Jacob Tremblay built his early career on roles that asked audiences to worry about him, from the captive boy in ‘Room’ to the child behind facial prosthetics in ‘Wonder.’ His next part asks something else. In Netflix’s ‘Unabomber,’ Tremblay plays a young Ted Kaczynski during the mathematician’s years at Harvard, long before the mail bombings that made his name notorious. Tremblay discussed the film in a conversation with actor Nick Offerman published Sept. 28 in Interview magazine’s September issue. He said the movie arrives Oct. 5.
Tremblay said the role sat far from the parts he took as a boy. ‘When I was younger, obviously a lot of the films I had done, I couldn’t fully understand the subject matter,’ he told Offerman. Preparing to play Kaczynski as a student meant working with thin material. ‘There wasn’t really too much, because there’s a lot of information about Ted when he’s an adult, but it’s really hard to find information about him when he was a kid,’ he said.
The film centers on the young Kaczynski’s bond with a Harvard professor, a dynamic Tremblay said mirrored his own experience on set. ‘It was amazing. I looked up to the dude and that has a parallel with the film that we worked on because Ted really looks up to this professor,’ he said. He also described a deliberate turn away from vanity in how he picks and plays parts. ‘In a lot of my roles, I’m really not trying to look cool or masculine and attractive,’ Tremblay said.
Tremblay has spent much of his life being recognized for work in which his face was hard to see. In ‘Wonder,’ he acted under heavy prosthetics, yet strangers still tie him to the part. ‘You can’t see my face, but yet somehow people still say, I loved you in that film,’ he said. That recognition, he added, carries weight for him. ‘So the fact that they still know that that’s me, it means a lot,’ Tremblay said.
The Kaczynski project places Tremblay among a group of former child actors testing tougher adult material. Offerman, who has moved between comedy and drama across his own career, steered the exchange toward that shift and toward the strangeness of playing a figure many viewers already judge. Tremblay grew up on screen in parts that hid or softened him, and the Netflix film hands him one of the more unsettling real lives an actor his age could pick. It is a public step away from the roles that introduced him.
