Jake Lacy lately has been upending his reputation for kind characters. Photo / Nathan Bajar, The New York Times
Known for playing nice guys, the actor won acclaim as a privileged jerk in The White Lotus. In a new drama, he goes even darker.
The actor Jake Lacy, whom I met for tacos on a recent weekday evening, has an All-American handsomeness that verges on caricature — brown hair, blue eyes, a chin so strong it must work out. He looks as though a 3D printer were fed images of lacrosse players and then told, 'Go ahead, make this.' His face at rest — though, over dinner it was that way only very rarely — suggests a guy who captained a team or two in high school and then joined a frat in college. A craft brewery fan. A fleece wearer.
"There's a bro element to my look," he acknowledged as the guacamole arrived.
"He's got this handsome blank canvas thing," Murray Bartlett, his co-star on the HBO hit The White Lotus, told me. "But he's incredibly versatile with that handsome blank canvas. He can take that in many directions."
Until recently, most of those directions — Obvious Child, High Fidelity, Girls — confirmed Lacy as a go-to nice guy. Vulture once created a list ranking the niceness of his various characters. Several of these characters were mere way stations or end points on some female protagonist's journey. And Lacy — citing, in a very un-bro way, the patriarchal history of TV and cinema — liked that fine.
"What a great way to start in this business," he said, sincerely.
But he switched up that persona with last year's The White Lotus, in which he played Shane, a paragon of white male entitlement in a succession of sherbet-coloured polos, earning him his first Emmy nomination. (At last month's ceremony, he lost, happily, as he tells it, to his scene partner, Bartlett.)
His new show, the fact-based drama A Friend of the Family, uses that bland handsomeness as both camouflage and cudgel. "Weaponising that" is how Lacy put it.
He had suggested meeting at La Superior, an unassuming, Michelin-starred taco place in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, near a few of his old apartments. (Mid-pandemic, he and his wife, Lauren DeLeo Lacy, packed up and moved to Connecticut.) This was a comfortable spot for him, though he seemed, in a faded red T-shirt with a few holes in the torso, not entirely comfortable there, apologising often for rambling, pausing, digressing.
"He's very earnest, not in a cheesy way; he's just a good guy," Bartlett had said. And this seemed true enough. While Lacy has little particular professional interest in playing likable characters, he has a personal need — a need that most of us share — to be likable. And he is. ("I've gotten better about my own people-pleasing," he said.) A Friend of the Family works with and against that likeability, in ways more insidious and less comic than his work in The White Lotus.
In this nine-episode limited series, which streams in New Zealand on TVNZ+, Lacy plays Robert Berchtold, an Idaho husband and father who in the mid-1970s twice abducted Jan Broberg, the eldest daughter of a family that he had known for years. (This case was previously explored in the Netflix documentary Abducted in Plain Sight.) As the show tells it, and as Broberg confirmed in a recent interview, Berchtold, or B as those close to him knew him, used his smile, his jokes, his great charisma to insinuate himself with the Brobergs. The two families were so enmeshed that when Jan was first taken, her parents delayed contacting the FBI.
(Following the first abduction, Berchtold was convicted of kidnapping. Sentenced to five years, he served just 45 days. After the second, he avoided prison entirely, serving five months in a psychiatric facility instead. In 2005, having been found guilty of aggravated assault and possession of a firearm for a later offence, he committed suicide.)
Most of the episodes of A Friend of the Family had been written before casting began. Finding the right Berchtold was particularly daunting, because the actor needed to project an uncanny charm.
"He had to have a natural charisma that would come through the screen and drop into the living room of whoever was watching the show," said Broberg, who is a producer on the series. Because charisma, she continued, was "B's superpower." And yet, that same actor would also have to travel to some very dark places.
Nick Antosca (The Act, Candy), the showrunner on A Friend of the Family, had been impressed by Lacy's turn on The White Lotus and the sympathy that he brought to such an unpleasant character. An audience isn't meant to sympathise with B, Antosca clarified. "But you have to understand how that family fell in love with him," he said.
B doesn't think of himself as a monster, though — inarguably — he is one. Antosca suspected Lacy would be able to play both aspects at once.
Not every actor on a hot streak would choose to play a paedophile for his follow-up. And Lacy, who has two young sons, nearly turned down the show. But the challenge of the character attracted him, as did the scripts, and he appreciated the involvement of both Jan Broberg and her mother, Mary Ann, who is also a producer.
"Had they not been involved, it would be so voyeuristic and so tabloid and not grounded in some greater purpose," Lacy said.
That purpose, he believes, is to show how grooming can operate and how abuse is perpetrated most often by intimates. Before shooting began, Broberg had left a letter for Lacy, detailing all the positive things she remembered about B — his charm, his sense of fun — while also encouraging Lacy to make the role his own and assuring him that the choices he made would not cause her further harm.
"I was wildly impressed by that level of grace," Lacy said.
This allowed him to pour as much of himself as he could into the role. "He's a very nice person and a caring father," Broberg observed of Lacy. "You have to bring all of those things to the role for it to work."
As for the darker aspects, Lacy filled those in with research — evidence from the various trials, audio that Berchtold had recorded, material on psychology. Sometimes he had to put a time limit on that research. "Like, that's enough for now," he said. "Let's not spend all night listening to these tapes of Robert Berchtold."
When it came to paedophilia, that wasn't a place that he went to imaginatively, though he did read Lolita. Instead he worked through what he described as substitutions, trusting that if he looked at his young scene partners with love, the camera would read that love as something dark and unsafe. (The show doesn't include any scenes of rape, so Lacy never had to portray these acts directly.)
Neither he nor Antosca saw a need to locate Berchtold's humanity. "He was a sociopath who kept telling himself self-justifying stories," Antosca explained. So in nearly every scene, he said, it was enough to know what B was trying to achieve and how he was trying to achieve it without marinating too deeply in the why.
"There wasn't a need to go into his thoughts," Lacy said. "Because my point of view on his thoughts is so rightfully so filled with judgment."
In the past, Lacy has struggled to disentangle himself from characters he has played. That didn't happen here. "When people were like, 'Is it hard to leave that on set?' I was like, 'No, it's a very clean break,'" he said.
Antosca confirmed this. "He is a super-thoughtful and technical actor, not method," he said. "I didn't see him struggling to get out of character."
Lacy doesn't know what he'll play next, if he'll continue this particular heel turn or return to nice-guy roles or try something else. ("He has tremendous depth and this range that hasn't been fully used yet," Antosca told me.) He mentioned a Los Angeles project. And one in London. He is glad to have made A Friend of the Family, glad to promote it, but also glad to leave it in the rear view.
"I'm very happy to just take a little breath and hold my kids," he said.
A Friend of the Family is available to stream on TVNZ+
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Alexis Soloski
Photographs by: Nathan Bajar
© 2022 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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