André Holland investigates identity in ‘The Actor’

The film, set in the 1950s, opens in Ohio where a New York theater actor, Paul Cole (Holland), is in bed with a married white woman and gets beaten senseless when her husband discovers them. Cole’s long-term memory vanishes, and his short-term memory becomes erratic, leaving him to try to reconstruct himself and his life. But he’s run out of town by the authorities for attempted adultery and only has enough bus fare to make it to a small town still far from New York. There, he lands a job at a tannery to earn money to make it home, and falls for a local costume designer (Gemma Chan).

“The story starts from the question of, who are we? Do we have control of the destiny of our personalities, and how much are we just the subject of our experiences and our memories, our wins and our failures?,” Johnson said. “And can we change?”

Holland says he’s always believed in the human potential to change, but that memory plays a tricky role in shaping our present and our future. “I find myself telling the same stories over and over, but they’re always just a little bit different until I wonder what actually happened,” he said.

In the movie, Paul’s buddies and colleagues shrug off his womanizing and his cruel streak — in one scene, some pals laugh at the way he used to torment a homeless man — and Paul is confronted with the idea that he may be better off becoming a new person, Holland noted. “He has an opportunity to piece together who he was, or live in the moment and build a new life.”

Johnson uses stylized musical cues and surrealistic directorial flourishes — such as the background disappearing when two characters are engrossed in conversation, and street scenes made to look like movie sets — to imbue the film with an obvious artifice and a dreaminess. He also cast supporting actors including Simon McBurney and Tracey Ullman in multiple roles.

“I love the theatrical qualities of filmmaking and think that, through metaphor, you get to something authentic,” Johnson said.

Johnson is best known for his stop-motion animation work, like the Oscar-nominated 2015 film “Anomalisa,” about a man who sees everyone around him as identical until he meets a woman who stands out. He co-directed with Charlie Kaufman. It was Kaufman who recommended “Memory” to Johnson.

Johnson loved how the book “subverted the noir-thriller genre to excavate and explore the nature of identity,” he said, and set about figuring out how to translate its interior monologue into a film. (Kaufman serves as executive producer.)

The director developed the script with Ryan Gosling, who was originally going to star. When he dropped out (remaining as another executive producer), the film company Neon suggested Holland.

“André has such access to his emotional experience,” Johnson said. “He’s one of those people where you look in their eyes and feel what they’re feeling.”

Holland was immediately intrigued by the project. “When Duke described how he wanted a cast playing multiple parts, the theater nerd in me went crazy,” he recalled. “And movies like this have always, to my knowledge, had [characters] played by white actors.”

The director and star discussed how much to change the film once it became a story about a Black man in trouble for being with a white woman in the Midwest in the 1950s.

“I wanted to honor the reality of the time period,” Holland said, “and there’s one version of this film where you could lean all the way into that, but we thought, ‘What happens if we just gesture towards it so it leaves space for other things?’”

Those “other things” are what drew both men to the project. To prepare, Johnson steeped himself in philosophical questions, like how much of identity is rooted in memory and whether, as an individual, you “are the thing that’s reflected in the mirror, or the thing that’s observing the reflection?”

Once the story begins, he said, the larger ideas fade into the background, “and it’s about the emotional experience, and being connected to this character.”

Making a low-budget film in Budapest with a lot of roles to fill, there was a practical reason to have the actors play multiple parts. “But it also gives the audience an experience similar to Paul’s where they wonder if they’ve seen that person before,” Johnson said. “And this is about actors who become their characters, so you wonder: ‘What is real?‘ and ’Who are we really?‘”

As Paul wanders through the haze and the maze caused by his amnesia, Johnson hopes it gets viewers thinking. But they shouldn’t look to the film for all the answers. “Hopefully it sparks thoughts that continue beyond the film,” he said, “but we’re all just asking questions, nobody has any answers.”

Stuart Miller can be reached at stuartmiller5186@gmail.com.