Recognizable by his mustaches of timeless finesse, Karl Glusman (New York, 1988) seems to carefully choose the roles he chooses. Far from aspiring to be an omnipresent Hollywood icon, the actor has been slipping his face in projects played and faithful audiences: Love of the French-Argentine Gaspar Noé, The Neon Demon by Nicolas Winding Refn, the series Devs the Alex Garland.
Now it has a fundamental role in Please Baby Please, a film by Amanda Kramer that premiered this month on the Mubi platform. There he is a member of a street gang and third in contention of the marriage formed by Suze (the recent Oscar nominee Andrea Riseborough) and Arthur (Harry Melling), who lives a peaceful urban existence until the seductive action of Glusman’s character shakes the Arthur’s sexuality.
Freed from any conventional structure, the film progresses like a mismatched and whimsical musical through sets of decadent styling. This histrionics makes the coherence provocative of Please Baby Pleasewhich precisely evades genres to trace its portrait of identities in crisis.
“I really enjoyed this role, in part it meant doing something different from what I had been doing, I had never dressed like that in public, I am not so confident,” says Glusman in contact with VOSvia Zoom.
“It was fun to put on a hat and leather pants and a fishnet shirt and feel the freedom to say and do bold things that I’m not used to in my daily life. To prepare myself I was watching Angelina Jolie in Interrupted innocence, and although I don’t imitate her, Angelina was my muse, my inspiration in many ways. I tried to connect with a sensual side other than sexual, it was interesting to explore ways to communicate that dimension on screen ”, she expands.
For him, the film feels quite like a Love without barriers dreamlike and bizarre: “I can’t think or write like Amanda does, the language of the script is so exhilarating. I thought she was reading an old play, a text that had been tucked away in a Tennessee Williams cabinet. I haven’t seen anything like that, and I was like, ‘This movie is going to be totally horrible, or it’s going to be really special.’ And I think it’s special, because there aren’t many things like this right now.”
“Of course the influences are there, Kenneth Anger, John Waters, the Tom of Finland illustrations, everything. Love without barriers and Marlon Brando in The wild. When you take all this and remix it, something different is created. Sometimes it’s enough to see something like this. If in a room there are ten guys shaving and one with a beard, I want to talk to the guy with a beard ”, she completes.
Roles cavernarios
Is Glusman interested in questioning masculinity and couple roles? “Yes, absolutely,” she replies.
“I feel like I never know what my girlfriend thinks. Sometimes yes, but other times there are those moments where she wants to be the man, whatever that means. I’m talking about instances where something needs to be fixed and she says ‘get out of the way, I’ll do it.’ I think that these ideas about what it is to be a man and what it is to be a woman are sometimes somewhat ridiculous ”, she later develops.
“Perhaps some of these issues originated when we were cave beings, perhaps men had more physical strength to push a rock or chase a turkey across a field, but today we live differently and as we evolve our masks should do it too,” he argues.
“As for the film, this idea of a couple in love, who wants to stay together, was interesting. Suze doesn’t want to leave even though he prefers to wear pants and act like Johnny from The Wild One. She doesn’t want to leave Arthur, they love each other, and their relationship grows and love is reinforced. Do I behave like this in my life? No, I’m not Suze or Arthur, but I think the film is healthy for anyone wondering how to fit into a relationship or into their own skin or into society,” she says.
For the actor, “that’s what art is about, challenging old-fashioned ideas and giving yourself something to think about, not distracting you for an hour and a half but shaking things deep inside you.”
“It’s good for men to be vulnerable and soft sometimes and it’s good for the girl to be the man sometimes. We are in 2023, it is not a maddening proposition although it seems extreme when you put it to work in an imaginary setting of the 1950s ″, she rounds off.
-Demi Moore has a part in the film. What was it like working with her?
-Unfortunately I didn’t share a scene with her, I met her briefly outside the set. She’s laid back, warm and sweet, and I was jealous that I didn’t get a scene with her. I managed, however, to catch a performance of his in a scene with a lot of dialogue. I slipped onto the set just to listen to her, her body language speaking for itself. I’m scared to meet my heroes because they might disappoint you, but that wasn’t the case with her.
More of Karl Glusman’s spell watching Demi Moore perform: “I’m always pinching myself when I meet these people, who are just like you and me but at the same time were gods incarnate on screen when I was a kid.”
“She didn’t have a lot of time to prepare the dialogue for that scene, and it was incredibly powerful to see her interact with actors she barely knew and take on the heavy lifting and do it without pressure as if it didn’t require effort. You always learn something from veterans like her, ”she closes.
To see
Please Baby Please. United States, 2022. Script and direction: Noel David Taylor and Amandra Kramer. Directed by: Amanda Kramer. Featuring: Andrea Riseborough, Harry Melling and Demi Moore. Duration: 95 minutes. Platform: Mubi.
More information
Five little stars for “What do we see when we see the sky?”, on the Mubi platform