Charles Melton is explaining how his six-year, almost 100-episode Riverdale run prepared him for his critically acclaimed supporting performance in Todd Haynes’ May December, for which the actor is gaining serious Oscar buzz.
“Ten months out of the year, 22 episodes, eight to 10 days to film one episode … That’s a lot of work in a short amount of time, and it really took everybody on set to come together to execute this process,” Melton tells THR. “That experience alone, and working with nearly 100 directors on that show, really gave me this confidence and this foundation — as, like, my acting school in a way — to really be able to come to a set like Todd Haynes’ and just completely let go.”
The director, however, had never seen Riverdale, so Melton was an unfamiliar face to him when the actor auditioned for the role of Joe, a suburban dad who, when he was just 13 years old, became sexually involved with a married mother of three, Gracie (Julianne Moore). The scandalous romance rattled the pair’s close-knit community, but Joe and Gracie got married and had three children of their own.
Once he received the script, Melton started his “journey into the research of who Joe was,” says the actor, who discovered a process for preparation along the way. In pulling together his audition, he self-taped for six hours — a hefty time commitment, he acknowledges.
“I have to completely exhaust myself and give every fiber of my being, just so I could look back and be like, ‘OK, I gave everything I’ve got there, and there’s nothing else I would’ve done differently,’ ” says Melton. It got him through the door: Haynes sent him back notes. He self-taped again (for another six hours), which led to a chemistry read with Moore.
“I really felt like that six-week process was the best experience in my career, because I really learned how I wanted to work and how deep I wanted to go when it came to preparing to play characters like this, which was invigorating,” says Melton. “I felt so much comfort and safety and excitement of going really deep into the psychology of who this man was and really transformed into this physicality of how he navigated his own story.”
Melton gained 40 pounds for the role, although he and Haynes never discussed a certain way Joe was supposed to look. Melton calls it a “natural [and] external expression of the internal work I was doing with Joe. When you look at the facts, this is a suburban dad who’s 36 with three kids, a loving marriage, and has a job,” Melton explains. “Like, where does he really find time for his own vanity to really even look at himself?”
The actor ate a lot of Five Guys, pizza and ice cream alongside his best friend, Kelvin Harrison Jr., who was prepping to play Martin Luther King Jr. in Disney+’s Genius: MLK/X. “We were inspiring each other, watching a bunch of films, talking about our characters and eating well,” he says.
There was no rehearsal time before the 23-day shoot, so Melton didn’t practice his scenes with Natalie Portman, who in the film plays an actress portraying Gracie in a movie about her life. He often had dinners with Portman, Moore and Haynes, however, where they got to know each other on a “human level.”
Given the subject matter, Melton says his way to decompress after shooting was watching Abbott Elementary every day, as well as football on Sundays and the Japanese anime television series Demon Slayer. “That was part of my ritualistic comedown, and then I did acupuncture three times a week to really relax, because we carry emotions in our body. So keeping my body as calm and as relaxed as possible not only helped me, but helped what I would do when it came to allowing the technical work I did for Joe to really exist when I was on set.”
Looking back, Melton was never intimidated by the subject matter or his character’s complexities. “There’s just something about repression and tragedy and loneliness that I’m attracted to in characters, and Joe had a complex mix of all those things,” he says. “In spite of whatever the subject matter was, just understanding this human without any sort of formulated opinion or judgment and complete empathy really allowed me to just go to places that I always hoped are possible with Todd, Julie and Natalie.”
This story first appeared in a December standalone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
