be a leading man. Rumor has it that a martini and a license to kill may be waiting for him.

- Alex Pappademas

A SUMMER AFTERNOON IN NEW YORK'S WEST VILLAGE, A WARM day fast turning hotter, and inside Buvette Gastrothèque-a tiny bistro so perfectly Parisian that there's another one in the Quartier Pigalle, a few blocks from the Moulin Rouge-Aaron Taylor-Johnson is scooping up ruddy pink globs of steak tartare and packing them like wet sand onto little ellipses of toasted bread, one bite at a time.

The size of the space means we're out in the open, visible. His eyes dart to the front door every time it opens. His body language says he's ready to be recognized, to be spotted-not waiting for it but scanning, steeling for it.

It doesn't happen. Either everyone's being chill about his presence or nobody associates the guy at the table with the things he's been in. You've definitely seen him in things, though. That was him in Avengers: Age of Ultron, as a mutant dying a plot-twist death. That was him in Tenet, behind a massive Special Forces beard. Or you may have watched the long scene in Nocturnal Animals in which a redneck serial killer torments Jake Gyllenhaal and his family-just unmanning poor Jake-and thought, halfway through, Waitis that the kid from Kick-Ass?

Which it was. He looks different in practically every movie. Mustache, no mustache. Weird hair, less-weird hair. Bulking up, slimming down. A one-man Guess Who? board. Today, his look says Young Mafia Don Bound for Miami. He futzes with a couple gold chains while he talks. They slip in and out of the collar of his seventies-dude tan polo shirt, which matches his pants, which match the suit jacket draped over his chair. His hair is longish, curly, a little sweaty. He's lean, but his arms are like cinder blocks.