Will Poulter is sitting in a London hotel room in a chunky-knit sweater swigging a murky brown liquid out of a protein shaker. A couple of days prior to our conversation, it was announced that he had been cast in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 as Adam Warlock, a golden adonis from the comics who is, frankly, absolutely jacked. Poulter, now 28, is already in great shape.
He looks a far cry from the skinny teen the wider world was introduced to in We Are The Millers, as viral screenshots from his new Disney+ drama Dopesick will attest. But crossfitting every other day does not a superhero make. Just ask Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Chris Pratt — any Chris at all, really. With filming due to get underway in the coming weeks, he’s working harder than ever. I tell Poulter that an hour before our interview I’d seen a tweet that read “somewhere in the world Will Poulter is on his fifth protein shake of the day.” Was that on the money?
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“It’s not five”, he says with a laugh, but declines to be pinned down on a number. “I’ve just come to terms with everything that’s required now. Filming starts in a month or so, so [I’m] definitely locking in and training my focus on that role and that role alone.” He is, due to Marvel’s notorious secrecy, not able to tell me anything at all about his regimen, or just how shredded he’s planning to get. But the 10am shake (it’s chocolate, by the way) speaks volumes. Landing the gig was a rigorous process of Zoom auditions before an IRL screen test with director James Gunn in Atlanta. “James is such a wonderful dude, and someone I think is incredibly talented,” he says. “It’s still sinking in for me. I’m very, very honoured to have been welcomed into the Marvel family, and especially into a franchise like Guardians which I’ve admired for a long time.”
Poulter has had a remarkable and varied career on screen already — from his incredible debut at age 12 in British indie gem Son of Rambow to Black Mirror’s interactive epic “Bandersnatch” and folk horror Midsommar — but his entry to the MCU still feels like a big leap. Marvel remains at the top of the cinematic mountain, and Guardians is one of its most popular remaining properties, having taken £1.2bn at the box office so far.
There’s a sense that it was only a matter of time until Poulter landed a career-shifting role. Last year, he pulled out of a part in Amazon’s record-breakingly expensive Lord of the Rings series due to a scheduling conflict, stepping away from what has to be one of the most eagerly-anticipated TV series this decade. Did that feel like a missed opportunity? “As an actor, you’re very used to things not going your way and having to adapt accordingly. I’m more used to things not going my way. So I just had to shake that one off, and I’m very grateful that on this occasion with Guardians I’m able to do it.”
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Before Guardians gets underway, Poulter can be seen in Disney+’s Dopesick, a harrowing docudrama that charts the genesis of America’s opioid crisis in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He plays Billy, a sales rep for the real-life pharmaceutical company Purdue Medical peddling the drug OxyContin as a non-addictive painkiller to desperate doctors (such as Michael Keaton’s Dr Samuel Finnix). In the series, Poulter exhibits the range that undoubtedly drew in some of Hollywood’s most powerful eyes — he is at once slimy, villainous, boyish, misguided, and perhaps most importantly, deeply human. Though he is certainly one of the bad guys (the slicked-back hair gives it away), he is not the salesman caricature that he could have been in less capable hands. Even in early episodes when he is in full Kool Aid-guzzling mode, voraciously takin we can see his dedication wobbling slightly as he begins to realise that the drug is not quite as flawless as he had been led to believe. “Getting to play the kind of moral conundrum of working for this company, and having as much success as this young kid was having, while coming to terms with the fact that it was unethical, was really interesting.”
Watching the show from across the pond, where prescription opioid use is increasing steadily (doubling between 1998 and 2018) but remains a drop in the ocean compared to the US (where it is the leading cause of injury-related death), is a jarring experience. Poulter, who was born and raised in Hammersmith, was shocked to learn the extent to which Purdue Medical had misled the public about the drug’s safety, and the ramifications it has had on the nation in the two decades since. “We're talking about a company that fabricated data, that entirely funded its own support studies and buried any data that was unfavourable. And then they vilified the people who became the victims of opioid abuse...”
The series goes to great lengths to reverse that, putting the patients who succumbed to addiction as a result of the big OxyContin push front and centre. Writer Danny Strong worked with journalist Beth Macy (writer of the non-fiction book Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors and the Drug Company that Addicted America) to create authentic portraits of the real victims of the crisis, drawing from real-life stories from people with opioid abuse disorder. It’s clear the show’s subject matter has left a mark on Poulter. “Every 15 minutes, a child in America is born with opioid withdrawal symptoms,” he tells me. “In 2020, there were over 90,000 deaths attributed to opioids for people under the age of 35. So while we were, naturally, globally consumed by the pandemic, more people under the age of 35 were dying as a result of this epidemic.” In preparation for the role, he studied How to Win Friends and Influence People because it felt like the kind of thing a salesman in the 1990s would read in advance of entering that world. “It was quite disturbing to read this book in 2021,” he says. “Looking back at it through a modern lens, what looked like salesmanship and casually influencing people now looks like coercion and deceit.”
Poulter cut his teeth at the very early age of 12 in Garth Jennings’ Son of Rambow, a beloved indie about two schoolboys in the 1980s trying to make their own version of First Blood. It was an idyllic entry to filmmaking that convinced him he had found his calling in life. “I learned an immense amount doing that film. I suppose there's a small part of me that will always be chasing the dragon a little bit after that experience. That kind of community spirit, you feel like it develops quite organically in smaller tight-knit units.”
He has been bouncing around much larger productions since then, working alongside some of the biggest stars in the world — from Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy in The Revenant, Jennifer Aniston in We Are the Milllers and Brad Pitt in War Machine. He was well equipped, then, to work alongside Keaton in Dopesick, but remains mystified by the power the former Batman star holds. “I can't help but absorb and be inspired being around someone like that,” he says. In December 2018, Black Mirror's “Bandersnatch” changed things for him, as he became the face of the kind of global TV phenomenon that only Netflix can create. It was interactive storytelling on a scale that has never been seen before or since, and he was the supporting character who stole the show, as enigmatic video game developer Colin Ritman. In the days after its release, Poulter found himself increasingly at the mercy of casually cruel keyboard warriors, who poked fun at his appearance. He quit Twitter in early January 2019 with an eye to protecting his mental health. Two years later his account is active once again, but he's only using it to platform causes that are close to his heart. “I just feel like that's the best and most healthy way to use it for me personally. I'm really lucky those organisations — The Black Curriculum, anti-bullying or Alzheimer's Research UK — allow me to do that."
“I'm constantly reminded of the importance of taking care of my mental health and obviously, aside from the physical challenges that it posed, I think the pandemic woke a lot of people up to the importance of extending that sort of empathy and level of care that we have with physical health to people's mental health. Mental health is physical health, you know.”
With his biggest career move to date just around the corner, he'll most likely find himself in the crosshairs once again. But this time, with a strong focus on self-care (and leg-day) he’s well equipped to deal with whatever comes next.
Dopesick is out on Disney+ on Friday 12th November.
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