There is a moment in every actor’s career when they must confront their early dreams and their present reality. For Taylor Kitsch, that reckoning has been more painful than for most. “If you start marrying yourself to these phantom outcomes that don’t exist, man, you’re gonna go crazy,” he says.
Kitsch is talking from New York, thousands of miles from his home in Montana, where he has carved out a different life from his Hollywood years. “I’d rather be in the wild chasing animals with my camera than going to clubs or bars or Hollywood parties,” he says.
Today he’s at a press junket for his new Prime Video series, The Terminal List: Dark Wolf, which expertly marries gun battles and spy intrigue with a neat consideration of what happens when red-blooded American males are confronted by the realities of war. Before our interview, I was excited to see the exact state of dishevelment that the wildlife-chasing actor would greet me in, but my request for him to turn on his camera is politely rebuffed and I have to make do with listening to his disembodied Canadian-cum-Texan boom.
The path seemed so clear in 2012. Kitsch was a 30-year-old Canadian hockey player turned model turned actor, blessed with the kind of looks that make casting directors reach for their phones and studio heads reach for their chequebooks. He had spent the back half of his 20s playing Tim Riggins, the brooding high-school running back and rebel heart of the critically acclaimed show Friday Night Lights. His first forays into movies were solid turns, among them Gambit in X-Men Origins: Wolverine and the photojournalist Kevin Carter in The Bang Bang Club. Stardom seemed inevitable. A few years earlier he had lived in his car on futile visits to LA – now he was looking up at billboards of himself. The Guardian proclaimed him a star “about to turn supernova”.
Then came the big swing: John Carter, Disney’s $264m bet on Kitsch becoming the next great action star. The film was based on the 1912 novel A Princess of Mars, inspiration for a number of great 20th-century space operas (not least Star Wars and Dune) and was meant to be Disney’s answer to Avatar. Hopes were high but the box office gods were ungiving. John Carter quickly became a punchline due to its lackluster title and marketing campaign, which one Disney executive deemed “the worst in the history of movies”. The film itself is decent, certainly better than its 52% score on Rotten Tomatoes, and Kitsch received praise for the “slyness” brought to the title character.
Still, John Carter felt derivative. Its similarities to Avatar in particular (Earth soldier is transported to an exotic planet and begrudgingly accepted by the native population before saving the day) made it a magnet for unhelpful headlines as the early box office returns proved disappointing. It went on to flop so badly (reported loss: $200m) that its title now refers less to the film than its accompanying cautionary tale of big-budget disaster. Meanwhile, the prevailing narrative around Kitsch was that he couldn’t carry a blockbuster – a suspicion compounded by his next film, Battleship, a failed attempt to turn the board game into a Transformers-style franchise that is now primarily remembered for being Rihanna’s film debut.
The cruel irony is that while Kitsch’s charismatic screen presence was honed on a naturalistic high-school drama, his potential big break came in that post-Avatar moment when movie studios looked to build franchises around groundbreaking special effects, without necessarily marrying them to strong characters or coherent narratives.
Kitsch is sanguine about his part in the John Carter debacle. “There’s so many cogs in that wheel of movies, man. I’m literally such a small part of it.” The machine was so much bigger than any one person: “I don’t know if it’s timing, or a million cooks in the kitchen, or it just didn’t hit.” At the time, he took it personally, feeling the weight of a $264m production, the studio’s faith, the expectations that came with being positioned as the next big star. “Over time,” he pauses, choosing his words carefully, “you gave it the best you could. I’m proud of the way I led that shoot. You move on.”
Perhaps the most telling aspect of Kitsch’s story isn’t the fall – it’s what he did while he was down. Rather than chase another potential blockbuster or reinvent himself as a different kind of leading man, he disappeared into the work itself. The roles that followed show an actor no longer interested in being anyone’s idea of a Hollywood heart-throb. In 2015, Kitsch played a repressed highway patrol officer in season two of True Detective, a role that laid the foundation for his subsequent TV revival, embodying wounded men in a country that’s constantly redefining masculinity. He marks out his 2018 part as the cult leader David Koresh in the Paramount miniseries Waco as “a big turn in my career, in the sense of preparation and understanding and not judging a character”. The role of Koresh, a real-life figure responsible for alleged sexual abuse and the deaths of dozens, is certainly more complex than the parts that made Kitsch famous.
“My job is to marry myself emotionally to the circumstances and these guys,” he says. “I don’t think: ‘I hope you like Dave at this point or I hope you hate him now.’ I just want to be as authentic as I can be to him and service that without judgment.” It’s an approach that would prove essential when Netflix’s Painkiller came along in 2023, a limited series examining the opioid crisis through the lens of pharmaceutical executives, addicts and the families caught between them.
For Kitsch, the project was deeply personal. “Addiction runs through my family pretty hard,” he says. “It’s really changed my perspective in a lot of ways.” His sister is in recovery, so when the opportunity arose to play an opioid-addicted salesman, he asked her to advise on the role. “I’ve seen her detox on the floor of my house,” he says quietly. “Those scenes were very close to me and I had more people reach out than any other show I’ve ever done, which meant a lot to me … to share it with my sister was amazing, to be honest.”
Earlier this year, in honour of his sister’s successful journey to sobriety, he founded the nonprofit Howlers Ridge. The organisation provides support for veterans and trauma survivors and represents the kind of purpose-driven project that would have been impossible during his blockbuster years. “I think I’ve grown up a little bit,” he says. “In my 20s, I would see people who’d be like: Well, why aren’t you doing more? You have the means to help people.”
There is an interesting parallel between Kitsch’s career and the characters he is drawn to playing. Many of them are men trying to figure out how to live with themselves, how to carry on when the world has shifted beneath their feet. The transition from movie star to television actor might seem like a step backward to some, but for Kitsch, it represented something more valuable: creative control and the chance to truly inhabit his characters and allow part of them to inhabit him.
The Terminal List: Dark Wolf represents yet another step in his journey back to mainstream attention. Despite a lukewarm critical reception for the original series – including one star from the Guardian – the show became one of Prime Video’s biggest streaming hits ever, largely off the back of a charismatic turn from Chris Pratt in the lead role. Working with Pratt as both co-star and producer for this new prequel series, Kitsch found himself in the curious position of partnering with someone whose career has taken the path his own could have, had the machine worked as intended. Far from any bitterness about Pratt’s fame, there’s genuine enthusiasm in Kitsch’s voice when discussing their collaboration. “We get along really well. I think there’s a mutual respect.” Faced with that level of celebrity, Kitsch thinks about the practicalities: “You often wonder where you’d even be living. I bet you I wouldn’t even be living in Montana.”
The beauty of Kitsch’s current life – photographing wildlife in Montana between carefully chosen projects – is how little it resembles what anyone expected his career to look like. The actor’s career is quieter but perhaps more sustainable. He’s not the action star Hollywood tried to make him, but he’s also not the cautionary tale they might have written him off as. Instead, he’s something more interesting: an actor who faced failure, and subsequently redefined success on his own terms.
“I just want to keep disappearing,” he says, almost as a throwaway. Not from the world, but into roles. Into people he hasn’t met yet, lives he hasn’t lived. Looking at Kitsch’s career now, it’s hard not to think that maybe the supernova metaphor was wrong from the beginning. Supernovae burn bright and burn out. What Kitsch has built instead is more like a campfire: sustainable, warm and capable of lasting through the night.
The Terminal List: Dark Wolf is on Prime Video from 27 August.
