With superb turns in this spring’s heartfelt Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret., summer’s Christopher Nolan blockbuster Oppenheimer, and Showtime/Paramount+’s current mind-boggler The Curse, Benny Safdie—co-director (with his brother Josh) of Good Time and Uncut Gems—has established himself as one of his generation’s most dynamic and versatile actors. According to him, however, there was a point not so long ago when he nearly hung it all up for a less glamorous career.
“I was this close to being a physicist,” confesses the 37-year-old writer/director/actor in late November during a wide-ranging discussion about his astounding 2023 slate. “It was literally a coin flip—physics or film—after Good Time, because if that film didn’t work, I probably would have gone back to school to become a physics professor. I was ready to make that decision because it wasn’t fair to my wife to continue down a path of negative returns. Here I am, we have this kid, and I can’t just keep pushing myself into this dream that’s not happening. That’s not fair. So I came to the conclusion that, if this doesn’t work, I’m out! And it worked, so I didn’t have to make that decision. But I was ready to.”
Safdie is aware that there’s irony in the fact that he almost entered a field that’s the subject of Nolan’s biopic triumph, in which he co-stars as Edward Teller, the famed Hungarian-American physicist who teamed with J. Robert Oppenheimer on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos and, ultimately, betrayed him as a result of their differences over the development of the hydrogen bomb. Nonetheless, more than those fiction-mirroring-reality parallels, Safdie continues to be most taken with the unique creative spirit of Nolan’s celebrated production, which upended his expectations about what’s possible on a grand scale.
“Oppenheimer was funny because you have these preconceived notions about what it’s going to be like on the set,” he admits. “Then I got there, and there was this freedom to it. It was so strange and open and fun. Everyone was playing off each other and trying to be the best they could be. Chris was really there for it and pushing you. I was like, oh wow, he’s moving the camera, trying to discover where to shoot this from! He has an idea in his head, but he’s not shutting things down. He’s very open to whatever happens.”
Safdie is quick to note that this doesn’t mean Oppenheimer was a laissez-faire endeavor—“Look, you’re talking about nuclear physics—you can’t improvise that!” Even so, it was a remarkably collaborative undertaking that didn’t conform to rigid logistical or artistic protocols. “It was the kind of thing where your movements and acting did dictate how things would happen. That was awesome for me to see; that you could literally run through this entire scene that would take somebody else five days to shoot, and he does it before lunchtime and there’s no compromises,” he says. “I’m like, how the hell did that happen?”
To Safdie, getting the opportunity to watch how other accomplished filmmakers work is part of the appeal of performing in their projects. “As an actor when I’m not directing or producing, I have the ability to see somebody else do their craft and understand it, and I’m able to learn and take from it.” That’s true of directors and also of actors—and on Oppenheimer, he was surrounded by a who’s-who of illustrious talents, which made it that much more exciting and rewarding an enterprise.
“It’s great to work with great actors who I wouldn’t normally work with. You get to know people and learn new points of view and tips and tricks and stuff like that. It’s amazing to be able to have a moment with Cillian [Murphy], who’s out of control! Or Emily Blunt. Even in Are You There, God?, there’s a really intense scene that I have with Rachel at the end, and I was shocked because I had gotten to a place, emotionally, that was really deep and concerning for me in that scene, and it was hard. But it was so nice that [director] Kelly [Fremon Craig] saw that and was pushing me. It’s about harboring the emotions and pushing you there.”
He continues, “That’s all I care about when I’m involved in a project. You want the best from everybody. If you truly believe that you’re getting the best and somebody is holding back, or you can see how they can unlock something, you want to go there with them to get it.”
Safdie remembers that being a particularly exciting challenge on 2019’s Uncut Gems, as he and Josh had to elicit intense performances from not only the likes of Adam Sandler, Idina Menzel, and LaKeith Stanfield but also Hall of Fame basketball star Kevin Garnett in his acting debut, as himself. The trick, he says, was not straining too hard for realism. “You have to let people be who they are. You can’t force them to be somebody else,” he explains. “Whatever we had for a given scene, it had to become Kevin. But that’s not easy! That’s something that gets misconstrued a lot of times. Just because somebody’s playing themselves or a version of themselves, it is very hard, speaking as an actor, to be natural as yourself, without self-consciousness. To do that on-screen is hard. With KG, he brought a specific energy off-set when we were talking to him, and that was what we wanted on-camera. But that’s not an easy thing to do.”
Safdie humorously points out that he’s had a bit of personal experience with that, as his Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. role is the first that resembles his real self: “When I got the call for Are You There, God?, I was like, oh my God, somebody actually looks at me for who I am: a Jewish dad from New York! I’ve never gotten that before!” Still, this year has proven his bona fides as a screen chameleon, including with The Curse, in which he plays Dougie, a reality-TV producer who habitually sparks conflicts. Tasked with shepherding host Whitney (Emma Stone) and Asher’s (Nathan Fielder) eco-living home-renovation show Flipanthropy to HGTV’s airwaves, Dougie is a troublemaking weirdo with long dark hair, a matching goatee, and hands decked out in copious rings and bracelets. Driven by dubious motives, he’s a catalyst for absurd mayhem. Yet for Safdie, he’s most interesting because he’s not just a comedic cartoon.
“You see somebody like Dougie a lot, everywhere, and you can judge that person immediately. You do that in episode one; you think you have a perfect idea of who Dougie is,” he remarks. “But then you start understanding that this guy is dealing with a lot of stuff. He’s not a good guy, but he’s deeply, deeply sad. There’s something really tragic about him. It was, how do we humanize this guy? How do we make him somebody who’s not just a caricature of someone you think you’d see on this show? We’re playing with the idea of the crazy reality producer who’s always trying to make drama. He is doing that, but he’s also a real person. Everybody is a real person, and if that’s so, they’re all going to have something in their lives that complicates who they are. That became key for Dougie.”
According to Safdie, the benefit of working in television as an actor (and as a showrunner, alongside Fielder) was that it afforded a tremendous amount of time and space to really dig into his role. “That’s part of what I love about being involved with something like The Curse. You’re on it for the whole time, and you’re seeing characters grow, and how you can change and move things. You just want to get people to do the best work they can do. When everybody’s working like that, they feel so great and are so proud of it.”
No matter his current stretch of standout performances, however, Safdie doesn’t intend to simply stay in front of the camera in the future. Whether it’s with his brother Josh or solo (something about which he’s not yet ready to divulge), he makes clear that, “I’m definitely going to direct moving forward. It’s about finding the right project. I have ideas, and it’s just a matter of following what I feel I want to explore. It’s accepting that mindset of, what am I interested in right now? And then following that. Because it’s really all I know how to do.”
