Only one actor appears in both “One Battle After Another” and “Marty Supreme,” the two films on a collision course for an Oscars standoff this year. And it is not Leonardo DiCaprio nor Timothée Chalamet. It also isn’t Chase Infiniti or Odessa A’Zion, who have breakout roles in those respective films.
It happens to be Paul Grimstad, a 52-year-old Yale professor.
“Somehow I lucked out,” said Mr. Grimstad, between bites of scrambled eggs and French fries in Brooklyn last month.
In Paul Thomas Anderson’s quixotic action film “One Battle After Another,” Mr. Grimstad is Howard Sommerville, a true believer wearing Coke bottle glasses whose capture by federal agents hurls the movie into manic overdrive. In Josh Safdie’s pingpong epic “Marty Supreme,” he’s the less consequential “Production Manager,” hurling lines at the back of another character as the camera trails behind.
The tale of Mr. Grimstad’s fortunate fall is one that would make acting students rend their hair out. He has no acting agent and isn’t a member of the Screen Actors Guild. He hasn’t so much as cracked a book on acting theory and has never walked a red carpet.
Rather, he has spent the past 15 years walking the halls of Yale, where, as the director of undergraduate studies in its humanities program, he teaches courses with titles like “The Detective Story: Solving Mysteries from Oedipus to Sherlock.”
He is still getting used to being recognized by parents at his 17-year-old son’s high school and students in his classes.
“That’s been weird,” said Mr. Grimstad, who looks like he could build a mean computer from scratch and talks at the speed of a runaway typewriter. Over the course of an hour he skated through topics like the band Television, the Mets, hipsterdom, Steely Dan and what it was like to film alongside a “Shark Tank” judge. There is nothing linear about Mr. Grimstad’s delivery. When he dropped the phrase “Al final del Camino,” it was difficult to tell if he was name checking a “Boyz II Men” song, citing a line from “One Battle,” or merely just switching to Spanish for his own amusement.
About 15 minutes into the interview, Mr. Grimstad, who was born in Branch, Wis., and still harnesses an “aw shucks” Midwestern affect, stopped mid-thought to ask if this interview really was going to run in The New York Times.
He is a bundle of contradictions, wrapped up in a dusty leather jacket — an academic who detests academic writing. (He prefers sci-fi. His debut novel, “Cold Fusion” is expected in 2027 from Simon & Schuster.) And he is an untrained actor who appears in two of the year’s critically beloved films.
“I have just been winging it and riffing and figuring it out,” he said. His story is a classic tale of who you know mattering perhaps a bit more than what you know.
Mr. Grimstad attended the University of Wisconsin where he studied literature and fronted Ex-Action Figures, a fuzzy punk band that opened for Yo La Tengo and Guided By Voices in the mid-’90s. (In some script-like foreshadowing, one of the band’s songs was called “Famous for a Second.”)
He moved to New York in 1996, then buzzing with a music scene that would soon catapult bands like The Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs to global recognition. Mr. Grimstad, ever the contrarian, wanted little part of it. “I didn’t like the conformism of indie rock,” he said. “Everybody sounding and looked the same. It just started to depress me.”
When his band dissolved, his roommate in Brooklyn, Ronald Bronstein, just beginning his own film career, offered Mr. Grimstad a new type of gig: a role in his debut film, “Frownland,” as “Charles” a misanthropic musician who refuses to pay his apartment’s electric bill.
“I’ve never met anyone more ambitious at the level of verbal expression,” said Mr. Bronstein, who spent six years making “Frownland,” and wrote the part with Mr. Grimstad in mind. “If he refused to submit to the process, then that character wouldn’t exist in the movie. I was lucky and almost surprised that he was open to submitting to my process.”
But, Mr. Grimstad couldn’t stomach it. “I found that I did not particularly enjoy seeing myself on screen,” he said. He turned down future acting opportunities, more at ease with life as an unseen composer.
None of this surprised Mr. Bronstein.
“I always first and foremost think of Paul as a musician,” he said. “Acting was just a thing he did as an experience.”
Over the years, Mr. Grimstad has continued scoring films, including “Heaven Knows What,” an early Safdie Brothers film (Mr. Bronstein went on to co-write that film, as well as “Good Time,” “Uncut Gems” and “Marty Supreme”) and “The Sweet East” directed by Sean Price Williams. He recently did the music for Sarah Sherman’s Netflix comedy special, and self-released “Songs,” his long-gestating debut album under his own name.
“I had more respect for Tom Verlaine and Thomas Pynchon than I did for Ethan Hawke at that time,” said Mr. Grimstad, reflecting on his distaste for acting. “Writing songs seemed more like what I am.”
But another life change was also in motion as “Frownland” premiered. Mr. Grimstad, an insatiable reader, decided to get his doctorate in literature at New York University. From there, he was hired by Yale, first in the literature department and later in humanities. For him, it felt like a true calling.
“I love teaching,” said Mr. Grimstad. “I love being in the mix with the students and talking about books.”
Mr. Grimstad refused to pick up another script.
“I don’t know why I had such an aversion to it,” said Mr. Grimstad. “But I did, it was probably pretty self-involved. Stupid stuff, actually.”
His resolve lasted until about two years ago when Mr. Bronstein (again playing the role of Mr. Grimstad’s cinematic guardian angel) passed his name along to Cassandra Kulukundis, the casting director of “One Battle.”
“The moment I get on a Zoom with Grimstad, I was like, ‘oh, this is awesome,’” said Ms. Kulukundis. The motor-mouthed professor, she said, had the “A.D.D. delicious,” that she and Mr. Anderson, were searching for. “When I think of who Sommerville is, we wanted him to be this sort of like kind of mechanical genius,” she said.
By Mr. Grimstad’s own admission, the character, an aging radical simmering with equal parts beaten-down weariness and tenacious idealism, is quite close to his own persona. “I’m basically that guy,” he said, from behind his own set of blocky glasses.
Still, he copped to feeling “impostor syndrome.” Mr. Anderson worked with him to take the role, and by extension, to take his performance seriously. It wasn’t enough for Mr. Grimstad to just carry a backpack as Sommerville; Mr. Anderson wanted him to know each map, bus tickets, cash and fake credit card, inside and out. “He’s going for realism,” said Mr. Grimstad, who spent about a month filming his part, between El Paso and Los Angeles.
As initial apprehension abated, Mr. Grimstad came to feel that “acting was incredibly fun.” He now believes that his years in the lecture hall prepared him for the set. “There is an element of verbal performance in teaching,” he said. “I’m not talking about over-the-top showmanship, but a certain way of animating a book.”
The “One Battle After Another” experience convinced him to finally take Josh Safdie on his offer and act in “Marty Supreme.”
“Paul, you turn him on and there’s just lots of chain reactions and everyone feeds off of that,” said Mr. Safdie, who said he and Mr. Bronstein wrote “dummy text” in the “Marty Supreme” script for the role knowing that Mr. Grimstad could improv.
Mr. Safdie added: “He walked me through what he was gonna say, and it’s better than anything you could ever write.”
Jacob Gallagher is a Times reporter covering fashion and style.
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