by Josh Rosenberg
Christopher Abbott has a secret. We’re sitting in the Bowery Hotel’s outdoor patio in Lower Manhattan, making small talk about the New York Knicks and life in the city as we gauge who might bring it up first. He disguises well. No one around us recognizes the forty-year-old actor in his washed red button-up and jeans. And they don’t know it yet, but when the movie premieres in a few days, Abbott will make a surprise appearance in Nathan Fielder’s exceptional Elizabeth Holmes documentary, You Can See Everything.
He’s hesitant to say anything, especially in a room full of potential eavesdroppers. Spoilers of any kind in the film industry are to be guarded with your life. Abbott’s already kept his role hidden for more than a year since they filmed. Why stop now? Eventually, I cave and reveal that I’ve seen the movie already. His part in the new film is impossible to ignore, and if you haven’t seen You Can See Everything yet, here’s your warning that even knowing that he’s a part of the film is a minor spoiler.
“I don’t think I even knew what I was going to do,” Abbott says about joining the documentary. Watching how the gears turned in Fielder’s mind was simply an opportunity Abbott couldn’t pass up. “I wanted to see how these things work,” he says. “After a long time of doing this, you realize you can curate a little bit. Because of how long these things take to come out, I don’t know what the world is going to look like then. It might all blow up.” But when I saw the film in a packed, sold-out theater on opening weekend, the audience gasped in delight when the camera panned up to reveal Abbott on screen. Now The New York Times and others are predicting that You Can See Everything might become the first documentary to receive a nomination among the feature films for Best Picture at the Academy Awards.
For Abbott, recognition is new. The actor has long excelled in brooding indie films. He can draw you into a scene just with his eyes—deep brown and ardent—which are capable of evoking great feeling before he even says a word. It’s a skill many actors work toward but may never achieve—the ability to engage an audience even when your character is simply listening to your costars in between your own lines. He’s as skilled at staring off in anguish as he is at intensely boring into his scene mate’s soul. So why is Hollywood just now catching up? Well, “you got to kind of hunt for it,” Abbott says.
Since his breakout role on HBO’s Girls as Marnie’s (Allison Williams) smothering boyfriend Charlie, Abbott’s career has been a series of almosts. James White, a 2015 Sundance drama about a self-destructive twenty-something who takes care of his terminally ill mother, first garnered him accolades as a leading man capable of a serious dramatic role. At the premiere, people clapped him on the back and told him it was time to get his tickets to the rocket ship. It’s only up from here, they said.
“The number of times people would be like, ‘Chris, when this movie comes out, get ready!’ ” he continues. Abbott went on to costar in First Man with Ryan Gosling. He appeared alongside Emma Stone in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, and he led Bring Them Down with Barry Keoghan. “Things did happen, in little ways,” he says. “But there’s been so many ups and downs.” He kept working.
“I’ve been doing this long enough where I’ve had multiple moments where I felt like I was having ‘moments,’ ” Abbott says. It’s a somber thought, but Abbott knows more than most that plenty of working actors never hear their numbers called. “I don’t feel like I’m owed anything,” he adds. But the moment’s here.
This year, Abbott took on two roles that many actors have struggled to bring something new and meaningful to for the past seventy years. He was nominated for a Tony Award for playing Death of a Salesman’s Biff Loman as a character to be feared instead of pitied. The revival wrapped up in August following 167 shows. Abbott also starred on Netflix’s critically acclaimed East of Eden miniseries, adapted from John Steinbeck’s sweeping 1952 novel, as Adam Trask—a despondent father far more beaten down by the world than previous portrayals would ever allow.
Still, it’s more than just that he earned the parts, or that he has seemed suddenly ubiquitous. Where others failed to leave a mark, Abbott found a deeper humanity in roles that few in Hollywood could unlock before. Even when the industry feels like it’s eating itself and spitting itself back out, churning out content and forgetting to care about the result, Abbott is a reminder that great performances are still waiting to be discovered. If we let him, he knows the way to take us there.
Another very big change in his life may have something to do with it.
