Best Supporting Oddball

Several of the year’s best films have one thing in common: Caleb Landry Jones, who’s just as adept at playing unhinged bullies as he is at playing their victims.

- Kyle Buchanan

CALEB LANDRY JONES yells “Strawberries!” at the ghosts. There are two of them, and the male ghost is rubbing his big, bulbous nose into his partner’s nether regions, bringing her to loudly ecstatic orgasm. She screams over and over, her happy shouts filling the small cabaret space, but Jones screams even louder. “Strawberries!” he says again. “Strawberries!”

Jones and I have made our way to this cabaret show after three drinks at the next-door Hollywood dive bar the Three Clubs. Every time Jones shouts about strawberries, the puppeteers manning those ghosts squint into the audience to look for the source of the voice. It’s too dark for them to see the 27-year-old redhead in a hoodie sitting next to me, and even if the performers do spot Jones, they might not recognize him as the common-thread character actor in several of the year’s most acclaimed films, such as Get Out and The Florida Project. Still, once the puppeteers finally acknowledge his improv prompt—“Oh,” yelps one ghost, “we got a suggestion from the audience!”—it earns the show’s biggest laugh.

Jones has a knack for that sort of thing: With his wiggly, insistent energy, he can single-handedly ramp up a scene from passable to memorable. As he unwinds with me over gin-and-tonics and a semihidden spliff, he acknowledges his recent run of big-screen good luck. “It’s the best working year I’ve probably ever had,” he says. It helps that Jones suits both sides of our current moment: He has the pale skin and southern verve necessary to play a Trump-era villain, but he’s sensitive enough to toggle easily from the bully to his victim. He’s also appealing to auteurs, since Jones is the rare young American actor who eschews social media—his cell phone still has a hinge—in order to throw himself wholly into his work.