“I swear to you, I am not making this up,” Fred Hechinger tells me. “Sir Ridley Scott is a fan of Beavis and Butt-Head.”
In Gladiator II, the younger actor performs the mad, syphilitic emperor Caracalla, who guidelines a decaying Roman Empire alongside his twin brother, Geta (Joseph Quinn). The pair are orange-haired, caked in white face paint, and coated in gold—as goofy as they’re terrifying. To encourage Hechinger, director Ridley Scott informed him to consider Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten, Ed Sheeran, and, sure, Beavis and Butt-Head.
“I might do scenes, and he would do the chuckle,” Hechinger says. “The heh-heh-heh.”
We meet, per his suggestion, on the sizzling canine stand exterior the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork. It’s a kind of alarmingly sizzling fall days, and Hechinger (that’s with a delicate g) has traded his imperial drip for an unassuming white tee and navy pants. The New York Metropolis native grew up not removed from right here, on the opposite facet of Central Park, so I ask him if he spent a lot time on the museum as a child.
“No,” he says. “However I grew up watching Gossip Lady. I really feel like they’re all the time exterior this place.”
Jacket by Our Legacy. Shirt by Ferragamo. Pants by Connor McKnight. Footwear by Sebago. Socks, his personal. Belt by Emily Daybreak Lengthy x Most Henry. Necklace by David Yurman. Ring by Cartier.
Now 24, Hechinger has achieved one thing that normally requires a number of many years within the business: He’s reached beloved That Man character-actor standing. After his breakout position as Quinn, the candy, dopey son in season one among The White Lotus, it appears as if he’s in every single place you flip. He has a face that transcends epochs, equally plausible glued to a Nintendo Change in The White Lotus, as ’90s indie rocker Bob Nastanovich in Pavements, as the worker of a Jim Crow–period reform college in Nickel Boys, as a comic book e-book supervillain in Kraven the Hunter, or wreaking havoc circa 200 AD in Gladiator II. (Offscreen, too, the now-downtown resident is kind of omnipresent: At any time when they’d study that I’d interviewed him, colleagues and pals would report having simply seen him at a screening, a present, a celebration, a pattern sale.)
As we speak, Hechinger particularly desires to go to the a part of the American Wing that incorporates the museum’s open space for storing—a mishmash of things all seen from glass instances. It seems like a secret area, the closest you will get to wandering the museum’s basement. We soak up work and devices and chairs upon chairs upon chairs, together with one which has an embedded chamber pot.
