Luke Grimes Says ‘Eddington’ Director Ari Aster Was On His Bucket List

“Ari Aster was on my bucket list ever since I’d seen Hereditary,” enthuses Eddington actor Luke Grimes as we discuss the neo-Western over Zoom. “Then I saw Midsommar, and I liked that even more. When I saw Beau Is Afraid, I had a panic attack. I don’t know what that was. He’s one of the most special filmmakers we have right now.”

Something he loves about the director, who also wrote and produced the satirical black comedy, is that “he’s not picking a destination and getting himself there.”

“Ari is finding everything as organically as the movies feel, and for that reason, they stay in your head. Eddington is one of those films,” he explains. “Just like with his other films, you watch it once, and then you go, ‘I think I need to watch that again.'”

Graves loved watching Aster work and found his process fascinating.

“As far as the technical aspect of making a movie, Ari has the whole thing mapped out in his head. He has every shot, and he will storyboard everything. It’s very old school,” he muses. “It’s like he knows what’s going to be in the frame, how long each of these pieces of the film are going to be, and where he’s cutting. He knows all of that beforehand. When it comes to character, allowing actors to act and even the words, sometimes it’s more like, ‘We’re finding it as we go.’ Usually, there’s a script, and it serves as the blueprint that you can rely on. It was sort of the other way around, but you feel like you’re in really good hands.”

“My actor friends were like, ‘What was it like?’ and all I could say was, ‘Honestly, I had no clue what I was doing and I wasn’t supposed to.’ When you see the film, you’re like, ‘Wow, we got somewhere. That’s a well-rounded character.'”

Set during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, Eddington stars Joaquin Phoenix as Joe Cross, a small-town sheriff who is locked in a standoff with the mayor, played by Pedro Pascal. That sparks a powder keg as neighbors are pitted against each other in this New Mexico pueblo. Grimes plays Guy Tooley, one of Cross’ two police officers. Eddington is exclusively in theaters now.

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Exploring the cop was a unique experience for Grimes.

“I’d never had a director allow themselves to be so unsure of a character that they wrote,” he recalls. “Him going, ‘Look, we don’t have to figure this guy out right away. We can figure this out over the process of making this movie,’ made the character a lot more interesting than just pigeon-holing him and saying, ‘Well, this is a bad guy.’ You can feel that with every character in the movie. There are no villains, but there are also no heroes.”

“Everyone is trying to figure everything out at all times, and that’s how it felt making the movie, and that’s how it felt approaching Guy and these aspects of his personality that are a little unsavory. We were questioning it the whole time. I remember the first meeting we had, Ari said, ‘Let’s not reduce him too much. In every line and every scene, why don’t we try to feel like we don’t know what that is or where that comes from?’ It was really interesting and something I’d never done before.”

‘Eddington’ Examines The Pandemic But It Doesn’t Judge

Although Eddington is set during the pandemic, it neither takes a side nor makes a political statement. If anything, it pokes fun at both groups.

“That was important to Ari when we were making the movie,” Grimes explains. “He did not step into the realm of preaching or trying to give a lot of answers. The point of the movie is to raise a lot of questions. The point of this movie wasn’t to go like, ‘Ha! Look at them over there. We’re in the right,’ and that’s what I liked about it. You don’t see that very much. Everybody has an opinion, and I don’t think this movie necessarily has one. It’s just showing you the reality of what everybody was doing, what they were using, and the manipulation from every single side to try to get what they wanted, and trying to tell everyone else that they’re wrong.”

He continues, “A lot of the characters in this film are using the situation at hand, which is this big scary thing, this virus, and this crazy time, to manipulate people and use that fear to get what they want. Guy is the only person in the movie who’s not quite intelligent enough to know how to use anything to get what he wants. I don’t even think he knows what he wants. I think he wants to impress Joe. I think he wants to be good at his job, and I don’t think he necessarily knows how to do that.”

Shot on location in New Mexico, the state where the fictional town of Eddington is located, the production created hundreds of local jobs, many appearing as extras. The places where they filmed, which included the town of Truths and Consequences, felt very familiar to Graves.

“I’m very used to small-town America. I’m very comfortable there. I live in a town of 700 people in Montana. So for me, I get the mentality,” the Fifty Shades actor reveals. “The only problem arose when we were doing these scenes where there’s a bunch of people picketing, and they’re starting to get what the movie is, and they’re starting to wonder, ‘Which side are these people on?’ That was funny, because you could tell that they’re starting to be a little bit afraid of what this movie is preaching.”

“Again, I think they’ll realize now that it wasn’t preaching. It’s a satire on a very scary time for all of us. The town was amazing. They were happy that we were there and they couldn’t have been kinder and more welcoming.”

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Grimes, also known for Yellowstone and The Magnificent Seven, is more than aware that while this is a neo-western, he’s no stranger to the broader genre. He’s okay with that, but it was never intentional.

“It’s weird. I always make this joke that the cowboy hat found me,” he laughs. “When I showed up in LA wanting to be in films and television, I wasn’t thinking, ‘I’m going to be the guy that’s going to try to do all the Western stuff.’ My father was a huge Western fan, so Westerns were always in our house growing up, and I watched a lot of the classic ones as a kid. Maybe just because of where I grew up and how I grew up, I had the sensibility for it.”

“There’s a reason why you keep getting cast as a similar type of person, and maybe it’s because that’s closer to who I am than a lot of other things. I found that I enjoy it as well. There’s something about shooting in the mountains versus shooting on a soundstage that I find much more enjoyable. I’m not complaining about it at all. I certainly love the genre and love doing it.”

Luke Grimes Says “No One Works Harder Than Joaquin Phoenix”

Something else Grimes loves is having the opportunity to work with Eddington’s lead, the Oscar-winning actor Joaquin Phoenix. He was impressed by how he performed on set and how he remained laser-focused on the work at hand without slipping into the cliché of “going method.”

“The term’ method acting’ has become bastardized, and people don’t know what that means,” he says. “It has become code for actors who are difficult and acting like actors and being like, ‘I’m just going to stay in this character all day,’ so that you know how hard they’re working. I’ve actually never seen someone work harder than Joaquin.”

The Eddington actor concludes, “He gives everything he has got, and he’ll do anything he needs to do to get himself somewhere. When you’re around Joaquin, the whole set knows that the only reason he’s doing anything is to make a good product and to be good in the film. It never feels contrived or like he’s being difficult. If he’s being difficult to anyone, it’s to himself. Beyond that, he’s a generous, beautiful human being, and one of the kindest people I’ve ever met.”