For his new movie, an actor turns photographer
After filming wrapped on Challengers, Luca Guadagnino’s recent sexy drama about a tennisplaying love triangle, Mike Faist — who, along with Zendaya and Josh O’Connor, forms the entangled trio — decided to take a break. The 32year-old actor, who splits his time between New York and Ohio, had planned to drive around the US with his dog and spend time with his friends and family, to “allow myself to be bored”, as he puts it. But then, director Jeff Nichols called.
The film that Nichols, writer-director of Mud (2013) and Loving (2016), wanted to talk about was The Bikeriders, a drama inspired by the book of the same name by American photojournalist Danny Lyon, depicting the time he spent with the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club in the 1960s. Faist was to play Lyon, which felt serendipitous: Zendaya had got him into photography on the set of Challengers, and he had recently bought a camera. “These things coincide with one another, at this perfect time,” he notes, when we meet in Claridge’s hotel in Mayfair, the day after the London premiere of Guadagnino’s film.
Faist visited Lyon and his wife in Maine, where they spent the day fishing. Lyon told him stories about his career — he had photographed key moments during the civil-rights movement — and they took photos together (Faist has “wonderful prints” from that weekend). Faist’s role in The Bikeriders is removed from the action, an observer documenting the frequently thrilling and often dangerous ways of gang members, who are played by stars including Austin Butler, Tom Hardy and Michael Shannon. “I viewed myself to be on the opposite side of the camera almost, just sitting there and watching these actors,” he says. “I wanted to see what their processes were and to see their psychologies a little bit.”
It would be fair to say that Faist has an unusual —and, at times, refreshingly unfiltered —take on his profession. He was born and raised in Ohio by adoptive parents and later moved to New York to pursue a stage career. Almost as soon as he started drama school, he dropped out and auditioned for plays while working part-time. His breakout came in 2015 with the all-singing, all-brooding role of school bully Connor Murphy in hit musical Dear Evan Hansen. He was nominated for a Tony for the performance, though wisely did not sign up for the widely mocked movie adaptation.
Instead, he was cast in Steven Spielberg’s 2021 adaptation of West Side Story as Riff, the leader of the Jets. That was the perfect showcase for Faist’s talents: balletic, unpredictable, gritty. Among a starry cast, he was a standout. “I was ner vous about going into that process, because of the Spielberg of it all, and because of the Holly wood of it all,
