To land a role in “May December,” Charles Melton spent six hours doing a self-tape.
“I probably had seven days to do my self-tape and I just dove in immediately,” Melton says. “I was talking with my coach, watching films, talking to my therapist about human emotions….and I completely exhausted myself.”
The result was an understated performance that “felt like it wasn’t just the lines I was saying.”
Director Todd Haynes gave him a series of notes, urging Melton to show more emotion “because I was trying to show almost nothing.”
Normally animated (“I’m an expressive person. My eyebrows go up and down and that’s not Joe. He doesn’t feel the freedom to do that”), Melton made corrections, did a second tape, then flew to New York to read with Julianne Moore “and it was the most magical experience.”
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Melton and Moore got to explore the relationship between a couple who came together when she was an adult and he was 13. Together for 23 years, they’re the focus of an actress who’s making a movie about just such a situation. She quizzes both about the relationship and tries to understand what might have provoked it and why they’re still together.
In the process of learning about Joe (Melton’s character), she discovers he raises monarch butterflies.
For the 33-year-old former “Riverdale” star, the analogy was important. “We find Joe in this cocoon in the beginning of the film,” he says. “If you touch the cocoon and if it fell, it was completely ruined. I aligned Joe’s journey through the metamorphosis of the monarch butterfly and just how delicate that stage in his own life was, where it was when it was taken from him and how that would impact the human that he was.”
Melton leaned into a description in the screenplay: “He’s like a Dutch aristocrat painting.” “It’s very stoic and there’s always something going on behind the eye. This was a good kind of jumping-off point to explore Joe.”
Other scenes helped flesh the character – and helped him land critics’ awards and a Golden Globe nomination for his performance.
Key to understanding the man, he says, was a moment on a roof with his son, who’s about to graduate from high school. The two are smoking marijuana and, “for the first time, being vulnerable.” Melton shot it, talked to a friend about the scene and, the next day, asked director Todd Haynes if they could try it again. “I was crying in between the takes and crying for Joe.” Haynes was moved, too, and agreed to another take. “Whenever those cameras started rolling,” Melton says, “it was like there were no tears because Joe has to hold everything together for some reason. And he doesn’t really know what he’s holding. It’s just such a heartbreaking scene.”
Melton says the film gave him an opportunity to reach for more, to want roles that really challenge him.
“I felt really invigorated and encouraged to just dive in and do whatever research I could do. I really discovered my process along the way.”
While Melton stops short of saying he took a Method approach to the work (“I don’t believe in causing pain and suffering to others around you, especially in the workplace”), he did play with aspects of the character when he was home or just ordering food on the phone.
The exploration taught him to look for parts that could challenge his abilities.
I always had this work ethic but sometimes you don’t have the opportunity to go to a certain place, to disappear in a way.”
As a Korean-American, he also wants to tell stories “that go beyond our ethnicity. Joe was a man who was going into the discovery of what he has repressed for so long. He so happens to be a Korean-American man. The story wasn’t he was a Korean-American man. The story was this is a man and this is what happened.”
“May December” is now airing on Netflix.
Bruce Miller is editor of the Sioux City Journal.