Duke Johnson is a renowned animator and filmmaker best known for co-directing Charlie Kaufman’s stop-motion film, Anomalisa, which deals heavily with memory and perceptions of others. For Johnson’s live-action solo directing debut, he’s taken on The Actor, an adaptation of crime novelist Donald E. Westlake’s novel, Memory, and starring André Holland and Gemma Chan.
The Actor stars Holland as a Black man in 1950s Ohio who is stricken with amnesia after surviving a brutal attack. Pieces of his memory begin to return as he also begins to court a local woman, only to realize that nothing is quite what it seems to be.
The film is directed by Johnson from a script he co-wrote with Steve Cooney. Aboard as exec-producers are Kaufman and Ryan Gosling. Gosling had been attached to lead an earlier version of the project in 2021.
Joining Holland and Chan in the cast are May Calamawy, Asim Chaudhry, Joe Cole, Fabien Frankel, Olwen Fouéré, Edward Hogg, Toby Jones, Youssef Kerkour, Simon McBurney, Tanya Reynolds, Tracey Ullman, and Scott Alexander Young.
SYNOPSIS: “Based on the novel ‘Memory’ by Donald E. Westlake, ‘The Actor’ finds Paul Cole (Holland) stranded in a mysterious small town with no memory of who he is or how he got here. Without a sense of identity or purpose, he starts from scratch and begins courting a local costume designer Edna (Chan). As bits and pieces of his past slowly emerge, he attempts to find his way home, but time is slippery, appearances can’t be trusted, and it’s unclear which of his identities is real.“
NEON will release The Actor into theaters on March 14th!
