In Kinds of Kindness, Mamoudou Athie Isn’t Afraid to Risk It All

IT’S SAFE TO say that Emma Stone is in her weird era, especially now that she’s found someone who can match her freak in director Yorgos Lanthimos. And it’s safe to say that Lanthimos entered his weird era well before his first English language film, 2016’s The Lobster, lit a fire under movie nerds everywhere. (That fire grew with The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Favourite, and Poor Things.) And for his part, Mamoudou Athie has proudly been chasing his weirder urges since breaking out in the off-kilter indie darling Patti Cake$. Since then, the Mauritania-born, Maryland-raised, Yale School of Drama-trained actor has bounced between gone-too-soon cult series (Archive 81), big budget franchises (Jurassic World: Dominion), animated movies that make adults cry (Elemental), and a healthy dose of scrappy indies and shorts.

Maybe fellow travelers were being drawn together when Athie’s agent called him out of the blue late one night to tell him that Lanthimos wanted to set up a meeting. He now appears in Kinds of Kindness, in theaters now, as part of a small ensemble with Stone, Jesse Plemons, and Willem Dafoe at its center. The movie—or rather an anthology of three thematically linked short films—is Lanthimos’s riskiest yet in both plot and structure. Athie’s meatiest role comes in the second act, as the best friend to Plemons’s character, whose wife returns after being lost at sea. And once she’s back? The vibes are off.

Now that Athie has joined the troupe of actors in the Yorgos Cinematic Universe (the director is already reuniting with Stone and Plemons for his next project), he spoke to Men’s Health about working with Lanthimos, learning to embrace risk, and the time Pixar helped pull him out from a mental health hole.

Atsushi Nishijima

MEN’S HEALTH: Now that Kinds of Kindness is out, audiences get to find out why Emma Stone was dancing in all those weird, cryptic trailers.

MAMOUDOU ATHIE: Honestly, I was just watching a trailer for another movie online, and there was a constant refrain in the comments: “Why are they showing us the entire movie?”

And, yeah, why are they? I’ve never understood that. That’s why I really loved the Kinds of Kindness trailer. It’s mysterious; it’s intriguing. The movie will beg conversation no matter how you go into it, but the trailer really gives you something to look forward to. You ask yourself, What’s that about?

MH: What were you thinking the first time you read the full script?

MA: I was thinking, This is crazy. This is crazy. This is crazy. But with somebody like Yorgos, with his body of work, you trust him. I didn’t need to “understand.” I just wanted to work with him. There are only so many people that are this singular, this steadfast in their belief of what their movie should be. There are plenty of extraordinarily talented people out there, but it’s really easy in this industry to get swayed away from your vision. Yorgos doesn’t get swayed. And I think there should be that sense of stakes, or of nervousness, when you’re creating something. It could work or it could not work, but either way you’re putting yourself on the line to put something new or fresh out there. There should be risk to that—it’s got to cost you a little something.

MH: How was the project described to you before you got the script?

MA: I don’t remember if there was a description. If there was, I don’t recall it. And Yorgos doesn’t really want to talk about the script. Which I kind of dig, honestly. At one point, there was something I did want to talk to him about, and he thought I was going to ask something like, ‘What does this part of the script mean?’ But when I said, ‘No no no, I want to talk about something in the script from an ethical standpoint, to make sure that we’re on the same page,’ he said to me, ‘Oh, we can talk about that any time you want.’ I think he just doesn’t want to dissect the script itself, that to him, it makes it uninteresting.

“I think THERE SHOULD BE that sense of STAKES, or of NERVOUSNESS, when you’re CREATING SOMETHING. It’s got to COST YOU a little something.”

MH: I imagine there was some conversation about one pivotal scene. Jesse Plemons’s character is grieving his missing wife, played by Emma Stone, and he tearfully pleads with two friends, a couple played by you and Margaret Qualley, to watch some old tapes of happier times together. In the next scene, they—and us in the audience—are suddenly watching a sex tape the two couples made together. It’s like an emotional jump scare for the viewer, rubbernecking from one kind of awkwardness to another.

MA: That’s actually what Yorgos and I were talking about. Obviously, there are other Black characters in the movie, but being the only Black person in that scene, I wanted to make sure we were going in with a certain consideration, that we were on the same page, because you never know. And we had a great conversation about it.

MH: The scene comes as such a tonal shock that I couldn’t help but burst out into nervous laughter. But it wasn’t using sex as a punch line, either. You learn something about these people.

MA: I was initially so trepidatious about that scene. It’s just not anything I’d ever expected I would do. So at the time I was, like, obsessed with the scene. But because we shot it over a year ago now, when I finally saw it on screen, I was just like, ‘Oh. Alright.’

Atsushi Nishijima

Lanthimos and Athie on the set of Kinds of Kindness.

MH: Going into a movie directed by Yorgos seems to require a leap of faith here and there.

MA: As long as it’s interesting, man. Even if it doesn’t work, I can take that risk. Because whether it works or not, we’re trying to do something and we’re trying to do our best. It may sound trite, but it’s true. There’s too much on the line to play it safe.

MH: Yorgos might not want to dissect the script, but I do! What do you see as the central theme of these three short stories?

MA: I was thinking about control a lot. Whether it’s by a religious entity or an organization or your boss or a husband-wife dynamic, there was a real fixation on control. I haven’t talked to Yorgos about it—because he won’t talk to me about it!—but that’s what I got from it almost immediately.

MH: There’s a specific way that a lot of Yorgos’s characters speak in his movies. A Yorgos cadence. How do you all find that tone?

MA: Did you feel like that when you were watching it? That we all shared a similar cadence?

“My parents are immigrants. I’M AN IMMIGRANT; I came here as a baby. MY PARENTS SACRIFICED EVERYTHING for me, they believed in me. So I was thinking about HOW IMPACTFUL a story like that could be for KIDS LIKE ME WHO ARE JUST COMING UP.”

MH: Yes! Many of the characters spoke with a very matter-of-fact, almost flat, intonation. Which they also did in movies like The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Dear.

MA: I wonder if it’s the script. I don’t know. Because it’s not intentional, as far as I know. I can only speak for myself; I’m just doing and saying what’s written on the page. I think with well-written or thoughtful pieces of material, it’s all in the bones of it. The script was very specific. And Yorgos likes to cast very specifically. Some of the people he casts aren’t even actors by trade. But he never told us how to deliver our lines. That never happened. He’ll tell you if you’re off track, but he won’t tell you what to do. You know what I mean? So it was an interesting exercise.

MH: With a script as weird as this one, how removed is what you saw on screen from what you imagined in your head?

MA: Somebody once told me, ‘The movie in your head doesn’t exist.’ And that’s mostly true. Though there were a couple of times in my career when that wasn’t true. Elemental, for one.

MH: I assume the processes behind a Yorgos Lanthimos film anthology and a Pixar animated movie would be wildly different.

MA: It was my favorite thing I’ve ever done. It’s not even close. And that’s not shading anything else I’ve done. I just loved that movie, the people, the process, the way it came to me at a time when I needed it. It was crazy.

Yorgos Lanthimos

MH: When did it come to you, and why was it such an important moment?

MA: Well, I’m going to have to give you a little background into the worst depression of my life. It was the pandemic, that summer George Floyd was killed, and I remember seeing people on social media doing things like the “George Floyd Challenge,” mocking this man’s death. And I thought, ‘To what end? Are we really that evil?’ The callousness of humanity was really shocking. Then the 2020 election happened. Then when that was over, I went to shoot this series, Archive 81, in which the starting point for my character was his family burning to death in a fire. And he’s an archivist trying to find and restore and give back to people a piece of their past, something that he will never be able to get back for himself. It was just… it was just a lot for me, man. It was a rough year. And directly after I finished shooting that, I got Elemental.

MH: That movie really sweetly covers themes of immigration, overcoming prejudice, and finding self-acceptance. Sounds like it would be an emotional balm during a time of rough mental health.

MA: It was also something so important to me and my family. It was the first premiere that my parents came to. They wore traditional garb on the red carpet, which made me really happy. Because that’s so much of what that movie is about. My parents are immigrants. I’m an immigrant; I came here as a baby. My parents sacrificed everything for me—they did everything for me. They believed in me. My mom was really gassing me up when things got difficult.

I was thinking about how impactful a story like that could be for kids like me who are just coming up. It was just so sweet, and I needed that.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Styling by Ugo Mozie. Grooming by Grace Phillips.

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