In a world where justice has become entertainment and the pursuit of ratings threatens to eclipse the pursuit of truth, Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime explores the increasingly blurred lines between performance and reality. Set in 2006, at the height of To Catch a Predator‘s cultural dominance, the A24 psychological thriller stars Robert Pattinson as a heightened version of television journalist Chris Hansen, whose ambition to expose society’s monsters gradually transforms his reporting into something altogether more unsettling. But while Hansen finds himself increasingly consumed by the character he’s created for the cameras, it’s Skyler Gisondo‘s Dan, an aspiring actor drawn into the morally murky world of televised sting operations, who provides the film with much of its emotional vulnerability.
For Dan, what begins as an exciting opportunity to finally be seen becomes a disturbing examination of how easily admiration can turn into dependence, and how the desire to belong can compromise one’s sense of self. Speaking with our Peter Gray during a recent press conference, Gisondo reflected on drawing from his own experiences as a young actor to understand Dan’s desperation, the complicated paternal dynamic between Dan and Chris, and the heartbreaking irony of a performer who becomes so consumed by someone else’s narrative that he ultimately loses sight of his own identity.
Skyler, what I found fascinating about Dan is that he enters this world believing he’s simply taking an acting job, but gradually he finds himself in situations where the consequences are terrifyingly real. As an actor yourself, I wondered whether you saw Dan’s journey as someone discovering the power of performance, or someone discovering how powerless a performer can become once someone else is controlling the narrative?
It’s a great question. I don’t think Lance (Oppenheim, director) or I, or Ajon (Singh, screenwriter), realised just how much this movie was about performance, in a way, and it became more and more clear as things went along. For me, having started acting at a young age, there was so much to draw from when it came to Dan’s journey. The clearest instances were any moment where…I remember very clearly that feeling of excitement before a big audition, and that quiet desperation in Dan’s eyes. Every week, with the big audition, the fantasy of what could be is dangling right in front of you, and yet in that audition process you can’t wear any of that. You have to just go in and do your thing. That was something really helpful to tap into.
And secondly, the feeling of being around Chris for the first time. To Dan, Chris is somebody who has seemingly everything Dan wants. He’s the star of his own TV show – at least that’s how Dan sees it in the beginning. Even still, when I was younger, and in the early days of Primetime, Rob Pattinson is an actor who is ten feet tall in my eyes, and that feeling of awe – of being in the same room as an actor you admire, let alone doing a scene with them. I remember that feeling.
Dan is so eager and excited that when the opportunity for the thing he’s always wanted comes in the form of something he never really expected, you can see him doing the calculus on the fly. He’s trying to compartmentalize – maybe I just didn’t realize what acting is, or maybe this is what it can be – and he’s trying to figure out how far he can stretch himself, and how much he wants to stretch himself to meet the moment. Those are all things that I think any actor, over the course of their career, has felt in some form.
In Lance’s description of the sting house, he called it a home away from home. And Chris and Dan’s relationship became the emotional heart of the film. Looking at this surrogate family – Dan enters looking for an opportunity, but also for something that resembles a family for him. Did you think his attachment to Chris was driven by professional admiration? Or by an emotional need to feel that he mattered to someone?
Great question. I think a combination of the two. He is in awe of Chris, professionally and creatively. At least in Dan’s eyes, Chris is an actor who is the star of his own television show, and Dan’s never been this close to his dream, or to somebody who’s living that dream. And then Dan seems like a pretty scared, lonely, lost soul in the beginning of this movie, and Chris, in that early scene, says, “You remind me of one of my sons.” I think there’s maybe a paternal element to their relationship. It’s unclear if Dan loves him, wants to be him, or just wants what he has. There’s a lot going on, and that’s why Dan is so desperately wanting to compartmentalize. Very quickly, he discovers that things are not what he thought they would be, and this job is not what he thought it would be. He’s desperate to make it all take a shape he can wrap his head around.
Even in that moment of Dan becoming Chris, trying to channel Chris – Lance and I talked about that scene. Is Dan thinking, “At the very least, I’ll have something for my reel; I can try to create a character here”? Or is he thinking, “I want to prove that I can be the star of my own show”? Or is it not even about the performance, but just wanting to matter, to earn Chris’s approval, to mean something to Chris? I think Dan is so mixed up by that point, and so close to his breaking point, that he’s not even sure what he’s doing, or why. And Matt (Smith) is so great in that scene. I think it’s a combination of all of those things.
That’s part of what’s so heartbreaking for Dan at the end. It’s not just the loss of a professional opportunity. Chris’s opinion of Dan means everything to Dan, in some way. So for him to get to a place where he’s willing to say – Rob has that line, “Your definition of bad and my definition are two very different things” – Dan is ready to stand up for himself, and basically says, “I don’t think I want any part of what you have.” And that’s why, in that final scene, when he’s asked, “Are you an actor?” — we talked about different versions of Dan answering that question. We talked about him saying, “Yes, I am.” We talked about him saying, “No, I’m not.” And then we landed on the idea of him just looking, and having really no idea, because it’s almost like he hasn’t given the question much consideration in a year. This whole experience was so discombobulating that he no longer even knows if he knows what acting is, or if that’s something he’s even interested in.
Primetime is now screening in Australian theatres.
