Part of this comes from the physicality of Ford’s direction, but the lion’s share of the credit has to go to Taylor-Johnson and his capacity for derangement. Nocturnal Animals wouldn’t work without Marcus’s constant danger always lurking in the background, a fact you don’t wonder about for a second. The first comes when he forces Sheffield’s family off the road, emerging from the car with the olive branch of an accident to report, and you realize that he’s more than capable of projecting menace even as he says things that might seem conciliatory.
When you watch Nocturnal Animals, there are a few moments when you can almost see Taylor-Johnson’s career turning in real time.
And it’s Marcus who puts him there, giving the Manichean world of the novel its depraved, sneering id. Gyllenhaal also portrays the protagonist of the book, the unfortunate Edward Sheffield, a mild-mannered father and husband thrust into a hellish West Texas version of Straw Dogs. In Nocturnal Animals, Taylor-Johnson plays Ray Marcus, the villain within the thriller written by Jake Gyllenhaal’s long-suffering writer character. It’s full-on sleazebag attire, and before you hear or watch a second of Taylor-Johnson’s performance, you know that he’s working on a different wavelength than he’s ever occupied before. In addition to the prominent chops, he’s also got long, stringy hair and a mustache that looks like he nabbed it from Burt Reynolds’s face sometime in 1973. You might call the style that Taylor-Johnson so gleefully sports in the film “mutton chops,” since “sideburns” doesn’t really do them justice: They’re like two strip steaks that have been stapled to the lines of his jaw. His path to stardom seemed rough aside from a strong turn in Joe Wright’s richly cast adaptation of Anna Karenina (for which he sported a delightful mustache), he’d become an actor in need of roles that allowed him to actually act. Taylor-Johnson then slotted himself into the blockbuster engine in a big way, taking the instantly forgettable part of Quicksilver in Avengers: Age of Ultron and the lead role in Gareth Edwards’s Godzilla, a beautiful film that turned out to be, in the words of David Ehrlich, “post-human”: Taylor-Johnson’s Ford Brody was so bland and anonymous that he seemed more like an action figure than a character in a movie. A second Kick-Ass didn’t resonate in the way that the first did, and Oliver Stone’s Savages, for which Taylor-Johnson sported some ill-advised dreadlocks, also failed to make much of an impact.
The English actor was coming off good notices in Nowhere Boy, in which he played a young John Lennon, and both performances shared a sort of misfit-makes-good narrative in which fresh-faced (and clean-shaven) protagonists capitalized on their innate, hitherto misunderstood gifts.īut like plenty of other young, pretty actors before him, Taylor-Johnson’s transition into adulthood was more complicated. Taylor-Johnson first made an impression with American audiences in 2010, when he played the title character in Matthew Vaughn’s teenage wish-fulfillment fantasy Kick-Ass. When you talk about Aaron Taylor-Johnson in Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals - a role for which he was recently and surprisingly nominated for a Golden Globe, receiving the nod over his more frequently lauded co-star Michael Shannon - you have to start with his facial hair. Aaron Taylor-Johnson in Nocturnal Animals.
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