Jacob Tremblay can relate to the Unabomber. No, really
Jacob Tremblay appears as Ted Kaczynski in Unabomber. The Netflix film focuses mostly on the mail bomber's early life as a student at Harvard. (Philippe Bosse/Netflix)Social SharingIt's uncomfortable to make any comparison — especially to the actor's face — between Ted Kaczynski, the mass-murdering ecoterrorist widely known as the Unabomber, and Jacob Tremblay, the cherubic former child actor behind films with titles as fuzzy and feel-good as Good Boys and Wonder.
There is some additional context here: After all, we are talking about the 19-year-old Canadian's portrayal of Kaczynski in the Unabomber Netflix movie, which dropped Friday.
But it still feels genuinely offensive to imply that there's any weightier parallel between the two. Which is why it's so surprising when Tremblay himself offers something like it, all on his own.
"I really had a hard time relating to Ted for the most part. But once I was there on set — the script is written so beautifully, of course you can really feel empathetic towards this guy," he says during a video call promoting the film.
It is a somewhat striking idea. Even as he points to the terrible, inexcusable crimes Kaczynski committed later, Tremblay keeps returning to his inability to resist relating to him.
"What I found, and what I really held on to," he says, "was the idea of being the youngest person in the room."
He's referring to the stranger-than-fiction beginning to Kaczynski's story — the near-singular plot focus of the Janus Metz-directed film. A math prodigy, the Chicago native was propelled to academic heights at Harvard University at just 16.
Through that early enrolment, he eventually became, at the time, the youngest-ever assistant professor at University of California, Berkeley (at which he would twice plant bombs, some 20 years later).
"You know, in this industry, I'm also often the youngest person there," Tremblay says. "So I could kind of relate to that feeling of awkwardness and not really fitting in."
The subject matter, of course, runs deeper than that. At Harvard, Kaczynski was also wrapped up in one of the most bizarre historical confluences of the last century.
After he was selected as a vulnerable test subject for what many have theorized was part of the CIA's top-secret MK-Ultra mind-control experiment, psychologist Henry Murray encouraged the young math student's nascent theories and developed his delicately blooming self-confidence.
He then had him strapped to a chair, wired with electrodes, and saw those same ideas mocked with surgical precision. The subjects were given, in Murray's words, "vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive" critiques that systematically tore them down.
Russell Crowe, left, appears as Henry Murray alongside Jacob Tremblay as Ted Kaczynski in Unabomber. (Philippe Bosse/Netflix)In the movie, the goal is to win the Cold War. If America can figure out how to break young men's minds, they can theoretically then break the minds of captured enemy combatants. And if the goal is to learn how to destroy a person's self-worth, who easier to start with than a precocious, self-unassured child?
The resultant screaming and scheming villainy we get onscreen is an against-type performance for Tremblay, in what he calls a fun change. His filmography, he says, is built around his desire to never play the same character twice, while flitting between as many genres as possible.
But it's this one that has that personal parallel to return to. Because if you're to believe some sources, that was Kaczynski's rosebud, though he had long denied those sessions affected him much at all. Going by the film, they were a gross betrayal of the societal duty to protect children — producing a man who would go on to mail deadly letter-bombs to authority figures for decades.
Given that this role comes so soon after Tremblay's performance as a boy manipulated into armed resistance against the federal government in Sovereign, the pattern is hard to ignore. The theme of "a young, impressionable mind, driven by trauma, really, to do violent things," as Tremblay characterizes it, that he also deems Unabomber's key message.
"How important it is to treat children with love … and teach them how much value they have," he says. "Because on the flip side of that, if a child isn't loved as much, it's harmful and it causes violence. It really does."
It also comes as the industry in which he came up goes through another period of reckoning. Following former child actor Hayden Panettiere's overdose death earlier this year, Canadian actor Alison Pill wrote a New York Times op-ed calling child acting "extractive, exploitative and nonconsensual" while proposing it should be banned entirely.
Nicky, Ricky, Dicky & Dawn's Casey Simpson, among others, pushed back against a ban — but said propelling a child to stardom basically guarantees they will later feel like a failure, regardless of what they achieve as an adult.
Tremblay does not make this comparison so directly. And from his earliest memories, his relationship with acting was obsessive fascination: After his first film role in Smurfs 2 at five years old, he says he remembers his mother asking him if this is what he would like to keep doing. Not only did he say yes — he said he couldn't picture ever doing anything else.
That has stayed. After Tremblay briefly flirted with the idea of going to film school, director Mike Flanagan advised him to simply spend as much time as possible on set to prepare for his growing yearning to write and direct.
Even still, as clear as the path to acting may have been, the question of whether he consciously chose it is tougher to answer.
"It's hard to say, 'OK, well, I really wanted to do this when I was five years old,'" he says. "Because I'm sure I couldn't fully understand what it meant to be an actor, or in film, at five years old."
That leads to the difficult comparison: Kaczynski, the young man raised to an incredibly high level while still too young to handle it, is destroyed. Is that in any way similar to Tremblay's experiences — breaking into fame with his role in the film Room at just eight years old — even if he didn't know what he was signing up for?
"You try and find those parallels, for sure. And I can imagine how different my life would be without this career. It's hard to even think about, right?
"It makes me really feel for someone who — like Ted, who has so much talent at a young age and had so much potential," he says.
"I just really hope that people watching this movie can think about this going forward — about talented people, people with skills. And how they want to elevate them and bring them up in life, rather than using them."
Jackson Weaver is a reporter and film critic for CBC's entertainment news team in Toronto. You can reach him at jackson.weaver@cbc.ca.
