Jacob Tremblay can relate to the Unabomber.
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Tremblay → relate → Unabomber
Canadian former child star speaks about his role in Netflix's Unabomber, and his career as an actor
It's uncomfortable to make any comparison — especially to the actor's face — between Ted Kaczynski, the mass-murdering ecoterrorist widely known as the Unabomber, and Jacob Tremblay, the cherubic former child actor behind films with titles as fuzzy and feel-good as Good Boys and Wonder.
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It → speak → Boys
There is some additional context here: After all, we are talking about the 19-year-old Canadian's portrayal of Kaczynski in the Unabomber Netflix movie, which dropped Friday.
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which → be → movie
But it still feels genuinely offensive to imply that there's any weightier parallel between the two.
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it → feel → two
Which is why it's so surprising when Tremblay himself offers something like it, all on his own.
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Tremblay → offer → own
"I really had a hard time relating to Ted for the most part.
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I → have → part
But once I was there on set — the script is written so beautifully, of course you can really feel empathetic towards this guy," he says during a video call promoting the film.
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he → write → film
Even as he points to the terrible, inexcusable crimes Kaczynski committed later, Tremblay keeps returning to his inability to resist relating to him.
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Tremblay → point → him
"What I found, and what I really held on to," he says, "was the idea of being the youngest person in the room."
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he → find → room
He's referring to the stranger-than-fiction beginning to Kaczynski's story — the near-singular plot focus of the Janus Metz-directed film.
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He → refer → film
A math prodigy, the Chicago native was propelled to academic heights at Harvard University at just 16.
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native → propel → 16
Through that early enrolment, he eventually became, at the time, the youngest-ever assistant professor at University of California, Berkeley (at which he would twice plant bombs, some 20 years later).
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he → become → bombs
"You know, in this industry, I'm also often the youngest person there," Tremblay says.
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Tremblay → know → industry
"So I could kind of relate to that feeling of awkwardness and not really fitting in.
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I → relate → awkwardness
The subject matter, of course, runs deeper than that.
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matter → run → that
At Harvard, Kaczynski was also wrapped up in one of the most bizarre historical confluences of the last century.
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Kaczynski → wrap → century
After he was selected as a vulnerable test subject for what many have theorized was part of the CIA's top-secret MK-Ultra mind-control experiment, psychologist Henry Murray encouraged the young math student's nascent theories and developed his delicately blooming self-confidence.
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Murray → select → confidence
He then had him strapped to a chair, wired with electrodes, and saw those same ideas mocked with surgical precision.
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ideas → have → precision
The subjects were given, in Murray's words, "vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive" critiques that systematically tore them down.
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that → give → them
In the movie, the goal is to win the Cold War.
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goal → win → War
If America can figure out how to break young men's minds, they can theoretically then break the minds of captured enemy combatants.
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they → figure → combatants
And if the goal is to learn how to destroy a person's self-worth, who easier to start with than a precocious, self-unassured child?
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who → learn → child
The resultant screaming and scheming villainy we get onscreen is an against-type performance for Tremblay, in what he calls a fun change.
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he → scream → what
His filmography, he says, is built around his desire to never play the same character twice, while flitting between as many genres as possible.
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he → say → genres
But it's this one that has that personal parallel to return to.
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that → have → parallel
Because if you're to believe some sources, that was Kaczynski's rosebud, though he had long denied those sessions affected him much at all.
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sessions → believe → him
Going by the film, they were a gross betrayal of the societal duty to protect children — producing a man who would go on to mail deadly letter-bombs to authority figures for decades.
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who → go → decades
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Primetime → hat → Hansen
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Given that this role comes so soon after Tremblay's performance as a boy manipulated into armed resistance against the federal government in Sovereign, the pattern is hard to ignore.
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pattern → say → Sovereign
The theme of "a young, impressionable mind, driven by trauma, really, to do violent things," as Tremblay characterizes it, that he also deems Unabomber's key message.
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he → drive → it
"How important it is to treat children with love … and teach them how much value they have," he says.
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he → treat → value
"Because on the flip side of that, if a child isn't loved as much, it's harmful and it causes violence.
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it → love → violence
It really does.
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It → do → ?
It also comes as the industry in which he came up goes through another period of reckoning.
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he → come → reckoning
Following former child actor Hayden Panettiere's overdose death earlier this year, Canadian actor Alison Pill wrote a New York Times op-ed calling child acting "extractive, exploitative and nonconsensual" while proposing it should be banned entirely.
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it → follow → acting
Nicky, Ricky, Dicky & Dawn's Casey Simpson, among others, pushed back against a ban — but said propelling a child to stardom basically guarantees they will later feel like a failure, regardless of what they achieve as an adult.
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they → push → adult
Tremblay does not make this comparison so directly.
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Tremblay → make → comparison
And from his earliest memories, his relationship with acting was obsessive fascination: After his first film role in Smurfs 2 at five years old, he says he remembers his mother asking him if this is what he would like to keep doing.
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he → say → what
Not only did he say yes — he said he couldn't picture ever doing anything else.
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he → say → anything
That has stayed.
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That → stay → ?
…and 12 more, not listed.
The Aporia
