Nice Paper · Issue 004
An interview with Dylan Smith, the actor who's died 26 times on screen and counting.
Dylan: “It’s a tie for funniest. Between being eviscerated by a murder of crows alongside Tom Cruise in The Mummy, and a film called Al’s Lad I did very early on in my career where I played one of Al Capone’s henchmen. A mob duo with the incredible Warwick Davis. I complain about marital affairs, and he has enough and so… Willow blows my brains out. Literally.”
Dylan: “Coolest is a three-way tie between my sliced throat after an extensive battle with the hilarious Nick Frost, who is a hell of a martial artist, in Into the Badlands. Next, Kiefer Sutherland in Forsaken deservedly blows me away with a double-barrel shotgun, after I had beat both him and his father, the incredible Donald Sutherland, up earlier in the film. While I was beating up Donald Sutherland, he farted on me. I asked that the costume never be washed and could I keep it. Sadly they said no to both requests. Lastly, the hand-to-hand fight I did in Treadstone. I almost win. But… well of course it’s me… so I die.”
Dylan: “Weirdest has got to be Immortals, with Henry Cavill, where I am his dear friend and follow him into an epic Greek battle, then disappear. But in the extras I am seen dead, eyes open, in a veritable ocean of blood.”
Dylan: “Most proud is a film directed by my dad, called The Englishman’s Boy, where I play a 19th-century wolf pelt hunter. I get shot with an arrow while riding a horse, fall to the ground, and then the Englishman’s Boy removes the arrow and I die in his loving arms. That’s Hollywood gold right there.”
Dylan: “The winner of most brutal is yet to come. I can’t tell you which of my projects, but look out for a truly vicious death at the hands of a legend.”
Why do you think you keep getting cast to die? Do you lean into it now or fight it?
Dylan: Have you seen my face? I fear I am good enough to die, but not good enough as an actor to live. I have no idea if one casting director, producer or the actual director is calling their colleagues on films I have previously worked on and asking, ‘How’s the kid at dying?’ ‘Oh damn, let me tell you… exceptional. If you can, definitely kill him.’
Lean into it? Hey, baby, I am going for records. I think I am up to 26 deaths including two coming up. C’MON! SURELY THAT’S HEADED FOR A RECORD. And that’s as an actor, not a stuntman.
How do you prep for smaller roles in massive films? What’s the work people don’t see?
Dylan: It depends on the film. A lot of my deaths came in action films where I had to spend anywhere from a week to months constantly in the gym and then in the stunt studio, learning and rehearsing the fights like learning a complicated dance sequence.
But for the straight roles, I re-read the script many times, and then the scene even more, to make sure I have a strong sense of the tone of the film. I try to watch films or television that the actors I’ll be working opposite have done, to find specific things they do or be prepared for their specific energy. I break a script down in terms of objectives, obstacles, and how my character succeeds in attaining those objectives, or how they are foiled. I try to write out as many different thoughts my character may have in response to the other character’s lines.
And then throw that all away on the day. But with the knowledge that now I am really listening to the other actor. Which is everything.
Was there a moment on a big set where you looked around and thought, ‘holy shit, this is wild’?
Dylan: There have been a few.
On Rings of Power, I was in the first ever scene shot on the most expensive TV show ever made. Playing a Hobbit, speaking some of the first lines spoken on that show, shooting in the forests of New Zealand, having laughs off camera with Lenny Henry. I have never been happier and really felt I had ‘arrived.’ Which of course had nothing to do with reality.
I recently worked closely with Hugo Weaving on Slow Horses, and I have never worked so closely or hung out so much with such an astounding actor and equally a behemoth of kindness, generosity, and play. Not to mention meeting Gary Oldman, one of the reasons I became an actor. That really was a ‘fuck me, I can’t believe I am in this moment right now.’
Was there a moment where it became obvious that acting was the path?
Dylan: I was a very serious ice hockey player, even getting a scholarship to play at a top American prep school. Ten shoulder dislocations later, I was having to find another way.
I started studying theatre, and got to be in a main stage production of Christopher Durang’s Baby With the Bathwater. An absurdist play where I found myself giving a monologue alone on stage to 600 people, talking about how my mother always wanted a girl not a boy, and so dressed me in dresses until she finally accepted I wasn’t going to have my period. The whole while undressing out of a suit, putting on a little girl’s dress, and finishing the monologue in an oversized crib. I had the audience in the palm of my hand and felt as alive as I had ever felt on the ice.
My mother, who was an Academy Award-winning film director, took me to a one-man show called Needles and Opium by Robert Lepage on the drive home. His performance was so physical, electric, and moving. I was hooked and the athlete in me connected to his physicality.
Then a famous British theatre director, Robin Philips, who ran the Stratford Festival in Canada, took me under his wing and pushed me hard to go to theatre school in London, saying: ‘You’re an emotionally bursting bull in a china shop, darling. Now you need lipstick and technique. Go learn to walk in heels, and you could be a star.’
Theatre school was the point of no return.
What do you do between jobs to stay sane?
Dylan: I try to establish my worth as a human being in the dignity of work. Non-acting work. Dedicate myself to my family and child, and separate church and state, acting and my life, as much as possible. I work on myself a lot. Therapy, mindfulness, accountability. And I do a lot of acting classes wherever I am in the world. Some of the best I have ever taken were at Melbourne’s 16th Street Studios, by the way.
If you could pick any role, any director, what’s the dream?
Dylan: I think I would like to play a broken man. A man who carries a lot of early trauma, has persevered by working hard for noble causes his whole life, but suffered terribly for having had to suppress it. And in the end, unravels until he learns to assimilate the pain in a healthy way, and has to let go of people he loves, to protect them, and simply because it’s the path he must take. I like painful catharsis, and the huge breath of air that comes with accountability and release.