The last time I talked to Anton Yelchin, he was really happy. He was doing a day of press at TIFF for Green Room, paired with the film’s writer/director Jeremy Saulnier, and that meant talking about punk music and gruesome makeup.
I got the sense that Yelchin really loved both of those things he was a pretty animated interview anyway, but he was clearly delighted to talk about his character’s punk swagger and the ridiculous volume of fake blood in which he wound up drenched. Green Room may be a gruelling exercise in survival horror, but it was clearly a blast to make, and Yelchin was still riding that high. I actually found “Yelchin giggles” among my notes for that interview.
That’s how I plan to remember him. Anton Yelchin was killed early this morning in a freak accident at his home in Los Angeles. He was 27 years old.
There are obits you expect to write, and obits you don’t expect to write so soon, and then there are the obits you don’t expect to write at all. Even in what seems to be a year of unprecedented celebrity loss, this one makes no sense. Anton Yelchin was a terrific actor with a brilliant future, and it doesn’t seem right at all to see that future erased.
Yelchin started acting when he was just a kid, working in television and movies for a couple of years before playing the young protagonist of Scott Hicks’s flawed but serviceable Stephen King adaptation Hearts In Atlantis opposite Anthony Hopkins. He was 11 years old when he shot it. That led to more TV work, including a role in the cable series Huff, before he broke out as a twitchy teenager in 2006’s Alpha Dog.
The movie was disposable, but Yelchin was terrific, and his performance clearly caught the eye of every casting agent worth a damn. He landed the lead in Charlie Bartlett, holding his own against a mid-comeback Robert Downey Jr. he grabbed key roles in two of 2009’s biggest summer films Terminator Salvation and J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek reboot.
In both films, he was tasked with reinventing a character beloved by audiences – Terminator’s paradoxical hero Kyle Reese, originally played by Michael Biehn, and Trek’s proud young ensign Pavel Chekov, a character Walter Koenig had played for decades. He did fine with Reese – Terminator Salvation has a lot of problems, but Yelchin’s performance isn’t one of them – and he made Chekov his own in his very first scene.
As Yelchin aged into leading-man territory, filmmakers responded. Drake Doremus gave him a fantastic opportunity as Jacob, an idealistic young American besotted by an English girl (Felicity Jones) only to be drawn to another potential partner (Jennifer Lawrence) when visa problems keep them apart.
It’s a terrific, complicated performance, and anyone who’d write Yelchin off as a genre guy for doing movies like Star Trek and Fright Night and Odd Thomas should watch Like Crazy at the first opportunity. He wasn’t just a genre guy, but he genuinely liked weird stuff it was fun, and he got to wear spacesuits and stab vampires and get covered in goo.
But check him out as Tom Hiddleston’s human familiar in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, and you can see him digging deeper into a character that most movies would render as a throwaway it’s a small part, but Yelchin invests it with so much heart and (sadly misplaced) loyalty that it’s a genuine shame when he exits the picture.
That moment will play very differently now, of course, as will his scenes in the next Trek movie, Star Trek Beyond – which is set to open next month. I’m going to do my best to think of it as a transmission from an alternate universe, one where Yelchin is alive and well and making weird movies for the joy of it. That seems better, doesn’t it?
