A
First Blood obsessive. It was a dream.
“That film coming along—I feel like
it saved me,” Poulter says.
A decade on, he works with serious
auteurs. In Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit,
he wormed his way into an ultra-
villainous cop. In Alejandro González
Iñárritu’s The Revenant, he was
dunked in Alberta glacier water, got
hypothermic shock, and held his own
opposite Tom Hardy and Leo. And in
“Bandersnatch,” last year’s wildly ambi-
tious choose-your-adventure Black
Mirror, he tackled multiple versions
of the same doomed gaming genius.
Playing so many versions of one won-
derfully odd character, each existing at
the whims of the viewer, was the tough-
est technical challenge he’d faced. “My
head was like scrambled eggs. I barely
had the energy to text at the end of the
day,” he says. “It’s a paradox: I find act-
ing really, really hard. But that’s what
I like about it—the feeling of being emo-
tionally exhausted.”
Just don’t spoil it for his folks.
“My parents”—Mum’s a nurse, Dad’s
a cardiology professor—“just got
Netflix. I think I’ll have to ease them
in with Our Planet before I go, ‘Fancy
throwing me o≠ a balcony with this
interactive experience?’”previous page
and bottom left
Jacket, $1,710, by
Dries Van Noten.
Turtleneck,
$170, by Ambush.
Pants, $960, by
Jil Sander. Boots,
$370, by Grenson.
top right
T-shirt, $525,
by Versace. Pants,
$490, by Éditions
M.R. His own
sneakers by Nike.
Watch, $2,990,
by Montblanc.T 26, WILL POULTER HAS
blasted past the broad
comedy and Y.A. fantasy
of his earlier years to
emerge an acting cha-
meleon. He is utterly distinctive, all
eyebrows, but has become so good he’s
hard to recognize.
If it seems like success came quickly,
well, you weren’t Will Poulter at 12.
“I always say I had an early-life
crisis,” he explains with a glint, out-
side a photography studio on a rare
sunny London day. “How much can
you know at 12? But I was going, ‘Is
school forever? What the fuck am I
gonna do?!’ ” In drama class, at the
Harrodian school in West London, he
impersonated singer/TV host/onetime
Beatles weed carrier Cilla Black. From
there he auditioned for everything:
sketch, musicals, pantomime. At 12 he
scored the lead in Son of Rambow, as a
36 GQ.COM AUGUST 2019
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