Noah Jupe: ‘In a zombie apocalypse, I’m just gonna call up Emily Blunt – she’d know what to do’

The 16-year-old British star of ‘A Quiet Place’ and ‘Honey Boy’ has become one of Hollywood’s most in-demand actors. He talks to Adam White about child star cautionary tales, wanting to play a villain, and how all those years pretending to be injured in his back garden have finally come in handy

Silent witness: ‘My voice was cracking, but then I was like: it doesn’t even matter, because we don’t talk much in this movie anyway’ (Matt Baron/Shutterstock)

Noah Jupe could be found writhing in agony long before anyone was paying him to do it. “I was always pretending I’d been shot or I’d been hurt,” the 16-year-old star of A Quiet Place and The Undoing recalls of his (even) earlier years. “I used to run around with lightsabers and toy guns and do these crazy war sequences by myself in the rain. I remember as a kid just being naked with a sword in the rain, just like fully going for it. I was completely invested in getting hurt. So I guess it’s all been practice for this one?”

The one in question is the much-anticipated A Quiet Place Part II, the long-in-limbo sequel to the smash 2018 horror movie. Jupe is Marcus, the middle child of desperate parents played by Emily Blunt and John Krasinski. Part II, which was due for release last March before the pandemic delayed it by more than a year, picks up 474 days after he and his family went on the run from a horde of earth-invading aliens. The creatures track their prey via sound, meaning if anyone who crosses their path makes a noise, their time is effectively up. This time around, Jupe is the focus of the film’s grisliest sequence. Without me giving much away, it involves a bear trap, a bare foot and some barely restrained screaming.

“My voice was a problem,” Jupe says over the phone from Vancouver, where his little brother, Jacobi, is following in his footsteps and going into acting too (he’s currently filming a Peter Pan movie). “After three takes, I could hear it kind of cracking a bit in the back. But then I was like, ‘Oh, I guess it doesn’t even matter, because we don’t talk much in this movie anyway’.”

With an enviable mop of brown curls and ability to look both kind and approachable or believably panicked, Jupe has become one of Hollywood’s most in-demand young actors. Born in London but raised in Manchester, he is best known – to his slight irritation – for butter-won’t-melt types: a vulnerable child star (and thinly veiled Shia LaBeouf surrogate) in the autobiographical Honey Boy (2019); Christian Bale’s inquisitive son in motor-racing drama Ford v Ferrari (2019); and a saintly schoolboy in the heartwarming coming-of-ager Wonder (2017). “I’ve been playing quite innocent characters in the past few roles, if not all of them,” he says, his accent still bearing a Manc lilt despite his years working overseas. “I’m 16 now, so I’d like to give something a try that’s not perfect or kind. Maybe a bit more villainous.”

It must have been disappointing, then, when he turned out not to be the killer in last year’s Nicole Kidman/Hugh Grant HBO series The Undoing, where he played the pair’s on-screen son. Especially when a mid-series cliffhanger seemed to suggest he’d bludgeoned a poor woman to death. Was he a bit miffed? “That was fully my reaction!” he laughs. “I was like, awww, come on guys!”

In A Quiet Place Part II, Jupe and his on-screen family are once again put through the ringer, with Blunt’s character having to weather both the recent death of her youngest son, and that of her husband – star and writer/director Krasinski, whose character was killed off at the end of the first movie, and returns for a brief flashback that kick-starts the sequel. Faced with so much death and destruction, I confess that I would have probably called it a day if I were in Blunt’s shoes.

“For me, I think it could either go two ways,” Jupe says. “I could either curl up into a ball and end up dying, or I could, you know, get my s**t together and be very productive. I don’t think there’d be a middle ground. Emily, though, I feel like she’d be very good at protecting her family and being resourceful. If there’s ever a zombie apocalypse or anything, I’m just gonna call up Emily and be like: ‘Yo, can I come and stay over at yours for a bit?’ She’d know what to do.”

Barely restrained screaming: Emily Blunt and Noah Jupe in ‘A Quiet Place Part II' (Paramount)

The son of actor Katy Cavanaugh (soap fans will recognise her as Coronation Street’s Julie Carp), Jupe began auditioning for film and television shortly after his parents realised they’d accidentally created a performer. Often, he’d pretend to be horribly maimed, but then stay in character after that, too. “Friends would be on their way to the house, and my parents would have to sit me down and get me out of character,” he recalls. “Just so that I’d be polite to all the visitors.”

Minor guest star roles in series such as Downton Abbey and Penny Dreadful led to a toothier part as the son of Hugh Laurie in the BBC mini-series The Night Manager. He’s since worked so much in America that many people are surprised he’s British. He remembers attending a Q&A for Honey Boy in Toronto, and numerous attendees gasping as soon as he opened his mouth. “Then Shia just turns around and goes: ‘Oh yeah, he’s British.’ No one had realised, which I guess is a compliment.”

Watching Stand by Me at around nine or 10 only cemented his love of acting. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a child’s performance, or a performance, better than some of the kids in that movie.” He also watched Ken Loach’s Kes, about a working-class schoolboy and his pet kestrel, and remembers sobbing. “It was the first film I’d seen that didn’t have a good ending,” he remembers. “I was distraught. Like, what do you mean there’s not another bit to the movie? Is there not a happy ending? My mum was like: nope, that’s it.”

Splat: Jupe in ‘Honey Boy' (Automatik/Amazon/Sony/Kobal/Shutterstock)

For the past couple of years, Jupe has been pondering his own happy ending. The history of child stardom is marked by its cautionary tales: Stand by Me’s River Phoenix was dead of a drug overdose at 23, while his co-star Corey Feldman fought addiction. In Honey Boy, Jupe played Otis, who is shuffled between auditions by his erratic, alcoholic father and lives out of a dingy motel on the fringes of the film industry. Shia LaBeouf, a former child star himself, played Otis’s father and wrote the film’s script, and is currently facing allegations of sexual battery and assault. Jupe is well aware that he’s working in an industry filled with potential toxicity, particularly for those who start young.

“I feel like this world, or Hollywood or whatever you want to call it, is dangerous,” he says. “It’s very easy to get lost. Especially if you have people like Otis’s dad, who doesn’t have his best interests in heart. He’s very selfish, and I guess he wants the best career for his son, but he doesn’t care about his mental state either. The biggest thing that I took away from all of that is keeping your inner circle as close as possible, and to have people [around you] that have your best interests at heart, that care for you and want to protect you. It’s a crazy world out there, and it’s an equally if not more crazy world in Hollywood or in the movie industry. So to have that close circle of people that I trust, my family or my close friends, is very important.”

Right now, Jupe is debating where to settle down once he turns 18. Having swapped Manchester for Chiswick in 2019, he calls London home, but is tempted by the idea of Los Angeles. Or a globe-trotting gap year typically reserved for the non-famous. “I’ve been lucky enough to see some incredible places and cultures,” he says. “But I feel like I haven’t really travelled yet. There’s so much to explore.”

Not bad for someone who was pretending to die in his back garden just a few years ago.

A Quiet Place Part II is in cinemas now