Page 77 - SHARP November 2021
P. 77

  “When there’s a scene with 10 actors in a room, part of me is in Greg. But in the moments I’m not a big participant, it’s really so fun to watch those other actors.”
Brian Cox), he is an outsider to the world of private jets, superyachts, and backroom wheeling and dealing. He stumbles into a job at the company, where he’s frequently subjected to abuse both physical (pelted by water bottles) and verbal (“Greg the Egg,” among other cruel nicknames) — courtesy of Logan’s spoiled, power-hungry chil- dren Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Roman (Kieran Culkin), Shiv (Sarah Snook), and Connor (Alan Ruck), as well as Shiv’s husband and Greg’s boss, Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen). Greg’s a fly on the wall to the Shakespearean-level family backstabbing, but as the series progresses, he begins making Machiavellian moves of his own.
“I’ve played a lot of nice guys,” Braun says, reflecting on his two decades in the industry. “I follow the scripts, like ‘Oh, this character requires this’ or ‘Greg requires a certain earnestness opposite his ambition.’ He can get easily manipulated. I like playing both sides.” Take, for example, Braun’s role in Zola, the Janicza Bravo−directed A24 dark comedy based on a wild but true 2015 viral Twitter thread about a waitress named Zola (Taylour Paige) and an exotic dancer named Stefani (Riley Keough) whose Florida road trip quickly goes off the rails. Braun plays Stefani’s chinstrap-rocking, backwards baseball cap−wearing, Migos-rapping boyfriend Derrek, who doesn’t realize he’s in a “totally uneven romance.” “He’s ignoring all the red flags of a dysfunctional relationship,” says Braun. “I think he has an addictive personality and this relationship is the thing he’s most addicted to.”
Although Derrek was based on an actual person (Jarrett Scott), Braun didn’t feel compelled to seek him out prior to appearing in the film. Instead, he lost weight and gave himself lesions by subsisting on a diet of candy and coffee. “How do you show that someone’s not taking care of themself because they’re taking care of another person more than themselves? They’re not prioritizing their own health,” he says. For the baggy outfits, Braun — who was born in Long Island but grew up spending weekdays in Connecticut with his mother and weekends in New York City with his father after his parents divorced — took cues from his own early twenties wardrobe. “I sagged my pants a lot,” he admits, laughing. “There were parts of me that were Derrek-y for sure.” Even with the quick shoot time, Braun found an easy chemistry with Keough, Paige, and Colman Domingo — who plays the menacing pimp, X — and says he’d jump at the chance to return to Derrek in the future. “I would play him tomorrow. I wish Zola was a TV show so that I could play him for years and work with those guys for years,” he says. “I asked Janicza, ‘Can we do a prequel? Can we do a sequel?’”
Despite his success onscreen, Braun’s first love is the theatre. When he was eight or nine, his father Craig — a creative director (and later actor) best known for designing iconic record covers for the likes of the Rolling Stones and the Velvet Underground in the ’70s— took him to see Pulitzer Prize−winning playwright August Wilson’s Jitney at New York City’s Second Stage. “My dad tells this story and he’s like, ‘Everybody started leaving the theatre and Nicky just sat in his seat and couldn’t move, because he was so moved,
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