This story about Apple TV+’s Black Bird” and Paul Walter Hauser first appeared in the Limited Series/Movies issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
It’s been nearly a year since Dennis Lehane’s “Black Bird” premiered on Apple TV+, and viewers are still buzzing over its star Paul Walter Hauser’s Critics Choice and Golden Globe award-winning performance as real-world serial killer Larry Hall.
Icily textured and eerily unnerving, his portrayal of the notorious Civil War reenactor-turned-murderer — one who could be responsible for as many as 50 young women’s disappearances, per some authorities’ estimates — is more slow-boiling and menacing than mustache-twirling. Hauser, buoyed by Lehane’s script, also telegraphs an internal anguish that echoes behavior up to the present day, seen in the many violent, disenfranchised, often white men making headlines, from Jan. 6 to the mass shooting of the week.
It’s no wonder Hauser has been thinking about the implications of toxic masculinity lately. But it’s hardly the first time he’s excavated such themes through his work.
“In a lot of ways, [Larry is] similar to some of the roles I’ve played in a movie like ‘BlacKkKlansman’ or ‘I, Tonya,’ which is a misguided, angry, dissatisfied, unrequited man in America,” Hauser said. “I think a lot of these bad behaviors of some of these characters I play, it all stems from how they grew up and how they handle rejection and grief about themselves — the death of dreams, the death of ideas and settling into being an outcast in the world.”
Hauser said he didn’t have to look to today’s headlines to find dejected, embittered men for inspiration, either. While playing Larry, he found himself thinking of “the socially awkward men that I’ve encountered in my life” and leaning into their “physical tics,” their “poor hygiene” and their habit of “voicing socially awkward opinions.” That was just a starting point.
“Those are all the building blocks to the character, and then the internal life is pretty rich when you have Dennis Lehane’s dialogue and you know that this guy was a serial offender who was changing his story and doing this game of deception,” he said. “But at the same time, I think he got caught in his own web of deception. He is his own victim — though many victims lay before him.”
Starring opposite Hauser in “Black Bird” is Taron Egerton as Jimmy Keene, the incarcerated FBI informant tasked with teasing out Larry’s confession. A womanizing drug dealer before life behind bars, he exhibits the toxicity that led Larry down a path of destruction, in less monstrous but still troubling ways.
“The relationing and sort of DNA of men and their brokenness is fascinating to pick apart in this story,” Hauser said. “And you see it reflected in culture. Dana White, Vince McMahon — these people in power who have not treated women very well. And then you have these guys in our show, some of whom don’t know that they are the problem. And that’s hard for men to grasp. I think our show does a service to the culture by shining a light on it.”
As a father of two boys — his youngest was just born in April — Hauser plans to continue shining a light on such matters, both on and off the screen.
“Having boys illuminates the consequential nature of toxic masculinity because you know that they’re watching you. They’re watching you when you know they’re watching you and they’re watching you and listening to you when you don’t know they’re aware. So the fact that it’s reached my doorstep in a way, where it’s become so much more real to me, being a father to two boys, that’s something I’m hyper- aware of,” he said. “Men can still have their egos, men can still have their issues. But if you fought to respect everybody around you, that would clean a lot of dirt out of the nail beds.”
Read more from the Limited Series/Movies issue here.
