Aaron Paul is on a farm in the countryside of California, strolling through nature as the day begins. He’s been on and off his phone most of the morning, promoting the new Riley Stearns film Dual, where he plays Trent, a quirky fight instructor in Stearns’ equally odd universe. “I’ve never had as much fun doing press as I am right now. I mean, it’s really so peaceful out here, and I only want to do press on this farm. So it’s good.”
Outside the farm, his name headlines articles and appears in theaters internationally, but on the farm, things are relatively peaceful, or at least as peaceful as things can be with a new four-week-old child. He and his wife, Lauren Parsekian, also have a four-year-old, and the time on the farm seems to be a kind of recharging of the mind, body, and spirit. Doubly so, after working on Dual, Westworld, and Better Call Saul, where he’s happy to finally reunite with Bryan Cranston, Bob Odenkirk, and others in the final season of Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould’s acclaimed Breaking Bad spin-off.
Aaron Paul on Doing TV After Having Kids
Sony Pictures Television
“Brian and I would talk about it constantly, like, ‘is it gonna happen?’ Because we’re fans of Better Call Saul but like, how is it going to happen? Because we’re still aging, it’s not like we’re not aging,” Paul says excitedly. Breaking Bad was arguably the vehicle that launched Paul into the stratosphere as a star, though he had done excellent work in a variety of smaller film and television parts, especially the HBO series Big Love.
Since then, he’s led several excellent films, including Eye in the Sky and Hellion, but has done considerable work in television. He brought a surprising amount of desperately needed joy to the wonderful but incredibly depressing Bojack Horseman, gave (and continues to give) a human touch to the cold brilliance of Westworld, starred in the underrated Truth Be Told, and was the lead in a great Hulu TV series, The Path. With a growing family and deepening roots, however, the family man is likely to turn down television unless a series is filmed in or adjacent to Los Angeles; fortunately for fans, Westworld fits the bill.
Dual and Riley Stearns
RLJE Films
Film, on the other hand, is a little more manageable. Dual may have been shot in Finland (and expertly captures the haunting isolation and wintry beauty of the location), but Paul only had to be absent from his family for a short period of time. Additionally, Paul is both a fan and friend of writer/director Stearns. “I am such a huge fan of Riley,” he says, staring out at some vast natural splendor in rural California. “I love his work. I love his writing, and I love him as a human being. I’ve been friends with him for years now.”
Westworld is just such a beautiful show. It’s a sexy show. I love sci-fi, and the stuff they’re giving me is really great. I’m pinching myself, you know, they’ve given me a lot to sink with my teeth into, and it shoots in L.A. I live in Los Angeles, and it’s so nice to not have to travel out of state or out of the country for a job […] I won’t do another series outside L.A. I just, I won’t. Maybe New York, I did a series in New York that I love, so L.A. or New York, but I have two very young kids, you know, a four-year-old and a four-week-old. So the idea of kind of being away from them is very hard, so, I don’t want to do that.
An actor of Paul’s pedigree can largely pick and choose what project to immerse himself in, but when he had the opportunity to work with people he respects and already has good relations with, it was hard to pass up, especially with Stearns specifically interested in Paul for the part. It just so happens that the part, and the script, were fortunately fantastic.
Paul is a very expressive and emotive actor, and brings raw intensity (or surprising whimsy) when required, so it’s a bit incongruous to see him acting in a Stearns film. The director of Faults and The Art of Self-Defense is known for a kind of heightened artificiality, creating semi-surreal worlds with extremely deadpan, matter-of-fact performances no matter how absurd or dramatic a situation might be. His films are beloved by many, and while reviews of Dual are not unanimous, everyone can agree that Stearns’ work is distinct.
I hadn’t seen him in a couple of years when this script landed on my desk, and I saw that he’s coming out with a new project, and he’s interested in me playing around with them, and I dove into it, literally the moment it hit my inbox, and I read the entire thing on my phone. I just couldn’t put it down. I just love the world that he creates and the stories that he wants to tell. You know, there’s a deeper story in there, that it’s not just about one battling their clone to the death, there’s a lot going on here.
Paul’s co-star in the film, Beulah Koale, has said that Stearns cut any of his “bad habits” from acting in television or film and reduced his performance to just “the rawest form” of acting. Koale said of Dual, “we had nothing to really hide behind, except to say [the words], just say it and see what happens, and whatever happens will be honest at that moment.”
Paul on Taking the Acting Trust Fall of Dual
Paul’s other co-star, Karen Gillan, has expressed similar sentiments, but Paul had an indwelling sense of trust for Stearns after knowing him and his films. It’s a sensibility that has earned comparisons to Yorgos Lanthimos, Hal Hartley, and others; influences Stearns is both proud of and transcends in his own way. When Paul read the script, picturing the kind of world Stearns creates, he was pretty much sold and ready to do the “trust fall,” as he calls it.
This is somewhat surprising, considering that Paul’s character, Trent, is a slippery sort of figure who remains relatively mysterious. In fact, most of the (very few) characters in the film are enigmatic in that way; Stearns loves to drop audiences into a new world like a crash landing on some accidental planet. Paul developed a backstory for Trent, because, “the more information you have the better you know, when building a character. And so I always try to build some sort of backstory and some sort of story of where I think he’s heading,” Paul says.
I loved reading it, and I trust him, so I knew he had a very specific tone […] He has a specific tone in real life, too, and he’s very matter of fact, he’s a very smart, funny, dude, and so you’ve just got to do the trust fall, right? And so I knew I was in good hands. It definitely was an interesting thing to sort of navigate, but I knew what I was stepping into. So when I was preparing and reading the script over and over again, and I was really trying to understand who this guy [Trent] was, I felt like I had a pretty good grasp on what I was gonna do.
Trent is a solitary figure, accompanied solely by VHS tapes and an old dog with no new tricks. Gillan’s character Sarah enters his life in order to train for combat over the course of a year, in preparation for fighting her clone to the death in a dystopian, off-kilter future. Trent seems a bit nefarious at first, and certain moments definitely make him rather questionable, but he ultimately turns out to be a rather sweet person and is possibly more passionate than anyone in the film (though, in a Stearns film, passion is monochromatic). “I thought that this guy’s a man who really, really lives and breathes training, you know, he lives inside his studio. It’s really all he does in life.”
Watching him train Sarah, Trent, living and breathing his trade, almost seems like he’d be a kind teacher of non-violent, anti-bullying techniques for the Kind Campaign, an organization run by Parsekian (Paul’s wife). Before the series finale of Breaking Bad premiered, Paul organized a contest that would fly winners out to Hollywood Forever Cemetery and screen a special showing of the finale; he ultimately helped amass $1.8 million for the non-profit.
Now he’s on the farm, and Dual is in theaters. In some ways, Aaron Paul is a bit similar to his character. Tough but sweet, this is a man who really lives and breathes family and his passion is palpable.
You can find out more about, or donate to, the Kind Campaign here.
