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John Cameron Mitchell scoured England and Ireland to find the lead for his new movie, How to Talk to Girls at Parties—or what he calls a Romeo and Juliet love story “from a pretty queer perspective.” He’d almost given up on casting Enn, a shy teenage punk who draws comics and plays music as a form of escape from his broken home in the London suburbs, when he met Alex Sharp at a Tony Awards party in 2015. Both he and Sharp, who was still an undergrad at the Juilliard School when he was plucked out of relative obscurity to play the lead role in a Broadway play, had taken home their first Tonys that year: Sharp for his breakout as Christopher in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and Mitchell for his lead in Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
Mitchell immediately sensed in Sharp the rare combination of traits required to play Enn: “Possibly virginal, super smart, cool enough to be a punk, emotionally available. You know, it’s hard to find that mix,” Mitchell tells Playboy of the character who hits it off with an alien played by Elle Fanning. “His audition was cute. He said, ‘John, the one thing I’m actually comfortable with is talking to girls at parties.’”
Sharp, a 29-year-old English actor whose boyish inquisitiveness allows him to believably inhabit characters nearly half his age, nailed his first film role. In the roughly three years since being cast with Fanning and Nicole Kidman in How to Talk to Girls at Parties—the sci-fi drama hits U.S. theaters Friday, May 25—Sharp starred as a ballet dancer recovering from an eating disorder while attempting to woo Lily Collins’ character in the Netflix movie To the Bone, and snagged leading roles in a forthcoming remake of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels with Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson, and an adaptation of the novel The Sunlit Night with Jenny Slate and Zach Galifianakis.
Though it might seem like he’s wasted no time breaking into Hollywood, Sharp says just the opposite is true. Before enrolling at Juilliard to study acting in New York City, he worked at a call center in Toronto (he got fired about three days in for righteously adding people to the “do not call” list), backpacked across South America (he returned frequently to a community in Ecuador throughout college) and renovated houses in Middle America as a handyman during the Great Recession—all experiences that helped shaped his perspective as an actor.
“I had a lot of learning to do,” he says of his string of back-to-back film roles. “I wanted to work in film more frequently [in the beginning] than I want to in the future because I think I wanted to learn the trade of how to act in front of cameras. But I do take a lot of time off.” Which is what he’s doing now, speaking by phone from his cabin in the woods in the Northeastern United States—he won’t say where exactly, but it’s remote enough that we’re using FaceTime audio because cell service is spotty. He spends most of his time holed up here, making furniture and living inside the heads of his film characters when he’s preparing for a role, which lately is more often than not.
Today, he’s speaking with a slight American accent, he says, so he can stay immersed in his character, a Russian immigrant to Brooklyn, in The Sunlit Night, which begins filming in Norway this summer. “This is just my way of doing it, is to remove myself from things, and then it allows me to get deeper into the character, to have time. I think time is so important for me to find a character,” he says, adding that it took him about two years after the play ended to mentally let go of his character from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. “I have to feel like I am him—whoever he is.”
“His audition was cute. He said, ‘John, the one thing I’m actually comfortable with is talking to girls at parties.’”
In between production on the forthcoming sci-fi movie UFO, and Hustle, the Scoundrels remake due out this summer, Sharp spent two months driving a Jeep with his dog from east to west along the Mexican-American border. Donald Trump had just been elected president, and Sharp wanted to meet the people who live on either side of the barbed wire “before he puts a big fucking wall down there,” the actor says. “It’s also some of the most beautiful countryside in the world, so I wanted to see it because the wall is going to create a lot of devastation to the natural world down there.” Sharp makes no effort to hide his disdain for President Trump, but he also says liberals are wrong to underestimate him. “He used the [partisan] divide to his advantage, which is what any good, any clever dictator-y person does. They prey on fear, and they divide people,” Sharp says. “He understands how his public persona works, and he understands the art of distraction. He wouldn’t be dangerous if he was stupid.”
Sharp, who was born in the U.K. and holds a Canadian passport, grew up traveling across America with his parents before moving back to the U.K. at the age of seven. His dad used to renovate houses—“He wasn’t a rich man, I should say. I never grew up with money or anything”—and when Sharp moved to the U.S. after high school, he picked up the trade. “It was 2008. Houses were being foreclosed on en masse … Fannie Mae and all these companies were just letting these communities rot, essentially,” says Sharp. “It was quite impoverished areas, so I really got to see all the beautiful and culturally rich sides of America, which I’m grateful for. I wouldn’t have wanted to be doing that in, like, White Plains—that would’ve been boring as hell.”
Speaking in his put-on American accent, it’s easy to forget Sharp grew up anywhere else. His acting process changes from role to role and can be so extreme that “people would think I was nuts,” he says, declining to divulge the details, but it almost always involves an element of self-immersion. “For other people to think that you’re that person, I think you have to think it yourself,” he says. “I think it a lot.”
How to Talk to Girls at Parties hits theaters Friday, May 25.