Benny Safdie is late.
Frantic and a bit sweaty, he arrives at Westside Restaurant 40 minutes past our 10 a.m. breakfast, and just five minutes after I email his publicist, “Did Benny forget about the interview?”
Benny forgot about the interview.
Out of breath, he profusely apologizes, offering a Mad Lib of an explanation: “I was spray-painting a Tin Man costume in Central Park.” (Hours after we meet, he’ll visit “The Tonight Show” covered head to toe in sparkling silver, an absurdist comedy bit that seems to puzzle even Jimmy Fallon.)
Before that, Safdie spends three and a half hours answering my questions, legs cramping in a tight booth, metallic-smudged hands dancing around a heated corn muffin. “This place is awesome,” he says after a stack of plates shatters on the old tiled floor, as servers bark omelet orders across the narrow restaurant.
Safdie, 37, grew up bouncing between his divorced parents in Queens and the Upper West Side, and says he’s been coming to this particular spot since his teenage years, when it used to be open all night. “Diners have had a lot to do with the things I’ve created,” he says. Those things include 2017’s “Good Time” and 2019’s “Uncut Gems,” the gritty, heart-pounding crime thrillers he directed with his older sibling, Josh, which turned the duo into the bro idéal of indie filmmaking.
But now — with major acting roles in Christopher Nolan’s atomic bomb epic “Oppenheimer,” Kelly Fremon Craig’s coming-of-age dramedy “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” and Showtime’s “The Curse,” which he co-created with Nathan Fielder — Safdie is going solo.
Last year was a pivotal one for Benny Safdie, and though he worked with Josh as executive producers on an Andy Kaufman documentary and the HBO docuseries “Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God” and “Telemarketers,” he also proved himself as an actor and broke away from the hard-won directing partnership that was “the Safdie brothers.”
While recent rumors suggest the pair had a falling out, Safdie insists his split with Josh is amicable. “It’s a natural progression of what we each want to explore,” he says. “I will direct on my own, and I will explore things that I want to explore. I want that freedom right now in my life.”
That meant bowing out of the Safdies’ much-anticipated follow-up to “Uncut Gems,” a film that will also star Adam Sandler, along with Megan Thee Stallion, and is set in the world of sports memorabilia and baseball. While Benny was originally set to direct the movie with Josh, he says he did not co-write the script and hasn’t been a meaningful part of the creative process, despite reports to the contrary. Now, Safdie says, the movie is “on pause.” When I ask whether he’ll direct with Josh again, he shrugs: “I don’t know.”
For “The Curse,” Safdie teamed up with “Nathan for You” mastermind Fielder, whose comedic brand is awkwardness, after the pair met up for bagels in 2016 as fans of each other’s work. Over the next two years, they continued hanging out, with no plans to make a television series, when Fielder told Safdie a story about when he moved from Canada to Los Angeles: He was walking into a cellphone store when a woman outside asked him for money. When Fielder said he didn’t have any, she replied, “I curse you.” The words shook Fielder, so after buying his phone he went to an ATM, brought her $20 and asked, “Is the curse gone?” She smiled and said yes.
It left Safdie wondering: “What if she wasn’t there? Your life is potentially over because you’ll never see her again.” This hypothetical became an obsession, as Safdie and Fielder continually texted each other, building upon the idea. In 2018, they pitched “The Curse,” a pitch-black comedy about a married couple (Fielder and Emma Stone) filming an HGTV series in New Mexico when a supposed curse — as well as a slimy, self-interested producer played by Safdie — begins to corrode their television show and their marriage.
The idea to satirize HGTV came to Safdie during his wife’s pregnancy, when he’d spend mind-numbing hours glued to the television at the doctor’s office. “I’d sit and watch ‘House Hunters,’ ‘Fixer Upper,’ ‘Flip or Flop,’ all of them. I became hypnotized by it,” he says. He remembers being haunted by a certain show’s tagline — “If you don’t like your neighborhood, change it” — which tipped him off to the genre’s sinister, gentrifying underbelly.
Dan Doperalski for Variety
“There’s something underneath it all that’s speaking to a larger part of the country,” Safdie says. As “The Curse’s” “flipanthropist” couple descends into the town of Española to create opportunity and build eco-friendly mirrored homes, the boho bungalows don’t solve the community’s problems so much as refract them.
A perfect meld of Safdie’s stomach-churning suspense drama with Fielder’s extreme-cringe comedy, “The Curse” delights in making its audience squirm. (The first episode features the most excruciatingly long ATM withdrawal of all time, two ostentatiously displayed micropenises and a sex scene between Fielder and Stone that will make you wince.) And the series tackles gentrification, crime and Indigenous relations with an unflinching discomfort, all through the lens of HGTV’s whitewashed aspirationalism.
Safdie and Fielder approached the series’ touchy subjects without hesitation because “nobody is talking about it,” and they wanted to make viewers confront their own preconceptions and sympathies. “We’re going to take a chance, and it could backfire,” Safdie remembers saying.
He still can’t believe Emma Stone said yes to star as Whitney, the desperate and self-deluding center of “The Curse.” After he and Fielder wrote the pilot, they sent a text to the Oscar winner, who responded enthusiastically, saying she had already heard about the project. But when Stone got on a Zoom with the guys to discuss joining “The Curse,” she admitted she actually knew nothing about it.
“We had to retroactively pitch it to her from A to Z,” Safdie says. “Eventually, she said, ‘I was in no matter what. I didn’t care what it was, I just wanted to work with you.’”
Safdie is convinced Stone’s involvement allowed them to make the entire 10-episode season for Showtime rather than shop around a pilot. He gushes about Stone’s performance, saying “she fully committed to being Whitney with zero self-consciousness,” and, like a proud dad, shows me a photo he took at 30 Rock while watching her perform on “Saturday Night Live.” “Everyone was completely transfixed,” he says. “It was one of the greatest performances I’ve ever seen.”
Meanwhile, Safdie’s portrayal of Dougie Schecter, the show’s smirking puppeteer, has earned him an Indie Spirit Award nomination. Draped in Ed Hardy, cheap jewelry and a long, curly wig, Safdie disappears into Dougie, so much so that the series’ composer, John Medeski, didn’t recognize him.
“He had been watching all of the dailies, hours and hours of footage, and he goes, ‘I gotta ask, who plays Dougie?’” Safdie recalls. “I’m like, ‘Me!’ and he goes, ‘Get the fuck out of here.’”
Safdie’s first major foray into acting was “Good Time,” in which he played the intellectually disabled younger brother of Robert Pattinson’s bank-robbing fugitive.
It was this small but memorable role that would grab the attention of Fremon Craig, who cast Safdie in her adaptation of Judy Blume’s “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” as Herb, Margaret’s kindhearted father whose Jewish faith becomes crucial to the film’s conflict.
Fremon Craig had been “mesmerized” by Safdie’s “Good Time” transformation, but it was the way he carried himself in an interview that ultimately landed him “Margaret.” “Benny in real life is exactly how I pictured Herb, with such a warmth and easy humor,” she tells me. “Something about his voice just feels like home to me.”
Dan Doperalski for Variety
If Safdie’s casting as Herb feels inspired, it’s only because his other roles include a Hungarian physicist in “Oppenheimer,” a closeted politician in “Licorice Pizza” and a Jedi in “Obi-Wan Kenobi.” “Nobody looks at me like a young Jewish dad. But that’s who I am,” Safdie says. “I live in New York, I have two kids and an interfaith marriage. It’s literally the movie. But I had never explored that part of who I am.”
Fremon Craig remembers a pivotal scene in “Margaret” in which Herb finds out the estranged parents of his wife (Rachel McAdams) are coming to visit after disowning her because she married a Jew. “Benny was so generous in allowing himself to be pushed further, and summoning his whole emotional self in service of the scene,” Fremon Craig says. “At one point, I watched him break past his own line, and go clear to the bottom of his soul. It was gorgeous. At that moment, I called cut and we both started crying.”
Benny Safdie wanted to be a physicist, and he almost went to Reed College to study nuclear reactors. He’s telling me, over the droning of the diner’s Christmas soundtrack, about dark matter and the Doppler effect, cosmic rays and Carl Sagan — and about how he’d said goodbye to all that to study film. He could never have anticipated that years later, Nolan would recruit him to play Edward Teller, the theoretical physicist and father of the hydrogen bomb, in his blockbuster “Oppenheimer.”
Putting on prosthetics to argue about physics in a fully re-created Los Alamos was a special kind of immersion for Safdie, who spent weeks perfecting Teller’s Hungarian accent by listening to his speeches while riding his bike around New York. (For the movie’s later scenes, which take place 20 years after the Manhattan Project, Nolan suggested Safdie eat cheese to age up his voice.)
That wasn’t the only thing Safdie learned from Nolan. He was shocked as he observed the director’s “fluidity,” as Nolan would begin each scene with nothing set up except the lighting.
“You’d come into the room and Chris would say, ‘All right, let’s go.’ No camera. Everybody’s in makeup, and we’d just do the scene. And then it was like, let’s figure out where the cameras go,” Safdie recalls. Whereas most directors would already have the scene conceptualized, with Nolan, “it was pure openness.”
“This is a huge movie,” Safdie continues, “and he’s still operating with that level of freedom. As an actor, it made me feel awesome.”
Safdie also praises Nolan’s efficiency, and his “confidence” in moving on after just one or two takes. “It feels like such a perfect movie that the way it was made is almost a contradiction to that — because it’s so loose,” he says.
Safdie’s career as an actor is just now ripening, but he’s already worked with some of today’s most revered filmmakers, absorbing their methods and advice for when he gets back behind the camera. He remembers filming a scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2021 ode to the Valley, “Licorice Pizza,” in which he approaches star Alana Haim and pays her a compliment. As PTA watched Safdie swap lines with Haim, the director said matter-of-factly, “I don’t think we can do much better than that.”
“It wasn’t ‘Oh, my God, that’s amazing. You got it!’ It left room for the possibility of getting more, but only if you’re willing to go there,” Safdie says, his blue eyes beaming. “I took that as a kind of playful competition.”
He credits PTA with detecting his actors’ smallest choices, and empowering them to commit.
“If you pick something up and eat it during the scene” — Safdie demonstrates by shoving food into his mouth — “he’ll understand that motivation, and encourage you to do more stuff like that. As a performer, it was a liberating feeling.”
Then there’s Claire Denis, who directed Safdie playing a CIA agent in the 2022 romantic thriller “Stars at Noon.” Safdie spent hours shooting a monologue with Margaret Qualley at a dining table, and then Denis interrupted — “Enough, just stand up” — scrapping a half-day of filming and totally restructuring the scene.
“She’s constantly searching to be excited,” Safdie says, sounding giddy. “The moment she feels bored, she changes exactly what you were doing.”
A week after our interview, Safdie announces his solo filmmaking debut: an A24 movie starring Dwayne Johnson as the mixed martial arts champion Mark Kerr, titled “The Smashing Machine.” On Christmas Eve, Johnson sends me a long voice memo detailing how the project came together. (“I know you’re pushing a deadline with this piece. Santa Claus is coming tonight, as you know!” he says over the joyful noise of his young daughters.)
According to Johnson, he and Safdie first aligned on the project in 2019, when Johnson’s Seven Bucks Productions acquired the rights to Kerr’s story. As a token of his enthusiasm, Safdie sent the Rock a Nautica sweatshirt that the UFC champion wore in the 2002 documentary “The Smashing Machine: The Life and Times of Extreme Fighter Mark Kerr,” as well as a handwritten letter telling Johnson what he sees in him as an actor.
But then the pandemic put everything on hold, and soon Safdie and Johnson were pulled into a slew of other commitments. The two fell out of touch, but Johnson says he “still thought about ‘The Smashing Machine’ every day.” One night, years later, he was on the phone with his close friend and “Jungle Cruise” co-star Emily Blunt, catching up about their careers and their dream projects while Blunt was off shooting “Oppenheimer.” Johnson sent Blunt the Kerr documentary, and told her that playing the fighter in a feature film is “the thing that really speaks to me, that I want to sink my teeth into.” Blunt watched the doc and, as Johnson remembers, called him back immediately, insisting, “You must make this movie.”
“Unbeknownst to me, Christopher Nolan had cast Benny as one of the scientists in ‘Oppenheimer,’” Johnson says in the voice memo. When Blunt went to set the next day, Johnson’s name came up in a conversation between her and Safdie.
So, in what the Rock calls “the convergence of kismet and irony,” Blunt reconnected Safdie with Johnson, who says he never received the gift. “Benny thought I ghosted him, and maybe I was just a fuckin’ asshole,” Johnson says. “I felt so bad.”
Now, Johnson uses the Polynesian word “mana” to describe the creative, trusting force that binds him with Safdie. “Benny wants to create, and continues to push the envelope when it comes to stories that are raw and real, characters that are authentic and at times uncomfortable and arresting,” Johnson says. “I’m at a point in my career where I want to push myself in ways that I’ve not pushed myself in the past. I’m at a point in my career where I want to make films that matter, that explore a humanity and explore struggle [and] pain.”
As the film will confront Kerr’s triumphs in the ring as well as his addiction to painkillers, A24, in announcing the movie, is already touting “The Smashing Machine” as the Rock’s “most dramatic project and role yet.” Says Johnson, “I want to be clear not to say that this is an abandonment of big, four-quadrant movies. I love making them, and there is tremendous value and importance in [them] … but there’s a time and a place for them. I’m at this point in my career where I want more. And I don’t mean I want more box office. I mean I want more humanity. And that is why Benny Safdie is the perfect, collaborative, hungry partner for me.”
With “The Curse” ending on Jan. 12, Safdie isn’t sure about a second season. “There’s a lot more fun to be had in this world. It’s not off the table,” he says. “There are ideas, but it’s definitely too premature to put them out into the world.”
In the meantime, Safdie also tells me he’s creating a scripted series for HBO about boxing, which he thinks will be six episodes. Aside from that, he hints at yet another project he’s penned and plans to direct, but then he gets flustered and talks himself in circles as the conversation drifts too far into the future.
“Talking about something you’re going to do feels so weird, because you haven’t done it yet,” he says. “Part of it is wanting to preserve the level of intellectual excitement.”
But that excitement still seeps out of Safdie, who looks ahead to a busy year devoted to establishing his individual artistic voice. I’m not sure how he juggles so many things, but luckily he’s got an adage for that: “I always say, ‘How do you eat an elephant? One piece at a time.’ I don’t even know if that’s a phrase!”
Safdie bursts out laughing. “But that’s how you have to focus on things. ‘Now we’re gonna do the hooves!’ That’s a disgusting image.”
He grins, and tears off another piece of his muffin.