How Kodi Smit-McPhee left his comfort zone for ‘The Power Of The Dog’ role

With a filmography dating back 16 years, Kodi Smit-McPhee has grown up on-screen. Before reaching his teens, the Australian actor starred with Eric Bana in homegrown dramatic feature Romulus, My Father, then made the leap to Hollywood opposite Viggo Mortensen in The Road. His quietly piercing gaze has been a mainstay of Let Me In, Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes and the X-Men franchise too, as it is in this season’s awards frontrunner The Power Of The Dog. After spending the majority of his life to date in the industry, the 25-year-old actor is also a newly minted Bafta rising star nominee.

That nod is one of many that have come Smit-McPhee’s way for Jane Campion’s New Zealand-shot western. As the film has kept attracting accolades, so have its stars. Smit-McPhee has earned Oscar, Bafta and Screen Actors Guild nominations for best supporting actor alongside winning a Golden Globe. He is excited about and appreciative of his current success, all while recognising it is a touch surreal given his experience in the industry. “I’ve been at it for a very long time and have put in a lot of blood, sweat and tears,” he tells Screen International.

In The Power Of The Dog, Smit-McPhee lends his simmering presence to the part of Peter Gordon, son of Kirsten Dunst’s widowed inn owner Rose, and a target for Benedict Cumberbatch’s swaggering rancher Phil Burbank from the instant they cross paths. The role slides naturally into a resumé filled with characters who stand apart — whether as outsiders or by circumstance. However, although Smit-McPhee could spot familiar threads to Peter, it was the challenges of the role that appealed to him.

“There’s a lot that I relate to within Peter — being internalised with his emotions, intentions and motives; being an extremely curious human being; being somewhat of a recluse and happy being alone; and having to deal with a great deal of responsibility from a young age,” he explains. But at the same time, “a great deal of him is almost in symbol and in logo”, Smit-McPhee continues. “It’s in the way that he carries himself. It’s in his movements that act as an allegory for the inner workings of who he is, and his strengths and his ability. He has this other motive that people can’t see the first time watching but recognise the second time. We treated that as, for lack of a better term, a secret mission.”

Smit-McPhee secured the part after a meeting with Campion that went from “a general conversation between two people who are in love with this story and want to tell it, into a kind of improv session where she asked me to ‘uplift’ Peter into the room and, as Jane, she asked Peter a bunch of questions and explored his world”.

The actor had already fallen for Campion’s script, adapted from Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel. “I more so fell in love with the character, and the challenges that it held to play such an internalised being,” he recalls. And from there, “It felt like an experiment and a conversation between two passionate people.”

That fervour flows onto the screen, and Smit-McPhee is just as feverish about the impact of working with Campion. “I had my own things going into the character, but I would say that it was what Jane helped me unlock that is more interesting. She kicked down the walls and the doors to my comfort zone,” he notes. “There was a great deal of surrendering ego and its defiance in the trade-off to take on a challenge and reap that reward, in hindsight. It was more like a Jane Campion bootcamp.”

First steps

Honing his skills with exceptional filmmakers, or even acting at all, was not Smit-McPhee’s childhood dream. He did not “see a movie, see a performance and think, ‘That’s what I want to do forever,’” which he imagines is the traditional initiation into the industry. His father Andy McPhee is an actor, and Smit-McPhee explains his own first steps into the field were “more of a natural unfolding from a conversation that I had with my dad, taking the opportunity of asking me if I wanted to do some short films or just see what happened with it”.

Smit-McPhee is candid about how he felt initially. “At eight years old, it was exciting because, first of all, I got to get out of school, to be realistic. But I found something very satisfying within this world.” A lover of art, English and anything where he could express himself as a student, but less responsive to the way that other subjects were taught, his inquisitiveness flourished in the industry. “It kept that curiosity alight, and I fell in love with it, more and more.”

The intensity that is such a key part of Smit-McPhee’s performance in The Power Of The Dog can trace its roots back to those early days and roles. “I always dealt with adult themes and subject matter from a very young age. For whatever reason, I had enough of a pseudo-maturity to deal with that,” he says.

Working with actors Bana and Mortensen in his first two major roles was similarly influential. “Those men were the blueprint for how I carry myself on-screen and off-screen, and how I navigate myself through the industry,” he explains.

On The Power Of The Dog, Smit-McPhee was able to build his performance against a co-star — Cumberbatch — who took a method approach. “In that ranch, in that house, it’s noted so much within the script and within the novel that you can hear a door open, you can hear a floorboard creak, you can hear footsteps, and they’re supposed to rattle you in a way when you know that it’s Phil. So to have Benedict remaining in that colder nature of Phil had a very necessary domino effect,” he says. Peter and Phil start to grow fonder towards each other, however, and that was mirrored on set as well. “He was very standoffish with most people but, luckily, if I may speak on behalf of him, he had the elasticity to be a bit freer with me in the appropriate times and have a laugh.”

While acting might not have been Smit-McPhee’s youthful fantasy, his dream now, after working with Campion, is to keep being pushed and challenged. “I am now kind of addicted to that because I see the reward I reaped, so I want to look for people who challenge me, keep me on my toes and can help me elevate with every role that I do. Yeah, no more comfort zone.”

• ‘The Power Of The Dog’ director Jane Campion talks casting Benedict Cumberbatch, switching shoot to New Zealand