Duke Johnson’s “The Actor”: A Dreamlike Detective Drama Hits the Screens
A new detective drama, “The Actor,” directed by Duke Johnson, has rolled out to global audiences. Best known for his animated gem Anomalisa, Johnson draws heavily from the well of Charlie Kaufman—the visionary he teamed up with for that melancholic masterpiece. Much like Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or I’m Thinking of Ending Things, “The Actor” unfurls like a dream. Its central figure, reeling from a head injury, finds himself adrift in an unfamiliar town, grasping at the threads of who he might be.
Ten years back, animator Duke Johnson joined forces with Charlie Kaufman to craft the wondrous Anomalisa. True to Kaufman’s pedigree—penning scripts for Eternal Sunshine, Adaptation, and Being John Malkovich, and stepping into directing with Synecdoche, New York—that film wove a poignant, probing tapestry. It asked: What shapes a person’s identity? How do memory and true love, those twin pillars of human experience, dance with one another?
Kaufman’s shadow looms large over “The Actor,” Johnson’s feature-length debut. This surreal tale doesn’t mimic Kaufman’s playbook word for word but captures its spirit—a haunting sense that every fleeting moment carries the weight of an entire life.
The story follows Paul Cole (Andre Holland), who takes a blow to the head from the cheated husband of one of his lovers, plunging him into amnesia. He wakes in a hospital in some backwater town—on tour with a theater troupe, perhaps? An actor, maybe? The 1950s, it seems?—and, with the help of doctors, nurses, and cops, pieces together scraps of himself: his name, his craft, a New York address, and a nagging need to be home by Christmas. Broke and on the run from this nowhere place, he hops to the next town, forced to start anew while still chasing the ghost of who he was.
Paul has no clue what—or who—awaits him in New York, and he balks at the idea of rebuilding from scratch. Yet he takes a job as a factory loader, rents a room from a quintessential warmhearted landlady (nine dollars a week sans breakfast, twelve with meals), and crosses paths with Edna (Gemma Chan). Tentatively, they begin to date, though it’s a rocky road—Paul can’t recall Edna’s address, so he keeps it scribbled in his pocket (637 Larkspur Street, “like the bird”).
Johnson underscores the film’s surreal haze not just with visuals—shot with a soft, noirish blur that feels like a waking dream—but with a nod to Anomalisa. That earlier work leaned hard into Kaufman’s fascination with the Fregoli delusion, where every character save one spoke in the same voice, blurring into sameness. Here, a tight ensemble—Tracy Ullman, Joe Cole, Simon McBurney, May Calamawy, Tanya Reynolds—plays multiple roles, spinning a carousel of past and present around a hero teetering into paranoia. The more Paul insists he’ll soon feel better, the further reality slips from his grip. Finally scraping together thirty bucks for a bus to New York, he leaves Edna behind in Ohio, clutching her address like a lifeline.
New York unveils fragments of his old life—friends, the theater scene, a less-than-stellar version of himself—but it brings no comfort. Just as Johnson’s enigmatic film nears its most tantalizing turns, it hesitates, teetering on the edge of an existential abyss it dares not plumb. What’s next for Paul, forever unmoored from clarity, remains unsolved. No alternate path emerges. In this man, fading from himself and others, flickers a lingering ache for the Edna he left behind—yet what roots those feelings if her face has already blurred from his mind?
Charlie Kaufman, no doubt, could spin a sharp answer—he did, after all, in Eternal Sunshine. “The Actor,” though, throws up its hands. In quiet despair, it sends its hero back—into a new life doomed to reset each dawn.
