As soon as Cory Michael Smith arrives onscreen in May December, he sets the film spinning in a new direction. Up until then, in Todd Haynes’s thrillingly unsettling drama, Natalie Portman’s actress Elizabeth has been immersed in research on Julianne Moore’s Mary Kay Letourneau–like character, Gracie, and has been getting a mostly whitewashed description of the fallout from Gracie’s predatory relationship with her now-husband, Joe (Charles Melton), who was 13 when it began. When Elizabeth goes off to lunch at the local Crab Shack, however, she runs into Smith’s whirlwind of a character, Georgie, Gracie’s “sensitive†son from her first marriage who happens to be the same age as Joe and has grown into an unstable man with a gig as a front man for a band. When he sees the actress, Georgie immediately asks how much Elizabeth is paying Gracie for her film, steals her cornbread, and tells a bleak story about how no one remembered to cancel his birthday party after Gracie and Joe’s relationship became public, so no one showed up — except for one guy, whom Georgie gave a hand job to, and who then never spoke to him again.
In the story of May December, Georgie is a reminder of all the collateral damage Gracie has compartmentalized — or, as he unconvincingly insists, he’s “a phoenix rising from the ashes.†To carry off the part, Smith had to hold his own among several eye-catching performances and shift the film’s temperature with each appearance. Best known for his role as the Riddler on Gotham, Smith has also become a regular collaborator with Haynes, having previously played a detective in Carol and Millicent Simmonds’s older brother in Wonderstruck. May December is his largest role in a Haynes film yet, and as Smith points out, the one where he got to be the most involved in the artistic process. Georgie’s twang was his idea, as were those tattoos — and yes, he even committed to giving himself a terrible dye job. Smith talked with Vulture about the fun of messing with Natalie Portman, doing his own research on life in the Crab Shack, and his take on whether Georgie is telling Elizabeth the truth about his mother’s past, though he’d prefer not to share that: “I like that people are confused and uncomfortable.â€
I have to say, “Then I gave him a hand job and then he never talked to me again†is maybe my favorite movie line of the year.
Oh my God, yeah. It’s one of those lines you really want to lean into, but it works better if you don’t. There was one time, on one take, when I said, “blowjob.†It just sort of came out of my mouth. You get lost in the role and you start manifesting other things.
Well, there’s something more tragic and offhand about it just being a hand job.
It feels very middle school. There’s something sad about the thought of him with a straight boy who made him do it. It’s something extra-sad for Georgie.
In that scene, you come in and are immediately all up in Natalie’s business. You eat the cornbread on the table. You drink her water. Was that in the script?
It was not in the script. There was something about him opening the salt packets, which I didn’t want to do because of the noise. I just knew that I needed to mess with Natalie and create some problems for her and knock her off-center. So I was trying to design a way that I could do that subconsciously for George but consciously for me. I knew she would have water and I wanted something else on the table to play with — it worked really well having cornbread because it was so dry. I turned the chair around and really leaned into her space.
Before Elizabeth meets Georgie, she’s just been hearing all these people talk about how he’s “artistic†and “sensitive,†which totally reads as coded language for him being gay, and it feels a bit like he’s trying to puncture that delicacy.
It does read like people of a certain era who are still not comfortable saying their son is gay or queer, but you don’t necessarily know! He’s a liar and an enigma. He probably is, but there’s a world where he’s actually not, and he just says that one line. Also, the thing I wanted to highlight with him is that he’s very unnecessarily confident. He’s playing in a band at the Crab Shack on Tybee Island. He’s talented, but he’s performing where he’s performing — however, it’s his place and he feels authority over it. There needs to be a sort of cockiness that is unearned. He’s with this actress coming into town from a larger city. He thinks he’s on her level, but he’s not.
Savannah does have a pretty big arty and queer scene, with the Art and Design College, and it feels like Georgie could escape into that world, but he’s still a little umbilically attached to this suburban drama.
Savannah’s a great town and SCAD does have such a significant presence there, so you see art kids everywhere, all over the city, but they’re coming from different places. I’m from Ohio, and there’s a different vibe of what “artistic†means in different cities. So it was important that Georgie felt like a local cool artist. Todd and the producers found the band he plays with in Savannah. We ended up modeling my look off of how they dress. We actually did so many costume fittings. April Napier, our costume designer, was fantastic. We had to figure out how to make sure he wasn’t too cool or too outrageous. He does something reckless with the hair, but the clothes are actually sort of thrifty.
I enjoyed how he’s wearing a ton of different cheap necklaces and bracelets.
That was April on the jewelry, and I designed all the tattoos. We did some auditioning of where they should go. I had these shrooms on my right side right behind my collarbone that I don’t think you end up seeing. But I wanted them there. In case you saw them, you’d be like, “Okay.†It’s not that Georgie has a drug problem but …
He’s done some exploring. Did you actually bleach your own hair?
Todd asked me pretty early if I’d be willing to dye it, and I said yes because I wanted to make him look and feel very different from me. It felt sort of reckless in a way, because I wanted it to be a purposefully bad dye job. It started where there was an inch off my scalp, as if he had done it a month ago and hadn’t tended to it or anything. It was supposed to look like an at-home rancid dye job, with full peroxide and splicing in some yellow and orange. The first orange we used made me look like Ronald McDonald. We had to go back and make it look less colored. We just kept messing with my hair and ruining it, which made it feel right. We were passing back photos of Johnny Rotten, which ended up being our main inspo. He was my phone background while we were shooting it.
Was Georgie always going to sing Peter Frampton?
That was in the script. Todd had chosen those songs and I just picked the key. I did sing live. We recorded all the music in advance. But once we got to the space, we just recorded everything live. It had a great tinny sound and it just felt better.
Do you think he would be a good music supervisor?
Absolutely not. Dreadful.
If he did convince Elizabeth to give him that job on the movie, which sounds emotionally dangerous for him anyway, what would he even pick to soundtrack a movie about his mother?
What I decided with him is that he’s just oblivious. He has no idea what that job would be like. He’s incredibly naïve. He’s got judgments about everyone else, but he refuses to look inward. There’s just a lack of willingness on his part to acknowledge he wouldn’t be equipped to do that.
Like the story about the hand job, it feels as if Georgie says these things just because he has a need to provoke and get people to pay attention.
I don’t think it’s conscious. I have people in my life who are full-grown adults but they lie and behave in inappropriate ways to get attention because they lived through early years that were unfortunate. You see these scars on people and they’re not even aware of the damage that was done.
Do you think that he believes the story he tells Elizabeth about his mother being abused by her brothers is true?
Well, that’s meant to be vague. I know what I think, at the end, but I don’t want to tell people. I’ve really enjoyed hearing the way that people have reacted to the film, how they feel differently about exactly what is happening, so I like that people are confused and uncomfortable.
Aside from the brief moment where both families end up at a restaurant, you’re not really in scenes with Julianne Moore, despite her being such a presence in Georgie’s life. Were you able to see her performance at all?
When I got to Savannah, I asked to watch a scene of Julianne and with D.W. Moffett, who plays my father, just so I could know their sensibility. I watched that scene where Lizzie Yu (who plays Gracie and Joe’s daughter) is trying on dresses with all the mirrors, and the coffee scene with Natalie and D.W. It was great to see what Natalie was like, too, because I could anticipate what she would be doing. Natalie starts that scene with me at the Crab Shack and she’s actually kind of game. For a moment, she’s like, oh, another artist. She perks up a bit. She was really fun to work with in both scenes.
By the time you talk to her again after the dinner, that dynamic has changed too. She’s much more exhausted by the whole family.Â
And he’s excited just to run into her again. He thinks they’re building a relationship, and she’s really not that interested. He’s still very judgmental. When she tells him to blow his cigarette smoke the other way, he’s like, Ooh, that’s so L.A., green-juice vegan.
How do you imagine his relationship with Joe? You and Charles Melton barely interact onscreen, but we know your characters were at school together.Â
We know they were friendly in school but haven’t spoken since. Savannah’s not that big a town, so they’ve seen each other, but I’m certain of the fact they don’t speak. When I see people from high school or college, it’s like my nervous system goes back to that time. The idea that Georgie being around Joe or his mother takes him back to being a child was very interesting to me. So when Joe pulls up in the car to pick up Elizabeth, there’s no communication whatsoever. It’s just that moment of reliving all that awkwardness. I loved that last moment of Georgie alone on the sidewalk that Todd wanted to do, where you see him alone for the first time — and the only time — where everything falls away and it’s just this 36-year-old boy.
You’ve been in Todd’s films twice in the past, in Carol and Wonderstruck. How would you characterize what it’s like to work with him?
He loves his craft, so he’s a joyous person to work with, and so in command of his skill set. He just knows what he wants, and there’s no trepidation or confusion. He knows what he wants in certain areas and he’s open to things in other areas. Of the three I’ve done with him, this role required the most creativity in developing. I felt like I got to show up in a way and really contribute. For instance, Georgie’s parents are not from Savannah, but Georgie had grown up there, so it was important to me that he sounded like that. I worked with a dialect coach and showed up ready to present that to Todd.
How’d he react to the accent?
So, there’s not really rehearsal, but we were rehearsing blocking for the scene at the Crab Shack, and he goes, “I think Georgie should have a dialect.†And I was like, “I’m glad you said that. I worked with a dialect coach.†Also, the night before we shot the scene, I went to the Crab Shack and had dinner by myself to just get the vibe of the place. I have a recording that I took of the bartender, with his permission. I just played it over and over because he did a very specific thing that I thought was fantastic. So that was my last-minute integration of real life.
That’s some very Elizabeth-style actorly research.
Yeah, 100 percent.
More on May December
- All 53 of This Year’s Oscar-Nominated Movies and Shorts, Ranked
- Pour One (Dad Beer) Out for Charles Melton
- Charles Melton Feels Like a Melancholy Donkey