In Primetime, the thriller about the making of To Catch a Predator, Skyler Gisondo‘s character, an aspiring actor, is desperate to get his SAG card. So desperate, in fact, that he signs on for a gig as a decoy minor on the iconic NBC newsmagazine, agreeing to act as bait for child predators until the hidden-camera crew emerges. Anything for a credit.
Gisondo, as it happens, never had much trouble landing his own SAG card. He got it at 6, after booking a Pizza Hut commercial and guest roles on network shows like Strong Medicine and What I Like About You. “They were total cattle calls,” he recalls of his early go-sees while growing up mostly in L.A. “My dad thought every audition was a scam. Like, ‘How much is this going to cost us?’ ”
Related Stories
Gisondo, now 30, has been working steadily since — at no cost to his father — appearing in films like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza and Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart, as well as HBO shows like Danny McBride’s The Righteous Gemstones. Along the way, he’s tended to play a variation on a theme: the nice guy, the lovable dork, the hapless sidekick. Not for nothing that James Gunn cast him as the quintessential second banana, Jimmy Olsen, in last year’s Superman.
With Primetime, though, Gisondo is taking his unassuming onscreen persona into much darker territory. The drama, from documentarian Lance Oppenheim, centers on real-life To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen — played by Robert Pattinson — whose insatiable desire for ratings led to the production’s deadly standoff with an accused child predator. It’s based on a 2007 Esquire article with an arguably much catchier title: “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die.”
But while Hansen is the center of the film, the role of the guileless decoy — who enters the story idolizing Hansen only to slowly realize how deeply flawed his hero, and his show, truly are — functions as the audience’s surrogate, and is every bit as critical. Oppenheim, enamored with the earnestness Gisondo had brought to his previous roles, quickly set up a meeting with the actor, figuring he’d already found his man. Gisondo, though, wasn’t so sure.
“I basically spent the entire Zoom talking him out of it,” Gisondo says with a laugh. “I was like, ‘Man, I gotta tell you, there’s a whole list of other dudes who are usually in the mix for this.’ “
Luckily for Gisondo, Oppenheim ignored him — and Gisondo now says his time on the Primetime set was his most formative acting challenge yet. Part of that was due to watching Pattinson work, a process Gisondo describes as “shape-shifting.” Another part was experiencing Oppenheim’s avant garde, almost gonzo style of filmmaking. “The script was so batshit crazy, and there were things in it that I was like, I have no idea what to do here,” he says. “I got really comfortable with being scared.”
Stepping out of his comfort zone was something Gisondo had been contemplating for a while, occasionally putting himself on self-tapes for roles with more dramatic stretches. But he also was OK sticking with what he knew.
“Over the years, you start to get thought of as a certain way, and I was never the kind of actor who was considered for those [art house] movies,” he says. “And I was also used to the idea that I was doing stuff I know I’m good at, that I knew was going to be good, and then everyone is going to be like, ‘Hey, that was good.’ “
But as soon as Gisondo booked the role on Primetime, his agents saw an opportunity and started strategizing how he could use the platform to get in front of other auteurs for roles that stretched even further from his sidekick niche. “They’re like, ‘We can use this to get to that,’ ” he says. “But I was like, ‘Dude, first I have to not fuck this one up. Let me make sure I’m good at this.’ “
Meanwhile, he’s got plenty of nice-guy roles in his future, including a major one in Focker-in-Law, the latest in Universal’s dysfunctional family franchise, out in November, in which he’ll be bringing home Ariana Grande as his fiancée. And, of course, he’ll be holding Superman’s cape once again as Jimmy Olsen in Gunn’s Man of Tomorrow, scheduled for next summer, reprising a role even his father was impressed by.
“Ninety-nine percent of the time, when you’re making a movie, you think, ‘I hope people see it, but they probably won’t,’ ” he says. “But with Superman, people came out of the woodwork to text me. ‘Dude, I had no idea you made it!’ “
This story appeared in the Sept. 2 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
