‘I Just Love Acting So Much Right Now’ Is the Most Charles Melton Thing Charles Melton Has Ever Said

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | December 21, 2023 |

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | December 21, 2023 |

Charles Melton is one of those actors who I can admit to underestimating. Not only did he get his start on Riverdale, possibly one of the most ridiculous teen dramas to ever get made (and that’s coming from a Teen Wolf fan), but he’s the kind of hot that makes you hate yourself, and then he opens his mouth and out comes the most sincere, sweet bullshit you’ve ever heard. Surely he can’t also be good at acting.

But he proved me wrong in May December. Melton spoke about that performance and his changing career in a recent interview with i-D magazine.

The opening, I’ll admit, threatened to confirm my previous assumptions of him being an airhead. “Do you remember The Land Before Time?” he asked the interviewer, and then he described how that movie was what inspired him to be an actor.

“It goes deep, right? My dad took me to see it when I was about four years old, and I was walking up and down the aisles, looking at the faces of everyone watching this movie. My dad claims that that’s when he realised that I was so interested in this bridge between people seeing something on a screen and being able to feel connected. I wanted to be a part of it somehow.”

But, you know what? He really does mean that. Maybe he is an airhead, but he’s a sincere one.

In speaking about his Gotham Award-winning role in May December, he gushed, “I think it would be an actor’s dream for every script they get sent to feel this immediate connection to the character and the story. I don’t think it’s like that most of the time, but when I got Samy [Burch]’s script, I felt that.” It isn’t like that all the time, but don’t you wish it was, just for him?

I didn’t even hate it when he likened acting to playing football, which he did in high school and college. “It’s not so much what you do in the season as what you do in the off-season,” he said, and that was the first time I could relate to a sports metaphor.

“I was learning how certain emotions live in the body,” he said of working with acting and voice coaches for the role. “I can get so in my own head, going against my body’s natural instinct, because of all these structured ideas that almost restrain the performance.” Then he won me over once and for all when he laughed at himself and said, “I probably need to chill out.”

He further wore me down when he raised his mug to decry method acting, stating, “The idea of causing suffering and pain to others around you, in order to tell your story for the character … That is not my cup of chamomile tea.” If it had been English breakfast or even Earl Grey, it may not have had the same effect on me, but it was chamomile, God damn it.

But wait, there’s more! He paints to de-stress from playing intense roles. “Just like splatters,” but “Like five in a row every day.” He cowered at the suggestion of sharing his paintings but called them therapy. “But I guess anything can be therapy, right? Talk therapy. Walk therapy. American football therapy,” he said.

Sigh. I guess I love him.

He almost lost me when he said “Riverdale truly was my Julliard,” because come on, but then I admired the admission. “I was learning and growing and playing and taking risks.” To be good and humble, as we know, is a rare combo in Hollywood. We must protect anyone who possesses both traits. Such is our mortal coil.

“I just love acting so much right now,” he said, and that’s when I had to close my laptop and weep a little for the sheer earnestness of it all. Once I collected myself and opened it again, I read these parting words:

“I have no idea…” he said when asked what’s next for him. “I never really know what I’m doing,” (Oh no, give me strength,) “But I know I want to do this until I give everything I got.”

Here’s hoping that takes a very, very long time.

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