Taylor Kitsch Forever

Taylor Kitsch is feeling good, stretching muscled limbs on the climb up the waterfall- and ancient-rock-festooned River Place Nature Trail in Austin. He already boxed this morning, but it’s nice to get a second workout in—Kitsch doesn’t want to wind up looking, as he puts it, “like a bag of milk.”

We’ve only just started the trek, but I—nominally closer in physique to “bag of milk” than “Taylor Kitsch”—need to hydrate.

Then Kitsch opens his beautiful mouth and reveals some bad news in a tone more like the flat Canadian blurt of a Tim Hortons employee shouting out a doughnut order than the throaty “Texas forever” of Friday Night Lights screw-up Tim Riggins: "I didn't bring water or anything. Shit!"

When you actually meet someone you've only seen in two dimensions, the impulse is to note discrepancies. Real Kitsch is, turns out, much louder and more Canadian than Screen Kitsch. Real Kitsch is wearing Ray-Bans and Nikes, not a military or football uniform. Real Kitsch's black F-150 has a TY chicken toy and iced-coffee cups in it, not empty Lone Star cans.

Screen Kitsch represses—as martyred Navy SEAL Michael Murphy in Lone Survivor, as the eponymous Mars resident in doomed Disney movie John Carter, as closeted highway-patrol officer Paul Woodrugh in True Detective season 2, and, of course, on Friday Night Lights. No actor has been better (or more telegenic) at expressing silent pain since Clint Eastwood and his chapped lips crawled out of the desert in A Fistful of Dollars.

Real Kitsch, meanwhile, talks. Like…a lot.

After all that onscreen silence, hearing so much from Kitsch—and so loudly—is a little jarring.

It’s still early on our journey up Mount Dehydration when Kitsch reveals that the last time he tried the two-hour ascent, he had to turn back halfway through. We’re on a hike that you couldn’t finish, and we don’t have any water. I might literally die. Kitsch promises that if I do, he’ll retrieve my body on his way down from the summit. He also offers reassurance: When he attempted the aborted climb, Kitsch says, “I was losin’ the weight”—dieting to emaciate his muscled body enough to play David Koresh on Paramount Network's miniseries Waco. (Paramount Network is the new name for Spike TV, and the first episode premiered last night.) Kitsch portrays the self-identified Branch Davidian prophet, who perished, along with more than 70 acolytes and FBI agents, in a 1993 siege that was broadcast live by TV news crews.

In this role—which is the exact opposite of all those sexy, internal roles that were supposed to make Kitsch super-famous—there are words. So many words. Possibly more words than Kitsch has used in every previous part he's played combined.

Words that persuaded Koresh's parishioners to join him in the Mount Carmel Center. Words that assuaged the earthly problems they'd faced outside its walls. Words that explained the New Light revelation, in which God revealed that—what do you know!—Koresh was the only man allowed to have sex with the female congregants. Words that lured 12-year-old girls into his bed. Words that let the FBI know that the Lord had spoken to Koresh, and the Branch Davidians would not be coming out, thanks.

Or, as Kitsch puts it: "Dave talks a shit-ton in Waco."

Taylor Kitsch talks a shit-ton on our hike.

To be fair, I'm alternating between asking questions and being completely out of breath. Unlike during Kitsch's last venture up the trail, he's got the juice to loudly greet fellow hikers, loudly assess the goodness of the dogs we see paddling around in streams (all score highly), and loudly tell me about the time Tommy Lee Jones cold-called him to ask if he wanted to hang out on Jones's San Saba ranch.

Kitsch and Jones drove around the property for eight hours, Kitsch slinging questions at him as they toodled around Jones's cattle and polo field. Tommy Lee Jones plays polo? "Huge into polo," Kitsch says. "Amazing." In between lawn-sports revelations, Kitsch says, Jones mentioned he was writing a Western, cowboy kinda movie, and since "No Country for Old Men's probably top five" for Kitsch, that sounded good to him. Now, Jones speaks in movies about as often as Clarence Thomas does during Supreme Court arguments. It feels like the time to bring up Kitsch's pre-Waco onscreen reticence.

You and Jones are on similar wavelengths as actors. You don't necessarily need to do a lot of talking.

"That's the ultimate flattery," Kitsch honks, generously pretending to tie his shoe while I pant.

Kitsch says that when he was on Friday Nights Lights, he would cut his own lines and replace them with looks. "That monologue—I'm not going to say that," he'd tell other actors. "And then here, when you ask me a question, I'm just not going to say anything."

Taylor Sheridan was Kitsch's acting coach for the role of Tim Riggins. (This was a few years before Sheridan became the master of the neo-Western, writing and/or directing Hell or High Water, Sicario, and Wind River between 2015 and 2017.) He likens Kitsch to other laconic icons: "You hear stories where Steve McQueen would literally give lines away. I just worked with Kevin Costner, and he'd say, 'I don't need to say this line—I can say it with a look.' That combination of talent and knowing the character is rare."

"I don't know that many actors that do that anymore," says Kitsch. "Rather than just bein' so talky."

If it is not obvious yet: Taylor Kitsch is a truly genuine human. He recently spent a few weeks with his mom in Uganda, working with anti-poaching group WildAid and the African Children’s Choir. He’s the first actor I've ever done an extensive interview with who did not have a personal publicist, and he seems confused that this surprises me, or that I would think he might need one.

Kitsch is also genuinely generous, lavishing praise on Cons and Chands (Friday Night Lights' Connie Britton and Kyle Chandler), Pizzo (True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto), Bromance (his relationship with Only the Brave co-star Josh Brolin), Rach (Rachel McAdams), Jesse and Dunst (FNL co-star Jesse Plemons and fiancée Kirsten Dunst, who I have a hard time believing actually answers to that), the aforementioned Dave (David Koresh, though this one is maybe less "praise" and more "empathy"). Kitsch loves "Oz," where he loved filming "Wolvie" with "Hugh," whom Kitsch loved learning so much from about "working your 'bag' off." (That's Australia, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Jackman, and scrotum, in order.)

We've finished the death march and are walking back to Kitsch's pickup through his new neighborhood, near the house he spent six years planning and building. A few buddies helped him lay the brick for the gym, which saved him what he describes as "a ton of money." Kitsch says he still feels like he's house-sitting in the new place, even though he’s a relatively wealthy man now, a celebrity who co-stars in Mark Wahlberg movies and turns down parts that would shock you. (At least, they shocked me when he told me about them off the record.) But I get why Kitsch isn’t totally at ease here. He grew up in a trailer, and we’re strolling past a massive golf course and what feels like endless streets with succulent landscaping fronting sand-colored mansions. Some, like his, are tasteful. Others look like they could be Gene Simmons's pool house. (Rich people in Austin like columns!)

As we walk up the gravel-lined sidewalk, Kitsch tells an elaborate story about a custom-carpet guy who tried to upsell him on a "special" $11,000 rug made from refurbished parts of vintage rugs. "That's a fucking glorified used rug," Kitsch shouted, vowels as broad and flat as the Texas plains. "Get that fucking rug outta my house. I'll call you if I do Transformers 11, and then you can fucking put this whole place under rugs." (Kitsch wound up purchasing a shag rug on Amazon for $200. He loves it.)

Kitsch doesn't mind spending money on things that are worth it—there's the house, obviously. The F-150. The Australian shepherd he spent years on a waitlist for. He finally got Zero—as in "number of regrets he had about purchasing this dog"—right before he had to go to the U.K. for half a year to film John Carter.

Oh. Right. John Carter. The movie that was supposed to turn Kitsch into a superstar.

It was 2012. A few movie studios had offered Kitsch starring roles in huge blockbusters that would ostensibly advance his career. So Kitsch asked Friday Night Lights showrunner Jason Katims to temporarily write out his character, who wound up in off-screen jail after taking the fall for his brother’s illegal chop shop. Kitsch was none too pumped, having "pleaded to Katims just to keep it grounded for Riggs." But Kitsch was grateful for the time off and concedes it was not the stupidest crime committed by a fictional resident of Dillon, Texas. (That honor would go to Jesse Plemons's Landry, who inexplicably murders someone in the show's second season. Kitsch—whose character was unaware of the killing—would ruin takes by yelling at Plemons, "You literally murdered someone! You can't fuckin' keep murdering people!")

That year, three Kitsch-led films came out, all of which sounded like slam dunks if you enjoyed prestige filmmakers, extraterrestrials, and Taylor Kitsch portraying military men: Oliver Stone's fun "weed growers take on a cartel to get their kidnapped girlfriend back" drama Savages, in which Kitsch plays a former Navy SEAL; Battleship, an incredibly enjoyable Peter Berg movie about an alien invasion in which Kitsch portrays a Naval lieutenant; and John Carter, a reportedly $350 million Disney movie about Kitsch's titular character, a Civil War veteran who gets transported to Mars, where, it turns out, he is a prince. Carter is tasked with navigating inter-civilization conflicts between the Barsoomians and fighting space apes. There is a magical medallion that transports people hundreds of millions of years through time! Willem Dafoe plays something called a "Thark"!

None of these movies did particularly well, but John Carter was the only one that bombed. Publicly. Spectacularly. Kitsch says he was "gutted." To do the film, Kitsch left an unbelievable, life-changing TV show where he worked with people he loved, moved to England, used up six months of his life. "My thyroid was out of whack," he says. "I'd been dieting for so long. I remember the doctor going, 'You're fucked. If you were a mailman, I'd order you to do two weeks' bed rest.' " Kitsch had to give up Zero, who was too young to stay in quarantine during the half-year shoot. He cried as he drove away from the breeder.

It was all for a movie that did so badly, Kitsch honestly wondered if he would ever be allowed to act in anything again. It wasn't just the wretched box-office numbers—the reviews savaged him. Kitsch remembers reading one that basically said, "This guy should never even have started working."

Let me be clear: Kitsch wasn't the problem. Director Andrew Stanton, who Kitsch reminds me "is an incredible storyteller who had just come off a couple of Oscars" for Wall-E and Finding Nemo, had never made a live-action movie before. If you have the misfortune of seeing John Carter, this will be deeply obvious. For his part, Kitsch turned in a grounded, stoic performance as a man struggling to overcome the loss of war in a film that was much more interested in watching him fight Tharks in a loincloth.

Kitsch tried to voice his concerns during production, noting that he spent the entire movie falling down and being bewildered. (Kitsch's borderline comprehensive recounting of his John Carter dialogue: "Who's that? Where am I? Why am I here? What's going on? Who are you? What's this?")

"There were so many cooks in that kitchen," Kitsch says with a shrug. None of them was particularly interested in listening to him.

At the center of the Venn diagram of Real Kitsch and Screen Kitsch is the need to grind. Remember his admiration for Jackman “working his bag off”? It’s a high honor Kitsch also bestows on Mark Ruffalo, as well as on David Koresh's purported ability to memorize the Bible at 16. Kitsch lovingly recalls training for Lone Survivor by carrying 75-pound backpacks during eight-mile runs on Newfoundland's Skerwink Trail ("one of the top ten trails," proclaims Taylor Kitsch!) and passing out from exhaustion on the 126-day shoot for John Carter. Did I mention he read letters Civil War soldiers sent home to better inform the ten minutes of John Carter that do not take place on Mars? Kitsch literally learned sleight of hand for a minor role as grifter mutant Gambit in Wolverine.

You can only imagine the workout Kitsch's bag is getting on Pieces. He tells me about it in his pickup, driving to a dinner where he informs me, "I'm probably going to overeat, for sure." Pieces is Kitsch's directorial debut, and his voice rises to previously unmet decibel levels as he explains that he also wrote the movie and will star in it.

Making Pieces is the exact opposite of Kitsch showing up after months of solitary, occasionally unappreciated preparation, throwing on a loincloth, and delivering exposition in between sexy broods. It's Kitsch securing shooting locations and coordinating the schedules of producer Peter Berg and, hopefully, actors Harvey Keitel, Derek "Billy Riggins" Phillips, and his old acting coach, Taylor Sheridan. The movie is the story of three schnooks who turn on each other after robbing drug runners—men fucking themselves over after fucking each other over after fucking some real criminals over. It's inspired by Kitsch's middle school weekend job.

"I would snip weed at 13, 14 years old for the Hell's Angels," Kitsch says. "In a grow-up in a basement that had thousands of lights and plants. It's 25 bucks an hour cash, and you snip for 12 hours a day. You're making $400 cash in a weekend." Kitsch got the gig through a friend whose job was driving from B.C. to the East Coast. "Then he'd wait for a pickup in this field at night. These Cessnas drop [the weed] off. And he would have this fucking rental car, pick up these loads of weed and cash, drive it to L.A., and get $65,000 cash for doing it."

The cleavage between Kitsch’s brows deepens as he looks over at me across the cab of his truck. "It's so heavy to tell you all this shit," he says.

There was certainly little evident demand from the people who like Kitsch as a leading man to watch him play David Koresh in Waco. It's a role that entailed massive weight loss, serial-killer glasses, a mullet that looks like it was cut with nail clippers, and incredibly long portions of Koresh's marathon homilies delivered in a nasal, whispery sing-song.

The part also, of course, entailed the depiction of Koresh's automaniacal self-deification, statutory rape, and the on-camera firefight between his parishioners and the FBI. When I first heard Oscar-nominated Michael Shannon was going to be on the miniseries, I assumed that he would be starring as the leader of the Branch Davidians. Shannon says that he was asked if he was playing Koresh so many times that he wound up snapping at Ethan Coen on an airplane: “ ‘Damn! Why does everybody always ask me if I’m playing Koresh?’ I forgot for a second I was talking to Ethan Coen. I really kind of regretted it afterwards. I should have stifled my irritation.”

But Kitsch wanted to stretch himself. It was so different from anything he'd done before, playing a real-life guy whom, director John Erick Dowdle points out, you can readily find footage of online to compare to Kitsch's performance. And of course there was the bananas cast: Shannon, John Leguizamo, Andrea Riseborough, Shea Whigham. Actors who don't have anything to prove, acting-wise.

"We had crazy dialogue, obviously," Kitsch says. "Not once through the whole shoot did Mike [Shannon] have the [script] sides in his pocket or look at the words in between or right before. And he would know the other guy's lines. Me, I know it forwards and backwards. But I still look."

Even before the shoot, that self-doubt had started seeping in. Kitsch had been prepping for months, delivering scripture to the trees on hikes, starving himself, interviewing Koresh's old apostles, learning guitar, immersing himself in the mindset of a man who really believed he'd received a prophecy that the world would end in 1995. On Waco, Shannon actually plays Koresh’s foil, Gary Noesner, a hostage negotiator who could persuade anyone to do anything. (Except, it turned out, another guy who could persuade anyone to do anything.) "[Kitsch] took the whole damn thing very seriously," Shannon says. "He would seclude himself in this little compound he had. Seemed like all he did was study his script."

Stepping into a megalomaniacal messiah's sweatpants can wear on a man. “I never played a character that had done things that [I] don’t believe in to this extent,” Kitsch says. "I started to listen to other people that had no idea say, 'Oh, you're playing that crazy guy, the Kool-Aid drinker who raped kids.' " Kitsch was freaking out. “Do I really want to play this?” he asked himself. “Do I want my family watching me do this shit? Holy fuck. What am I doing?” And he’d almost lost his career before. “I didn’t even know it was that big of a film,” Kitsch says about his naiveté going into John Carter. This time he knew the stakes.

Kitsch wrote to his team three weeks before filming started and asked what would happen if he backed out.

But then—and yes, Kitsch knows how actor-y this sounds—he realized there was too much Koresh built up in him. "I needed an outlet," Kitsch says. He had stuff he had to let out—to prove—so he did what he always does: worked his bag off.

"Control what you can control and murder what you can control," Kitsch says. And if you, sure, control what you can control and murder what you can control, and combine a face singularly able to convey pain with what director Dowdle simply calls "being amazing at speaking," you can turn a false prophet who died on live TV into a human being. And, in the process, you can turn yourself from someone Hollywood wanted to look hot in front of CGI explosions into an actor people want to hear from.

As Michael Shannon succinctly put it the first time he saw Kitsch in character as Koresh: "Fuck me."

Kitsch pulls his pickup back in front of the South Congress Hotel. He kisses me on the cheek, and I promise to send him proof of something Peter Berg once said about him: "That's kind of who Taylor is. I buy him as the guy that's going to make the wrong decisions, be impulsive, have anger-management issues—but never out of malice." I repeated the quote near the end of our seven hours together, outside the Austin pizza place where Kitsch had unironically ordered a gluten-free pie ("I feel like shit when I eat a ton of bread," he explains) and a couple witbiers ("Wheat is my favorite").

When he first heard what Berg had said about him, Kitsch didn't believe it. "Bullshit!" he yelled, startling a nearby old man who seemed to not be expecting a Canadian air horn to sound across the quiet night.

I get back to my room and text Kitsch a photo of the quote. "Touché," he writes back. Taylor Kitsch knows that sometimes it's better to just not be so talky.

Fashion Editor: Kelly McCabe Assistant: Andrew T. Vottero Grooming by Kumi Craig using Living Libations Grooming by David Cox for R+Co Produced by Connect The Dots