Detroit's Will Poulter: 'It was like working in an oven. I was very, very glad to leave that character behind'

A first Oscar nomination of Poulter’s career beckons with his role as a racist cop caught up in the real-life Detroit race riots of 1967 in Kathryn Bigelow’s new film

‘I think it was important to believe that this was a personality within the police force at this time,’ says the London-born actor

“I really am still at that stage where I pinch myself that what I do for a living is something that I love,” says Will Poulter. Impressive though his humility is, the British actor – still only 24 – can probably stop pinching himself now. The past 18 months have seen him graduate into the upper echelons of Hollywood casting after starring opposite an Oscar-winning Leonardo DiCaprio in the stupendous The Revenant and Brad Pitt in the Netflix satire War Machine.

Now he’s the standout performer in Kathryn Bigelow’s new film Detroit, with a staggeringly ferocious turn. A first Oscar nomination of Poulter’s career beckons, and it would be no more than he deserves for a terrifying portrayal of a racist cop caught up in the real-life Detroit race riots of 1967. Critics have unsurprisingly raved; as industry paper Screen put it, “His baby-faced expression belied by cold, dead eyes, Poulter startlingly portrays pure, bigoted evil.”

It’s an astute observation. With freckles and cheekily expressive eyebrows that’d give Cara Delevingne a run for her money, Poulter’s transformation into a ruthless sadist is all the more impressive. Certainly, he left his Detroit director bowled over. “He is a courageous actor who didn’t shy away from going the distance in portraying a difficult character,” remarks Bigelow. “He took a well-delineated character on the page and in my opinion made it something truly powerful.”

‘I didn’t see any parallel that existed between myself and the character that I played besides from the fact he was a white male,’ says Poulter (Immo Klink)

The film – which reunites Bigelow with Mark Boal, the screenwriter on her Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker and the acclaimed hunt for Osama Bin Laden tale Zero Dark Thirty – is another forensic slice of journalistic filmmaking. Poulter’s Philip Krauss is just one of a dozen or so characters introduced amid the carnage of a city on lockdown as police battle rioters. After a dizzying first act, the focus turns to the Algiers Motel, where Krauss and his buddies end up after a shot is fired.

In reality, three African-American citizens were shot dead in cold blood that night, while several others were left traumatised by events. In the film, it’s the unrestrained Krauss that terrorises those in the Algiers. “I think I saw part of my responsibility in this film as a duty to expose racist individuals and racism and not represent this individual as a super villain or something unnatural,” says Poulter. “I think it was important to believe that this was a personality within the police force at this time.”

‘Detroit’ is set during the city’s riot in the summer of 1967

Playing an irredeemable bigot, it’s a hugely risky role for Poulter – a potential turn-off for audiences and future casting directors alike. He admits to “reservations”, not least “trying to…step into the shoes of someone who I couldn’t really see any sort of likeness in. I didn’t see any parallel that existed between myself and the character that I played besides from the fact he was a white male. So that was quite tricky. It may have been the hardest thing I’ve done in terms of understanding the character.”

With a number of British and Irish actors in the cast – John Boyega, Hannah Murray and Jack Reynor included – Poulter isn’t the only home-grown talent taking on a very American story. It was “another thing I was quite hesitant about”, he says. “Being a white British male, I felt slightly worried about criticising a culture that I don’t belong to, or a society that I’ve never lived in. My feelings about the police are rooted in my experience as a white male. So I can’t imagine what it’s like for an African-American person, because my relationship is defined by a totally different history.”

Poulter as fur trapper Jim Bridger in ‘The Revenant’ (Rex) (Rex Features)

Poulter spent time with real police officers from Boston who dealt with similar riots in 1968, giving him a perspective into the mentality of some law-enforcers at the time. “A lot of police officers believed that you were guilty until proven otherwise,” he says. “I think it’s important to remember that while there are a great deal of very good, hardworking and honest police officers, today there is a minority group who still feel in a similar way. Even though this event happened in 1967, fifty years later, in America, we see a repeat of those sorts of behaviours.”

With police conduct under the microscope, after the headline-making fatal shootings of African-American citizens Michael Brown, Oscar Grant and Philando Castile among others, Poulter has a point. Even more recently, the events of Charlottesville, Virginia, where far-right groups fatally clashed with anti-racist demonstrators, make Detroit feel sickeningly timely. “It’s incredibly depressing to turn on the TV,” Poulter recently stated at Detroit’s London premiere, “and see a repetition of the themes that are explored in this movie.”

Poulter as Sgt Ricky Ortega, a Marine Corps infantry squad leader in ‘War Machine’

Unsurprisingly, he couldn’t wait to finish the film. “It was like working in an oven,” he tells me. “I was very, very glad to leave that character behind.” He compares shedding Krauss to “taking off a boiler suit”, and it’s easy to see why. The Algiers scene, which lasts around 45 minutes and doesn’t cut away at any point, is deeply uncomfortable to watch. “I think the audience start to, I hope, feel that they don’t want to be there any longer… it is so suffocating and it is so horrifying to be in there for that length of time.”

For Poulter, Detroit will surely be a marker point – just like his 2007 debut in the wonderful Son of Rambow or winning the Bafta Rising Star award in 2014, the year after his Hollywood breakthrough in the Jennifer Aniston comedy We’re The Millers. This past decade he’s stealthily kept working, fortunate that his parents – his mother’s a nurse, his father a doctor – didn’t pressure him towards further education when it became clear acting was his dream. “They quickly learnt the idea of me getting the grades needed to go to medical school wasn’t realistic!”

Even then, he wasn’t ideally tailored to acting. “I’m one of the most nervous people you could possibly wish to meet,” he says. “I’m the kid who was sick before games playing football. Teenage performances at the Edinburgh Fringe didn’t exactly quell is nerves either. “I used to be physically shaking before I went on stage.” But it didn’t dent his enthusiasm; by the time he hit 18, he had to decide whether to take acting further or go to university.

“My crossroads was really defined by, ‘can I make a career out of what I love doing and what I hope to do?’” he explains. Yet he’s more than managed that with a portfolio of roles that range from slapstick to high drama and, next, a ghost story with Lenny Abrahamson’s The Little Stranger, opposite Ruth Wilson. Diversity, it’s the key to a long career. “That’s what excites me,” he grins, “the opportunity to stretch myself and show as many different sides as possible.”

‘Detroit’ opens in cinemas on 25 August