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Aug 14, 2010 By Chris Tinkham James Frecheville

In Animal Kingdom, writer/director David Michôd’s thrilling Melbourne-set family crime drama, Australian newcomer James Frecheville plays 17-year-old Josh Cody, a brooding, taciturn man-child caught between the law and his family’s illicit activities. With senior officer Nathan Leckie (Guy Pearce) coercing Josh to spill what he knows about the recent murder of two police officers, and Josh’s intimidating uncle, Pope (Ben Mendelsohn), pressuring him to keep his mouth shut, Josh’s words remain few throughout the film, but the weight of his fears are readable in his face and body language.

When Under the Radar met with Frecheville in June, he was in Los Angeles for the L.A. Film Festival‘s screenings of Animal Kingdom and meeting with Hollywood movers and shakers. Leaner in person and with his hair grown out, Frecheville, who is 19, more resembles one of the faces adorning fashion billboards on the Sunset Strip than his character in the film.

“People that see the film often think that because I went through the open-call casting, and I was 17, I wasn’t quite acting,” Frecheville says. “So in a way they might think I’m this kind of like teenager with Asperger’s, that I just am the character. Which I’m completely not, but some of the best meetings I’ve had have been from people who have seen the film. They’re pleasantly surprised by how much of a difference there is between me and the character, because I consider myself quite well spoken, and Josh can barely get any words out as it is.”

Have you been to Los Angeles before?

Yeah, twice before. There’s a spring break equivalent in Australia for kids who graduate high school, ‘cause the drinking age is 18, where they all go up to a beach and just get drunk for a week. And I had the option to do that, and I had the option to go to L.A. and meet my agent and manager and have some productive meetings. So I did that instead. And then I came here after Sundance, which I went to as well. And then this trip, which is good. I just spent a couple days in New York, and it was amazing.

How was the screening last night?

It was good. The sound was really great, and the screen was huge, and it was like an 800-seat cinema. I remember doing the Q&A, and usually I’m good with those sort of things, but started to feel really weirded out because I started to hear the reverberation of the microphone, so all of a sudden I became hyperconscious of the fact that people were listening and I was being recorded.

You were 17 when you shot the film?

Yeah.

And you’re how old now?

19. The day we finished shooting, I was a month shy of 18. So I was at the latter end of being 17. I turned 19 a bunch of weeks ago.

When we first meet Josh, his mom is dead and he’s repeatedly glancing at a TV game show when the paramedics attend to her. Do you think it’s intended for the audience to underestimate Josh at the beginning of the film?

I think so, yeah, because he’s a passive kid. He doesn’t do anything for himself, and he’s always adhering to what other people do or say. Especially when he moves in with his uncle, and he’s living in that environment, he just wants to do the right thing. He never had a father figure or any decent male role model, so he’s just trying to make a good impression on people.

Was there much backstory with his character?

Not too much. His father had left the picture very early on. I think the father got an idea of what his wife’s family were like and was too freaked out and left. And his mom’s a heroine addict, so, you know, 101 in bad parenting, and I think Josh had to do a lot of things for himself without being told. Like in that first scene, he’s wearing a dishwashing glove, which you might have spotted and been, “Why is he wearing a dishwashing glove?” But the idea is that he was never taught how to wash the dishes, but he saw it on TV and just thought, “That’s how you wash the dishes,” with like boiling water and gloves. Probably no soap. He just had the gloves and the water. I think the backstory was that he had an offense of stealing a car once and maybe dealt pot at high school. These trivial juvenile delinquency kind of things, and then he gets thrown in the deep end with adult delinquencies.

One of the great things about your role is that it gives you the opportunity to work opposite so many good actors. Did anyone in particular take you under their wing?

It’s funny, the relationship that I had with everyone somewhat mirrored the relationship the character had with people. So the relationship I had with Guy was really serious and work-oriented. The relationship I had with Ben, I was treading lightly and not looking him in the eye. People said, “Don’t be in the same room with him.” So I got completely hazed by Ben. And I’m great friends with Ben now. I suppose, after the fact, Ben’s probably taken me under his wing the most. And Joel [Edgerton] was really sweet. He’s a really affable, cool guy. And then Sully [Sullivan Stapleton], who played Craig, gave me the huge big brother treatment…. Luke [Ford] took me under his wing during the shoot, because he was the closest age to me. We talked about young actors stuff. He was really helpful.

There’s a scene after J steals the car, where he’s left alone in the flat, and there’s this low zoom that begins with him out of frame and then slowly reveals him on the couch. Did you get a sense of the film’s strong visual style while shooting it?

Not quite. They had this kind of American dolly machine that they have to lease out to people because they’re too expensive to buy, and they’d get the camera, and they’d put it on this huge rubber chord, so it had the floating, not quite still [effect]. And I’d seen some test stuff. I didn’t really watch back the rushes. That was one of the first lessons I learned pretty early on, someone saying, “Don’t watch your fuckin’ rushes.” ‘Cause as soon as you start watching yourself on screen, you start going, “Oh, I’m doing this little idiosyncratic thing” that you can’t fix. And next time you’re doing a scene, you’re trying to concentrate on stopping doing that thing that pisses you off usually, that’s not your place to change. If the director wants to change it, he’ll go, “Stop twitching your lip.”

I’d seen some short films that Adam [Arkpaw, director of photography] had done, and some of David’s short films, so I don’t think I was quite prepared for visually what I saw, but I was aware that it was very high caliber.

There’s a lot of slo-mo in the movie. Are you aware of that when you’re shooting?

Yeah, I picked it up about halfway through. ‘Cause, they’re like, “We’re shooting at 48,” and initially I didn’t know what that meant. But, it’s 48 frames per second. And it was cool, ‘cause every time there was slo-mo stuff—‘cause I wasn’t watching the rushes, I hadn’t seen it—so, all of a sudden, it’s funny when I’m watching the film, I was like, [in an enthusiastic whisper] “Yeah, slo-motion.” The first time I saw the film, I was a bit of a mess, just ‘cause I was too weirded out by hearing myself as other people hear me—without the voice resonating through the head—and seeing yourself on a 25-foot screen, in all my adolescent glory, with pimples and all that sort of shit. But the more I’ve seen it, the more I’ve gotten over myself. But yeah, in every faculty, it was a very well done film.

What was the audition process like? Did you read scenes from the film?

Yeah. The first audition, I went through the open-call casting, and we did a group improvisation, and then I was asked to stay behind and do the scene they’d asked me to prepare—on the chance that I got asked to stay back. And I got sent the script around maybe the second or third audition, and I read it, and it was great. I went in with the mindset thinking that the job is a secondary thing. Somebody had said to me something really wise, “As an actor, you should want to audition more than you should want to get jobs.” Because, in a way, when you’ve got an audition, you’ve got a captive audience five feet away from you. And you’ve got the potential to make their day. And people can read the desperation of anyone that wants a job really, really badly. So if you go in there just wanting, the want needs to be about doing a good audition and then walking away and just putting it out of your head. And then if you get a callback or you don’t, it doesn’t matter, because you did a good audition. That was the kind of mindset I went into it with, and I got some callbacks, and then got the part.

Laura Wheelwright and James Frecheville, pictured above, were cast in Animal Kingdom through an open call.

Who was among the group audition?

All high school kids that had been told, like me, for the open call. Like teenagers that thought, “I’ll audition for the movie.” And they did the same thing with Nicky’s character. They had an open-call casting for girls as well, and Laura Wheelwright, the girl who plays Nicky, was an open-call kid like I was.

In the press notes it says that you heard on New Year’s Eve 2008 that you earned the role. How did you celebrate?

How do you think? [smiles] Nah, you know, got smashed. I was gonna do that anyway, ‘cause it was New Year’s Eve.

Were you out with friends?

Yeah, I was in this great little seaside town in Victoria called Lorne, which a whole bunch of teenagers will congregate to at this particular point in the year, and I had a whole bunch of friends, and all my friends have friends down there, so there’s this whole mob of people that were down there that year. And I found out I got the part at three o’clock in the afternoon. And then I called my mum, she said, “Don’t tell anyone. We’ll crack it open later with everyone in one spot.” I remember having to pull some old friends of mine away from all their friends, and they were grumbling, they were like, “What the fuck? I don’t want to do some stupid family thing.” All of our close family friends and all their kids are all my age, and my very old chums of mine were kind of around having drinks, and then we broke it and started drinking. And then we went back. It was funny trying to hide it from people for a couple hours, ‘cause I was literally jumping in excitement, so giddy with myself. And then they’re like, “What’s up with you?” And I was like, “Oh, I’m just really excited for New Year’s Eve!” It was really funny to suppress it, and I remember walking down the beach with the fuckin’ biggest grin on my face, and then all these people kind of looking at me thinking, “It’s just New Year’s Eve. You don’t have to be that happy.”

What sparked your interest in acting?

I don’t quite remember, to be honest. I think it was, I was at an age when it was all about show and attention. I was about five when I started doing it. My prep teacher, which is kind of the first year of elementary school in Australia, had a double degree in drama, and she said to my mum, “You need to put him in a theatre or something. Otherwise, he’s gonna end up a drug dealer or murderer.” I think I was one of those flurries of energy as a kid, and it needed to be channeled. I started doing youth theatre and kept it up until I was 17. I can’t remember any definitive point when I said, “I want to be an actor.” I don’t think I figured it out until I was about 13, but mom said I knew when I was six.

So there wasn’t like a particular movie?

No. To my recollection, it was when I got to an age when I realized some friends of mine were elite athletes and national-level swimming champions. With older brothers in high school, and hearing them pick subjects based on what they want to do after school, I kind of had this moment where I was like, “Oh, what do I want to do when I’m out of school?” I thought about it and I was like, “Well, I’m OK at sports but not very good.” Just kind of thinking this and that, then I was just like, “Oh, acting!” ‘Cause I’d heard you should do something you love. Yeah, I don’t remember exactly when it was, but it’s always been there. I think I’m a pretty aspirational person, not like I fell into it.

Going back to the conversation your teacher had with your mom, are teachers that blunt when discussing kids that age?

The whole drug dealer thing was a joke, but there’s always a truth in it, you know? ‘Cause I think I’ve got undiagnosed ADD, just ‘cause my focus is so terrible sometimes, and I just can’t be normal.

Did you have other interests or hobbies besides acting?

I think I slowly whittled away all of them, but there was a stage when I was playing basketball and Australian rules football, and swimming and tennis. My parents were really good with that. They put us in all these extracurricular things, where you could branch off and go in one direction. One of my brothers played football predominantly, and another one played basketball, and I kept up all of them, and then I just did acting, and it paid off, I guess.

I’ve been doing a little bit of writing, and that’s an avenue I really want to explore, because I think learning about other faculties of the craft of filmmaking in general will completely and directly influence acting and vice versa. Ideally, for me, I’d just love to get my career to a point where I’m just able to segue quite seamlessly into making my own content, or writing, or at some point making a production company. Just to be a seasoned industry person is my game plan.

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