Max Minghella sits in his backyard, soaking up the Los Angeles sunshine, wearing a T-shirt that pays homage to French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Love, his adopted shepherd Rye the dog gets excited about the arrival of the package courier.
"Are you okay, honey?" he asked gently - the dog, not me.
Minghella, 35, who has appeared in dozens of screen credits, is best known as the smarmy chauffeur Nick Blaine in "The Handmaid's Tale ," a character who's hard to imagine saying "honey." . Of course, in air-starved Gilead, tiptoeing past Elisabeth Moss' June might be seen as a romantic gesture. In a first-season episode that featured child separation and hospital baby kidnapping, Nick's main contribution was exchanging furtive glances with a sex slave, and "Don't You (Forget About Me)" had a dissonant rhythm. I asked Minghella if he could play the closest thing the show has to a dream leading man, countering the show's dark narrative of female conquest.
"I know that's not the answer you want to hear," Minghella said without hesitation. "But I love that stuff, right? In the pilot, I think Nick only had a few lines. It's unclear what the character is going to be. That's pretty lucky for me personally because in real life I'm not an intellectual. I love Fifty Shades of Grey . It's like my Star Wars role."
Minghella speculates that this enduring romanticism is the result of upbringing. His father, the late British director Anthony Minghella, had produced major romance films such as "Cold Mountain" and "The English Patient." Young, movie-obsessed Max sits on the living room couch, taking it all in. “It took me a long time to understand that,” he said of his long exposure to love stories during his childhood. "My dad made 'The English Patient' when I was 10. So I spent two years watching dailies of the film and then 50 more cuts. Then he made ' The Gifted ' when I was 13 Mr. Ripley , same thing." This was the teenage Max Minghella's alternative to reruns. "I think they really shaped my view of the world in a lot of ways, especially The English Patient . It was a complicated love story, and sometimes I wonder how much of an impact it had on my psyche."
Some sons are rebellious; Others are similar. Minghella's co-star OT Fagbenle, who plays another of Joan's pre-Gilead love interests, got his first acting job in Anthony Minghella's romantic crime drama "Break and Enter." "Anthony is one of the kindest, most beautiful men I have ever had the pleasure to work with," Fagbenle said. "And Max has a gorgeous, sensitive, open soul."
Although Minghella spent his childhood on the set of The Talented Mr. Ripley , had an uncredited role as a Confederate soldier in Cold Mountain , and used the Super -8 cameras, but he insists his upbringing was normal. He grew up in London's South Hill Park, overlooking Hampstead Heath, with his father and mother, the choreographer Carolyn Choa. (Minghella also has a half-sister, Hannah Minghella, now a film executive.) Yes, technically that's London, but it's not. "I feel like I grew up in a very small town. Every school I went to was in Hampstead. I was born in Hampstead," Minghella said of his pre-college life A small map point in . “When I go to New York, I feel like I’m going to the big city.”
Despite his illustrious surname, the film is much more than a classic to watch. " Beverly Hills Cop is definitely a movie that I remember having an unhealthy obsession with. I think I first watched it when I was five years old, and I only watched it two or three times a day for years. I'm just addicted to it."
Many actors can trace their love of movies to a love of story, but for Minghella, the relationship seems to be the other way around. When he went to Columbia University, Minghella chose to study history because of its connection to film through storytelling. It was during the summers during college that he began to take acting more seriously. Before graduation, he had already starred in "Syria" starring Damon and George Clooney. He soon made a splash playing Divya Narendra in The Social Network in 2010 and starred in Clooney's The Ides of March . As all young actors must eventually do, Minghella moved to Los Angeles.
It's been more than a decade since he last lived in the moors, but, perhaps unusually for a man who chose his profession, Minghella is decidedly not, in his words, a "shapeshifter." When he returned home this Christmas, he began sifting through old diaries stored at his mother's house, "like scraps of my writing from when I was very young and into my teenage years," before coming to the United States. “It’s hilarious to me,” Minghella said of the reflections from his own childhood. "My review of a movie when I was 7 was about the same as my review of a movie when I was 35. My tastes haven't changed that much. When I kind of like something, I do tend to continue to like it."
Which brings us back to his abiding love of romance, rooted in his heritage, which is evident throughout Minghella's 2018 directorial debut. Teen Spirit is a hazy film about a teenage girl from the Isle of Wight (the remote British island where Max's father Anthony was born) who competes in a local X-Factor -style singing competition. (The film stars Minghella's rumored long-time girlfriend Elle Fanning.) The story is small, but the climax is epic.
Minghella called the film - an ode to the power of pop songs - "embarrassingly Max." Max loves a good, music-driven movie trailer - he's watched the trailer for Top Gun: Maverick "many times." Max loves the rhythm of sports movies like Friday Night Lights . Max loves movies that showcase female energy, like Spring Breakers . He likens Teen Spirit to an experiment, his answer to the question, "Can I take all these things that I love and find a structure that can hold them?" The result is a touching hodgepodge of Minghella's charm, inspired by another thing he loves: Robyn's 2010 album Body Talk (itself a dance-pop meditation about love).
Minghella hasn't directed any movies since, but he now understands that making movies is more organic to his personality — methodical, impatient — than starring in them. Directing also made him realize that acting was "a lot harder than I thought," which in turn made him enjoy acting even more. In addition to The Handmaid's Tale currently streaming on Hulu, Minghella also appears in Spiral, the ninth installment in the Saw horror franchise, and for me, that's at least a departure.
"I do love horror movies, but what's really amazing is how nostalgic I feel, right? We were talking about 'Beverly Hills Cop' before. I just missed a certain type of movie," Minghella said of his role as Chris Rock's new role as detective partner. He longed for simple storytelling, like the buddy cop movies he watched in his youth, especially "48." There is no doubt that police dramas are a different kind of love story. "Then I read the script, and it was very much in the vein of that." He clarifies, "I mean, it's also very Saw . It's a very scary movie." "
His new passion for acting also showed up on the set of The Handmaid's Tale . Hollywood veteran producer Warren Littlefield described casting Minghella in the role of Nick as an effortless choice: "Sometimes you feel torn about things. [Casting Minghella] I was immediately Get it, everyone agrees." Now in its fourth season, Hulu's hit series is taking a more serious tone than ever. Gilead became more desperate to maintain its rule and so became more emboldened to commit violence. Perhaps it's fitting that the show's romantic gestures finally match this scale.
In one particularly emotional moment, Elisabeth Moss' Joan and Minghella's Nick meet in the middle of a bridge and fall into a long kiss. It's been two seasons since they held their newborn daughter in their arms, and it's hard to imagine this wouldn't be their last goodbye. Littlefield, like Minghella, comes here to find romance among the ruins. "When they come together, it's so spectacular. In the middle of all the trauma is this epic love story," he said. “The character of Max is brilliant.”
For Minghella, the satisfaction is more personal. He works with great people, he loves his scenes, and he thinks Nick is a complex character. Minghella first read "The Handmaid's Tale" in 2005 in college. Like everything Minghella has ever loved, he still loves it. He's as proud of the latest season as he was of the show's first. He watched Nick and Joan run desperately back to each other on the big screen, just as you'd expect. “I watch it like a fan.”
