Elkhart, Texas, is a town of roughly 1,300 people that sits about 10 miles down the highway from the relative metropolis of Palestine (pop. 17,989). This is 100 miles due East of Waco, deep into what Tye Sheridan, who has quickly become Elkhart’s most famous export, calls the state’s “piney region.” “Texas is a lot of things,” Sheridan, 25, says while stirring an iced coffee in the tony restaurant attached to a Beverly Hills hotel. “I-35 runs pretty much through the middle of the state: through Dallas, down into Waco, into Austin, all the way to San Antonio. I think anywhere west of I-35 looks like the West, and East Texas feels much more like the South.” And so it’s fitting that while the state’s arid western half conjures frontiersmen and bandits—the itinerant and fleeting—the ancestors on Sheridan’s father’s side, going back at least six generations, were born, raised, and buried within 30 miles of Elkhart. The major industry, he says, is timber.
Given its size, nearly all of the town’s children attend the same school. So when a group of strange men descended on Elkhart Intermediate in 2006, pacing the hallways, peering into classrooms, and pulling staff aside for hushed conversations, they were able to make a quick scan of every young boy the region had to offer. Sheridan was in the fourth grade. “I remember asking my teacher, ‘Who was that? Who are those guys?’ And she said, ‘Believe it or not, they’re some casting directors for a movie.’ I remember thinking, What the heck are they doing here?”
Those casting directors were conducting a sweep of Texas to find young costars for what would become Terrence Malick’s sprawling fugue The Tree of Life. That search lasted well over a year, and the string of auditions that followed took nearly as long. But when it was over, Sheridan was cast as the youngest son of Brad Pitt’s and Jessica Chastain’s characters. The Tree of Life won the 2011 Palme d’Or, and while its early American reviews were predictably divided, its advocates cite it as a masterpiece.
While waiting for Tree of Life to be released, Sheridan split his time between school, sports, and filming audition videos that did not yield a single callback. But when he returned to the screen in 2012’s Mud, opposite Matthew McConaughey, he stayed there for good. Over the past decade, he has appeared in more than 20 feature films, often as their star. (“Timothée said something to me one time that was really funny,” Sheridan recalls of a period before Chalamet exploded. “He told me I get all the good roles. I said, ‘Just wait, dude.’”) The scope and reach of these projects varies wildly. Sheridan is one of the X-Men, and was at the center of the second-most expensive Steven Spielberg movie ever, Ready Player One; he also plays opposite Oscar Isaac in The Card Counter, Paul Schrader’s caustic meditation on the abuses at Abu Ghraib, from earlier this year. He can currently be seen in George Clooney’s The Tender Bar, where he plays the Pulitzer-winning newspaper writer J. R. Moehringer, in the type of film Hollywood could once be counted on to churn out: the adult drama with movie stars.
Sheridan is fond of the word storytelling and says he sees the craft as a vehicle to gain “an education on yourself or someone else.” This is not, in itself, unusual among actors. But he is unusually protective of the place from which he comes. “Sometimes people who work in this industry think that they can just tell a story about anything,” he says. “I’m sensitive when it comes to stories that feel close to the people I grew up with: small-town, rural communities. I know what their values are, how they think, how they feel. Lots of times you see people trying to tell stories that are set against the backdrop of rural America. I’m not trying to say movies that are set against that never work. But a lot of times [filmmakers] don’t get it, and people who are from there feel that.” He says he’s grateful that the directors of his first three movies—Malick; Jeff Nichols, who cast Sheridan in Mud; and David Gordon Green, who oversaw Joe the following year—had roots in Texas. “They were telling stories I could relate to, as a boy coming from the South,” Sheridan says.
The Tree of Life process, Sheridan continues, was “like summer camp,” free of the bustling sets and strict rigidity that come on more conventional productions. In fact, he and his young costars never even saw a script. “They would bring us to set, and when we got there, that’s when we would find out what the scene was about,” he says. “There was no pressure; you never had to learn any lines. ‘You’re mad at your brother because he did this, and I want you to come from over there, and I want you to tell him why you’re mad.’ [Malick would] call out lines while we were shooting. It was fun. It didn’t feel like there was a set goal. It was very open-ended.”
Mud required Sheridan to learn lines and give a more conventional shape to his character. He did: Sheridan is magnetic as one of two teenage boys who stumble across McConaughey’s mysterious fugitive. Though his character is believably unkempt for a child with plenty of free time in DeWitt, Arkansas, Sheridan aged into a clean-cut, control-version young man: strong but not too muscle-bound, classic features dominating his face even when he lets his hair grow shaggy.
Despite those classic features, there are hints of unescaped neuroses that help Sheridan steady The Tender Bar, which occasionally wobbles in the way many Clooney-directed movies do. While he appears only scarcely in the film’s first act—Daniel Ranieri plays Moehringer as a child—Sheridan is constantly engaging as the sly, cerebral foil to his arch-masculine uncle (Ben Affleck) and his determined mother (Lily Rabe). The script, by Oscar winner William Monahan (The Departed), follows Moehringer through a chaotic childhood on Long Island to Yale and the Times. Sheridan is asked to do a lot of listening: to Charlie as he tends bar; to his roommates as they riff on the nature of life; to an editor who tells him he’s good, but not good enough to land his dream job, when he believes he’s ready for it. It is a tremendously reactive performance. What’s most striking is his eyes—for all the volleyed jokes and convincingly slurred drunkenness, Sheridan could have anchored the movie in complete silence.
“George was always talking about old actor tricks,” Sheridan says of Clooney, the first actor-director for whom he’s ever worked. “He would say, ‘Before you say that line, just look down… then look back up. Trust me, it’ll work.’” As he says this, he demonstrates Clooney’s advice; it does. Sheridan, who did not graduate from his Elkhart high school and instead received tutoring on sets, was working full-time long before his contemporaries began their conservatory programs, and so he’s picked up many performing strategies through osmosis. “I love working with actors who are classically trained,” he says, and he especially likes watching those more studied actors tweak scenes with their directors. “I loved watching George speak to Ben, because he’d come to Ben and say something very simple—or just walk him over to the monitor and say, ‘Watch this real quick,’ and Ben would say, ‘Got it.’ It was almost telepathic.” Sheridan talks frequently about his perfectionism, and about how acting is in some ways immersion therapy toward curbing that impulse—how, regardless of the actor’s feelings about a given take, he has to trust that the director has a clear vision of the finished product.
While he does not display the tics of a great character actor, and has yet to show the raw scene-stealing power, Sheridan can communicate impressive depth even when still—a longtime hallmark of movie stardom. Take, for example, the way he calibrates this stillness to his radically different characters in The Card Counter and The Tender Bar. In the former, his Cirk—whose father killed himself after returning from his stint as an Abu Ghraib guard, and who plans to murder the architect of that torture program—is quiet in a way that suggests something nearly feral just beneath the surface. His J. R. Moehringer is Cirk’s equal opposite, a young man whose id is cocooned in thousands of books and patrician aspirations.
Sheridan has no designs on the kind of upper-class integration Moehringer seeks in the movie. He has spent the past seven or so years living in Austin, where he and a business partner are working on a start-up that aims to make visual effects and computer-generated elements affordable to filmmakers, video game designers, and other artists. “I thought it was essential to me to live outside of the industry I was working in, to not be influenced by other people’s biases or trends,” he says—“to look at it from the outside in.” But the pandemic has spurred him to consider moving even further out of that industry axis, back to something resembling the place he came from. “I don’t really need nice things,” Sheridan continues. “I have more than I need, I think. I’ve had the same truck since 2014. I’m trying to put all my energy and focus into what truly matters, and that’s my career, and my family, and the people around me that I know love me for who I am. I want to get closer and closer to all those things.”