Interview: Michael Stuhlbarg on Call Me By Your Name and The Shape of Water

Michael Stuhlbarg was already beloved by fans and critics of New York theater, especially for his role as the childlike, mentally disabled younger brother in playwright Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman, when he rose a few rungs on the ladder of fame by playing the title role in A Serious Man. Joel and Ethan Coen's masterful tragicomedy got much of its soul from Stuhlbarg's performance as a middle-class, middle-aged Midwesterner whose comfortable life is upended by a baffling onslaught of calamities large, small and ridiculous. Since then, Stuhlbarg has disappeared into roles ranging from quietly terrifying gangster Arnold Rothstein on HBO's Boardwalk Empire to loyal sidekick Sy Feltz on season three of Noah Hawley's FX series Fargo to brilliant but schlubby Andy Hertzfeld in Danny Boyle's Steve Jobs.

The increasingly in-demand actor met with me at his publicist's Midtown office to discuss two of his latest films, Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name and Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water. Stuhlbarg speaks softly and deliberately, often pausing to think about what he wants to say, yet he's no tortured artist. Smiling or laughing frequently, he often used the word “joy” as he talked about studying with Marcel Marceau, growing up as “the luckiest kid in the world,” and whether he would want to play a character he hated.

You studied drama at Juilliard and in London—and in Lithuania, which isn't part of the standard route to dramatic success. How did you wind up there?

I was part of an exchange program at Juilliard. Our third year, we were asked to participate with the Vilnius Conservatory. They came to Juilliard and studied Tennessee Williams and American theater forms, like musical theater—took tap dancing with our teachers—and then put on a show to show us the things they'd been working on. And then we went to Vilnius, my whole class.

Did they have a different way of approaching acting there?

We were studying Chekhov, particularly. We got to see some theater as well. It sort of revealed to us that there's limitless ways of telling the classics. There were some beautiful expressionistic performances of Chekhov's plays that we saw that cracked open what could be thought of as a rigid form.

So it was less realistic and more expressionistic than what you'd been doing?

Yes! Very much so. Nina, instead of talking about being a seagull, she became a seagull. [He stretches out his arms like a bird's wings.] Things like that. Read the rest in Slant Magazine