MILO CALLAGHAN

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British actor Milo Callaghan is currently heading up the series The Rainmaker, based on the John Grisham novel of the same title, stepping into the shoes of Matt Damon, who took on the role of young lawyer Rudy Baylor in the 1997 film adaptation. To meet Milo is to connect instantly to someone who is warm, engaging, curious and grounded. In a conversation that spanned growing up in the North West to Buddhist philosophy, to a road trip on motorbikes that took him across the country for an audition, here is 5ELEVEN's discussion with Milo on acting.

Words by Carla McCannon.

Photographed by Lewis Robinson. Styled by Alton Hetariki. Grooming by Brady Lea at A-Frame. Milo Callaghan appears courtesy of Public Eye Communications.

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If you were to introduce yourself to the readers of 5ELEVEN in a few sentences, what would you say?

As an actor, you sometimes get that opportunity, for instance, with drama circles in theatres, where you go around and say a few sentences about yourself. It's always difficult to know where to start. I could say I'm an actor, I grew up in the North West, I have three brothers… but I'm more interested in people’s value systems. It's the same with acting: I often think, what kind of person do I want to be when I get that job? What do I want to bring to the set? I suppose I think more of who I would like to be than my idea of who I am.

That's a great way of putting it.

You studied at Cambridge, then became an actor, how did that come about?

My mother trained as an actress at the Conservatoire in Glasgow, so growing up, theatre was all around me. I was immersed in it. I always knew I was going to act, even if it wasn't professionally. At Cambridge, I became very involved with drama and put on some wonderful plays with wonderful people. In my second year, I decided to reach out to some agents and wrote to two or three of them. I was doing a show at Edinburgh a year later, and one of them – my agent, Josh – came up and introduced himself after the show.

You're currently starring in The Rainmaker. Did you read the novel before shooting?

I read it during, actually. I really connected with Michael Seitzman’s scripts. Very quickly, we had all 10, so I got to read the whole thing.

As an actor, if a project is based on a novel, you have such a huge amount of source material to draw on, which must be so interesting. On the other hand, with this particular series, there's also the fact that it was made into a film in the nineties. This is almost thirty years later, plus as a series now there's a lot more room to explore and expand, but how did it feel having both of those elements in the background?

It was just a privilege to stand on the shoulders of those two fantastic pieces of work: an exciting, beautifully paced novel, and then to follow the movie and try to do something new. That was Matt Damon when he wasn't quite Matt Damon yet. He's one of my heroes, I think he's incredible. That never felt like pressure. It just felt like inspiration - “How can I honour that performance and then take it in a completely different direction?”

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And the scripts were really the compass in that sense, because Michael’s version of that story diverged from the original IP. The novel is written in the first person, so in essence it's a monologue. That was helpful for me to find specific situations. For example, a large chunk of the novel is spent with [my character Rudy Baylor] preparing for this trial, and that gave me a sense of how much weight that character feels on his shoulders. He's going up against the biggest firm in the state, and he's doing it without any of their resources. All he has is his own diligence and time, and he's working out of this terrible office with this quite frankly incompetent ambulance chaser as a partner. (P J Byrne, by the way, being a wildly competent partner. One of The Greats.) He just has this solid resolve that he's not going to stand by and see injustice done to this family. But when our show kicks off, he's a different character. The way Michael wrote him, [Rudy] has this gift of rhetoric and memory for case law, and that’s not really present in the novel. In the novel, he’s a driven young attorney who does his best to deliver. But in our show, he's cheekier. And he’s angry. Michael wrote this more robust, trailblazing rule breaker. That was exciting to step into, but I also wanted to nuance that because I didn't want him to come across as an all-American hero. That wouldn’t have served him. I wanted him to be a 24-year-old kid who's lost his brother. Really, this is a coming of age story.

I'm so close to my brothers that the idea of losing a brother was enough for me to go, OK, I can see how much this kid's hurting. Then, coupled with perhaps the kind of rage and confusion he feels in an environment that he didn't grow up in, with a bunch of people who, no matter how nervous they are about their own lives, project an image of security, because they all come from more of an environment of privilege. And he finds his feet in attack.

The journey was on the page. I felt like: “We've got 10 hours of TV to explore this character, so let's always leave him somewhere to go.” I never wanted to feel like he's arrived, even at the end, because he's a kid and he's messy.

Left: Check belted wool mac coat by Ami Paris. Right: Houndstooth wool coat by Kyle Ho. Stripe cotton shirt by Loro Piana. Denim jeans by Tods. Sunglasses by Louis Vuitton

Yes, and really when do we ever arrive? In a way, that's life, isn't it?

A hundred percent. And there's a danger, maybe in the edit, of things being tied up too neatly. But in terms of my performance and the work that I did, I never wanted to tie it up with a bow. The editor tells the story and you [as an actor] portray the character. But being in every day and being as involved as I made myself in the process, it was a gift that I got to experience the edit. I was in constant communication with the people who were running [the show], and also trying to generate as many ideas and pivots as I could.

I would love to do more projects like that. The show opened up ambitions I didn't have before in terms of the whole creation of a piece of work. But then the caveat for me was that there were a lot of times where I just had to lock into my performance and make sure everything was fresh. There's a danger, I think, when you play a character for that long: life always imitates art. As an actor, you practice the emotions of the character every day. I think it's that simple. I don't think there's any voodoo to it: whatever you tell yourself continuously, whatever you practice is what you will become. And if you spend six months telling your body how to feel, you will feel it to a degree. I definitely felt, when we finished the show, that I'd been on a journey.

Left: Leather jacket by Brunello Cucinelli, Stripe cotton shirt and woven silk tie by Loro Piana. Right: Chunky knit jumper by Tods. Cotton shirt by Kent&Curwin.

It had been a personal journey with the experience of taking on a show like that, and also an emotional journey because the character spends 10 hours coming of age. People say to me when they watch it that it's very moreish, and that’s a testament to Michael's writing. But I also felt that part of my job was: “How do we keep this in motion and how do we keep it driving? This scene feels flat and we have to drive it like this.” It was a lot of problem solving, which was a privilege, and one that often you don't get if you come in and do one day a week. But it is a pressure too, to keep an audience engaged.

Yes, how long do people give a book these days before they grab Instagram and start scrolling? It's to do with attention spans, isn't it?

Yes, who's reading Ulysses today? Unless you are a scholar. It scares me a little bit in that there's a danger that you may end up thinking, writing or performing to grab attention.

Yes, I can really see that. I was watching some French films and realised they often let silence play a sizable role. They seem to give the audience that benefit of the doubt that they'll stick with it and that silence is a part of life. But sometimes it feels that the whole world is going the other way, that it's getting a bit nervous of pausing, in case people lose interest.

Yes, that's why European cinema is lauded: it's that confidence to lean into your art and to think: “If you don't stick with this, then I didn't make it for you.” I think that's incredibly attractive. In American television, they're particularly good at gripping and holding [an audience's attention], and the flip side of what we're talking about is that there’s an art to being able to do that for 10 episodes. That's where Michael, who's our showrunner, comes into his own, because he does: he grips and he holds, and he knew what he wanted from that show. He's the kind of guy who was up at three in the morning in an edit suite, then coming to set and directing for a day, then going and doing a music edit for two hours. Then he was doing a colour grade, and then he was back in the editing suite, and then he was calling his family, and then he slept for two hours, and he got back up and went to the edit suite. Seeing that amount of work, and seeing the way our whole cast and crew carried it, was what gave me faith that, however the show turned out, people would watch it and hopefully enjoy it.

Leather jacket by Brunello Cucinelli, Stripe cotton shirt and woven silk tie by Loro Piana. Denim jeans by Tods. Leather combat loafers by Dior Men

In terms of turning to the future, what projects do you have coming up?

I’m on a less is more vibe, partly because I think the work is more important than continuing to work, if that makes sense - I hope that doesn't sound pretentious. This show has offered a lot of incredible opportunities. Striking the balance between curating those opportunities and just saying yes to everything and throwing myself into it has been an interesting tight rope to walk. There are a few really exciting opportunities that are spinning in my orbit right now, and I'm just working out which one of them it will be.

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Exciting times. Do you feel like The Rainmaker's been a trampoline from which you can bounce and you're wondering which way to take the bounce?

Yes and no. I think not, so far as it's changed nothing about who I want to be, if that makes sense, those values that we come back to. But yes, insofar as it's given me an opportunity to reach out to people who will now communicate with me or maybe be aware of some of my work in a way that they weren't before.

But it's always a case of pivoting - I'm not interested in doing the same thing. That, for me, is futile. I want to explore as much breadth as possible: ultimately get better and work with good people.

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You work to live to a degree. I think that life is as important as work, because it feeds it, and I've been very intentionally living. I got to promote the show, which was an amazing experience, and then I got to spend time with my family.

I remember I did a film a few years ago. It wasn't crazy, but I thought, “I’m doing it.” I had been working for a builder, George, who’s brilliant, and he texted me when I was coming back from Slovakia and said, “I have a job tomorrow.” I replied, “What is it?” He said: “You don't get to decide whether you want to do it based on what it is, do you want it or not?” I said, “Yeah, I'll come.” And I basically moved 2000 bricks from one end of a garden to another. All day I was getting pelted with paper, and they were calling, “Whoa, movie star, movie star!” [Laughter]

I feel so lucky for the people in my life, to come back and work in [my parents'] coffee shop. To me, that is as life-affirming as making a TV show and promoting it. I love that, but I also love going in and teaching the new 16-year-old how to clean the coffee machine. It's all valuable, there is no hierarchy. As long as it's a kind of service and in lots of ways, working on that show was a process, linking it back to what we were talking about before, of everyday thinking: How can I serve this crew and how can I serve this story? That's kind of my compass.

We can't wait to see which way Milo's compass takes him next.

You can catch The Rainmaker on Apple TV now.

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