Finding New Babylon: A Conversation with Actor Benny O. Arthur

sweater by Dries Van Noten
jeans by Y/Project
belt by Saint Laurent


interview by Camille Ange Pailler
photography by Riccardo Meroni
styling by Ina Witzel
talent Benny O. Arthur @ Martensgarten 
hair & makeup by Simona Parrella
production by Pier Guccione Prata @ Residenza Production
light assistance by Leonardo Galeotti
styling assistance by Typhaine Porta 


CAMILLE ANGE PAILLER: When did you discover your love of acting, and what inspired you to pursue it as a career?

BENNY O. ARTHUR: You know, I’ve always had a love for storytelling. I was a very observant kid and would always watch people at school, or on the train, and try to imitate them and their mannerisms. I also used to love playing with my sister’s dolls. I would create characters and stories with them that I would perform for my family. There was a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction when I created and played out these storylines, because in my head, it was as though I had just made a movie. I also have to credit my mom for this, I guess we can call it motherly intuition, because without any connection or access to that field, she signed me up for local theater programs when I was in third grade. She didn’t grow up watching a ton of movies or going to the theater, but somehow she just knew. I was fourteen when I took part in my first professional theater production at the Deutsche Opera Berlin. It was super exciting seeing how what had started in my bedroom with my sister’s toys suddenly happened in real life on such a large scale. When I graduated from high school, I realized that an acting career was something that I seriously wanted and could pursue. But yeah, I think maybe I’ve always kind of known.

PAILLER: What has been your most memorable role or project so far, and why?

ARTHUR: I’ve been fortunate to have worked on some really cool projects, but so far, I’d have to say that the series Django, which premiered on Sky earlier this year, has to be the most memorable. I had never really envisioned myself being in a Western, let alone playing a cowboy because I had only ever really encountered this genre through a white perspective that left out stories of cowboys of color. What really drew me to this story was this new perspective and the potential for stories from these kinds of individuals that were very much present in that era. It was such a privilege to get to work with an incredibly talented cast from all over Europe. Being in the midst of Matthias Schoenaerts, Nicholas Pinnock, Lisa Vicari, and Noomi Rapace, and just being able to learn from each one of them by watching them work is something I am really grateful for.

 

blouse, belt & jeans by Saint Laurent

 

dress by De Pino
leather pants & shoes by Saint Laurent

blouse, belt & leather pants by Saint Laurent

PAILLER: Tell me about Django and your role as Kevin.

ARTHUR: Django was a really special project. The series is a reimagining of Sergio Corbucci’s classic Spaghetti Western character. The series tries to show more perspectives of different people in that period—the minorities, and the world they created for themselves after the American Civil War. I played the role of Kevin Ellis, son of John Ellis, who is the visionary founder of an idealistic city called New Babylon. It’s a community that welcomes all outcasts and people of different races and creeds as equals. When we meet Kevin, he is his father’s number one advocate. He believes uncompromisingly in his vision. Our parents are often like superheroes to us when we’re kids, and it’s only as we get older that we recognize their humanity and their flaws. As John’s youngest son, Kevin has a youthful and hopeful worldview, which eventually brings him into conflict with the harsh realities of the Wild West. The idealistic image he has of his father begins to crumble as he comes to terms with the fact that even our heroes harbor darkness.

PAILLER: What do you enjoy most about being an actor?

ARTHUR: There is so much out there in the world, it can be quite daunting to think that you only get to live one life. You can find yourself doubting your decisions and questioning if the path that you’re on is the right one, or if there’s something that you’re missing out on. But as an actor, your life kind of revolves around letting yourself face and live through the realities, emotions, and experiences of so many different lives, different jobs, different time periods, perspectives, mentalities, and cultures. It’s one of the most enriching jobs out there because you learn to see not just through your own eyes, but also through those that may be in complete contradiction to your own.

jeans by Y/Project

jeans & denim jacket by Y/Project

PAILLER: Were there any particular actors that inspired you during your childhood?

ARTHUR: I don’t know if as a child I really looked to the actors very much. But as I have gotten older and gained more perspective for the craft, I have really come to love and appreciate the work of actors like Mahershala Ali, Viola Davis, Albrecht Schuch, and Félix Maritaud, to name a few. I also always get super inspired and excited about the new young talent that emerges like in Lukas Dhont’s Close.

 

pants & shoes by Situationist

 

PAILLER: Can you share any upcoming projects or roles you are currently working on or have lined up?

ARTHUR: I’m really excited about a feature film titled Wake Up, which we shot on the Canary Islands last year and is set to come out sometime later this year, as well as another Sky original Series with an incredible German cast. Definitely keep a lookout!

coat by Saint Laurent

Dark Aesthetics: An Interview With Actor Anton Yelchin and Kate Parfet On Their Photographic Collaboration

Today on Autre, we present a photographic editorial by actor Anton Yelchin – who stars in a new movie called Green Room as a member of a punk band that is forced to battle violent white supremacists after witnessing a murder – and model/photographer Kate Parfet set in a desolate landscape in Joshua Tree. Eschewing the traditional late sixties vibe that most photographers try to achieve in the desert, Yelchin and Parfet went for a darker and grittier aesthetic that harkens runaway fugitives playing with a camera at their hideout. We thought it appropriate to ask them a few questions about the shoot, their collaborative process and how photography is different than their respective "day jobs."  

Autre: How did you both discover and become interested in photography?

Kate Parfet: Growing up, I spent several summers on a lake in Vermont at Lochearn Camp for Girls; an attempt to socialize an introverted preteen without a list of extracurricular passions.  While I didn’t take to waterskiing or the proverbial basket weaving as expected, I did take to taking photos of inanimate objects on the disposable cameras I’d buy at the canteen. I’d process the images in town, collage them and make into small zines.

Anton Yelchin: At age 12 I had an obsession with Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and then proceeded to watch all the other Kubrick films I could including a doc called Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures in which it was revealed to me that he started as a photographer...I got a camera sometime shortly after, but spent many years just photographing flowers in my neighborhood. Somewhere, there are albums filled with prints of roses, like a backlog of unused images for air freshener ads. I only started to take photography more seriously and shooting more aggressively a few years ago.

Autre: Kate, you are also a model, what do you get from being behind the camera that you can’t get from being in front of it?

Parfet: While I like the collaborative process of working with a full team on a more traditional editorial shoot, I use the camera to snap the world felt and seen in my head. Anton tends to shoot more portraits and I gravitate towards the in between moments.  We’re both incredibly obsessive with detail and like to control the elements of the frame - light, positioning and color balance.  I’m must admit we’ve talked ad nauseam about how many stops to push a photo.  Funny enough I still don’t think we’re any closer to our answer.

Autre: Anton, you are an accomplished and talented actor, but also a talented photographer, do you feel like you can express yourself differently with a camera opposed to being a mark or taking directives?

Yelchin: Taking photographs seems to be a means to express some kind of emotional, abstractive narrative. I look at the images that I'm most proud of like a film about the world the way I see it (or at least saw it at that moment, a perspective that seems to be ever-shifting and filled with self-doubt.) I've always liked the idea of lining images up into a kind of "story" but without any particular beginning, middle, or end, which is more in line with what I think of narrative anyway and is something that Kate and I bonded over. I think the beauty of images is that they are by definition fetishes and every image (banal or not) as a fetish holds within it the promise of a sensuousness that (without generalizing) at least I, as a human being, am drawn to. I was drawn to photography as an extension of film, and the beauty of film is that it's a sensuous, fetishistic medium.

Autre: Who are some photographers or artists that you are both inspired by?

Yelchin: I think what inspires me is in a constant state of flux...it's easier to stick to photographers and perhaps cinematographers, though the great medieval, Mannerist, and Baroque painters of Italian, Spanish, Flemish, and German origin are a constant source of inspiration, along with select modernists like Dali. Hieronymous Bosch holds an especially tight hold on my imagination. Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Jacob Holdt, Boris Mikhailov, Nan Goldin, Philip Lorca de Corca...images in Cassavetes films, the new Romanian Cinema and the work of DP Oleg Mutu...the cinematographer Michael Chapman. I've always loved Brassai's images of prostitutes at night. I've recently been very influenced by the images in the old AtomAge magazines. Kenneth Anger's work.  The list goes on. I already sound like an ass so best to stop there.

Parfet: I too am inspired by Nan Goldin and other contemporaries like Todd Hido, Stephen Shore, Robert Adams, Alec Soth. The work of poets Angela Rawlings, Susan Howe and Gretchen Mattox, to name a few, give me a roadmap in my head for the images I seek out when attempting to step outside myself and try a new direction.

"....Kate and I agreed that it would be more interesting to bring some of our personal tastes into a setting that hasn't generally been aligned with that aesthetic. The desert also makes me think of aliens, and aliens make me think of glam rock and glam rock inevitably makes me think of leather and leather makes me think of...well..."

Autre: When you are both shooting each other, do you communicate or is it intuitive?

Parfet: We tend to have a shorthand and a very intuitive feel for each other and for the images we want to create, so beyond small directions...it's quite easy and intuitive. A lot of people go to the desert because it’s the perfect place to shoot something that looks like it was taken in the late sixties, but you two went for grit opposed to glamour, why is that?

Yelchin: We both agreed on the sentiment that we are opposed to the banality of post '68 imagery that seems to pervade everything these days. For lack of a better term, I'm utterly turned off by all the hippy shit (I can envision Kate nodding enthusiastically in agreement.) We like Surrealistic Pillow as much as the next guy (begs the question, does the next guy even like Surrealistic Pillow?) but are opposed to stripping '68 (and other modes) of whatever transgressive attitudes it had at the time and using it and them purely as an aesthetic, which by and large is an action almost impossible to achieve with anything these days given the overwhelming prevalence of the Image in our culture and how everything becomes an advertisement for some mode of being. That being said, I think Kate and I agreed that it would be more interesting to bring some of our personal tastes into a setting that hasn't generally been aligned with that aesthetic. The desert also makes me think of aliens, and aliens make me think of glam rock and glam rock inevitably makes me think of leather and leather makes me think of...well...

Autre: Both of you shoot predominantly on film, or entirely on real film, do you think there is something lost in digital?  

Yelchin: I like film because it brings you very close to the absurd reality that you might spend a day shooting and not get a single image that you like or works, and you won't really know for a few days at least as you wait. It connects you and grounds you to a material reality and a patience that seems lost with digital. I also think the grain texture remains forever different, and in my opinion, what I find to be more beautiful.

Parfet: I just echo the sentiment really. The film process slows the brain against the immediate gratification epidemic of the digital age.

Autre: Anton, when you are on set, do you pine to get back out and shoot pictures or do you bring your camera with you when you shoot a movie?

Yelchin: I usually bring a point and shoot with me so I can go out on the weekends and shoot a bit. I used to bring more cameras, but I'm also an Ebay nut so sometimes I'll order something if I'm really pining for it when I'm on location.

Autre: There is something very real, almost dark, about both of your aesthetics, where do you think this comes from?

Parfet: I think acknowledging darkness is an important and natural part of self-exploration. My images help me process certain complex emotions instead of internalizing in an unhealthy way. 

Yelchin: I've always been drawn to a certain kind of dark aesthetic in cinema and in film, to what's abjected or considered abject. I've been tremendously influenced by noirish cinema whether that's Von Sternberg or Scorsese in the 70s or Lynch, etc.  

Autre: What’s next?

Yelchin: More film! Hopefully more ideas, more work. Trying to learn, trying to see differently.

Parfet: Playing in the unchartered waters of digital images. Helping set up a new photo studio concept in Tokyo’s Daikanyama district. Would like to get back to the desert at some point.  

You can see more of Anton Yelchin's photography by following his Instagram page. You can follow Kate Parfet here. Green Room is out now in theaters. Text and interview by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE