Lucas Hedges and His Father Never Meant to Make a Movie Together

There’s a story Peter Hedges likes to tell about the moment he knew his son Lucas would be an actor.

Young Lucas was in seventh grade, playing Smike in his school’s production of “Nicholas Nickleby” with such committed intensity that even members of the high school drama club had been assigned to study his performance. At least, that’s how Peter remembers it.

“In the very first scene, when he came up onstage, his eyes were filled with tears,” said Peter, beaming. “And I’m not kidding, I felt the theater gasp.”

“The whole theater,” said Lucas, “or just you?”

Father and son may quibble about the particulars of that night, but Peter’s hunch would prove correct: Lucas, now 21, is one of Hollywood’s most in-demand young actors. He earned an Oscar nomination for “Manchester by the Sea” and has already put together an enviable résumé including roles in two other best-picture nominees, “Lady Bird” and “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”

His father has worked in Hollywood as a writer and director of emotional dramedies like “Pieces of April” and “Dan in Real Life.” You might think, then, that as Peter wrote his new film, “Ben Is Back,” about a recovering addict who makes a surprise Christmas Eve visit to his mother (Julia Roberts), he would have had his son in mind to play the titular role.

The reality was much more complicated, they told me during a visit to the Brooklyn brownstone where Lucas and his older brother, Simon, grew up and Peter and his wife, Susan, still live. Though Lucas moved out, his father has preserved his childhood bedroom as though in amber: The walls are covered with a teenage boy’s doodles, and glow-in-the-dark stars are still glued to the ceiling. “I won’t paint these walls until they drag us out of the house,” Peter said, his eyes welling up.

The elder Hedges readily admits to being the cry-at-commercials type, and during our conversation, Lucas gently looked for ways to deflate his dad’s proud hyperbole. “He’s very romantic about the notion of fatherhood,” Lucas said. “I remember whenever I would walk home with him from school, I’d ask him if I could get candy, and it was a ‘yes’ every single time. He was like, ‘Do you think I could ever say no to that?'”

These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: Peter, as a parent, did you have any concerns as Lucas’ career started to take off at a young age?

PETER HEDGES: The only thing for me was I genuinely just wanted him to have positive experiences. Lucas, I don’t know if you know this, but Frances McDormand came up to me on the set of “Moonrise Kingdom,” and she said: “This is it, right? This is the only movie, and you’re not going to let him do any more?” And I said, “Well, that’s going to be up to Lucas.”

LUCAS HEDGES: You served it up!

PETER: Ironically, of course, he later did “Three Billboards” with her, which was great. But when Lucas was young, a casting director called our house and asked if he would audition for a film, and my wife said, “He can’t audition for movies until he’s 18.” She called me up, kind of proud that she’d drawn this line, and I said, “Hey, did you ever think about asking Lucas what he wants to do?” So, she said to Lucas, “There’s a movie they want you to audition for,” and he said, “I just have one question. Is Dad directing it?” She said no, and he said, “Then I’m interested.”

Q: Lucas, what made you so convinced early on that you didn’t want to work with your father?

LUCAS: Because I hadn’t established myself at all. I would have felt a lot better if I felt like this was my career rather than some birthday present, and I couldn’t help but feel it looked like that if I was just doing my dad’s movies. But it’s a valid thing to feel that a lot of why I did have success at a young age is because I was raised to some extent in this world. I don’t think people would give me the part if they didn’t believe in me, but at the same time, I can’t imagine there isn’t some nepotism going on. I’m in good favor because of my family, I think.

Q: So Peter, you didn’t write “Ben Is Back” expecting Lucas to do it?

PETER: I very much believed that he would not be in a film of mine, and that he certainly didn’t need to be in a film of mine, with the way things were going. But with “Ben Is Back,” I did want to write something that both of my boys would be proud of, that they could look at and go, “That’s my dad.” I sent the script to Julia, she said yes, and when I talked with her, I came with a list of actors that could play Ben. And she didn’t ever want to see the list. She just wanted Lucas.

LUCAS: It would have taken a lot for me to want to do it, because I had no intention of doing it. But I heard people were receiving the script well, and I wanted to read it more as his son supporting him. So I read it late one night, and I was just really blown away by it. There was a part of me that was like, “OK, maybe I’m going to want to throw my hat in the ring here.”

Q: But you didn’t say yes right away. What was holding you back?

LUCAS: Just sheer discomfort. My dad giving me notes seemed just as uncomfortable as us talking about sex. But I sat with it longer and did the I Ching, a thing a lot of hippies did in the ‘70s: You roll some dice and get your fortune told. I got really good results, and it struck me that the role was similarly special to Patrick from “Manchester by the Sea,” a part that I felt blessed to play. And I wanted to be of service to my dad in some way, during a big moment in his life. So I signed on, and it was hard and rewarding.

Q: What was it like to be directed by your father?

LUCAS: Honestly, it was difficult at first. I was only ready to listen to him direct if he said what I wanted him to say.

PETER: I wasn’t aware that it was as hard as it was for you. The moment I remember distinctly, which is not a moment you would be aware of, was at the end of the third day of filming. I put you in the van to go back, and I went quickly back to the producers, and I burst into tears. The producers said, “Why are you crying?” And I said: “I’m crying as a father. I’m so afraid I’m going to fail him, and he put his trust in me.”

Q: What made that so fraught?

PETER: It struck me what a gift he was giving me by doing the film, because the reason it’s so important to me is that it’s about a family dealing with heroin and opioids, but in my childhood, it was alcoholism. It’s one thing to be a father directing his son, but then there’s a much deeper thing, which is that I’m Carol Hedges’ son, and I didn’t know her sober until I was 15. She’s not here to see this movie, but without her, I would never have written “Gilbert Grape." [He wrote the screenplay for "What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,” based on his novel.] I would have been an accountant living in Ames, Iowa.

LUCAS: Do you actually think you wouldn’t have gone into this line of work had it not been for your mom’s actions?

PETER: Well, it made perfect sense that I originally wanted to be an actor because every Sunday, we walked into church and we acted like we were the happiest, most together family.

LUCAS: He wanted more than anything to be an actor, and there’s an experience he had as a young actor that’s the most heartbreaking story I’ve ever heard.

PETER: What happened was I was in this Christian film, and I needed to cry in this scene. No actor ever wanted to cry more than me, and I prepped and prepped, and I could not cry. We were at take 36, take 37, and finally, the director brought me into a room —

LUCAS: — and he said, “Let’s face it, Peter, you can’t act.”

PETER: And then I burst into tears. I was so humiliated that I just started weeping. If you wanted John Gielgud to cry, he could say, “Which eye?” But I trained with Sanford Meisner, and he said Gielgud was such a phony: “If crying were acting, my Aunt Martha would be the greatest actress in the world.” So it’s an interesting thing.

LUCAS: And yet everyone in high school was assigned to see me cry.

Q: How does it feel, then, to have worked together and gotten a peek into Lucas’ process firsthand?

PETER: One of the things that I see in his work, and it’s really evident in “Ben Is Back,” is Lucas has such a rich inner life that in moments that could just be toss-offs, you watch and you go, “Oh my God, there’s so much going on here.” It’s very rare to see someone that age fill moments with so much life and complexity. Sorry, I didn’t mean to embarrass you.

LUCAS: [Joking] You’re humiliating me.

PETER: Lucas is living the life that I wanted, but I want to be clear, I don’t feel there’s been any pressure for him to live it. It’s just he is the artist, at 21, that I wanted to be. His capacity to be authentic and inhabit his truth, he can do that much earlier than I was able to.

LUCAS: I feel like I’m very much open to the emotion of the world and very empathetic. I can feel my feelings, sometimes to a fault. And I think I got that from my dad.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.