When he began to miss his family too much, they made the trip to Detroit to visit him on set. During the entire span of filming, he never visited home and never got homesick. They’re perhaps what grounded him in the character and where, as we suspect all actors do, Merritt drew from to inhabit the role-his mother, like Wershe’s, left him at a very young age.
CAST OF EUPHORIA RICK HOW TO
When asked to name the most important thing he learned on set, he answers simply: “Mainly how to break down the script and the sequences and what’s going to happen next.” He credits his family for providing the emotional foundation for playing this part. White Boy Rick director Demange loves recounting how Merritt, when pushed too hard, would say, “Man, I ain’t ever asked to be an actor!” They laugh about it now, but the teenager is ever quick to attribute his success to the film’s cast and crew. His mindset came from a grateful place, savoring every moment without insecurity. For him, every day was a “blessing” and he acted as such. “I would just play video games and eat fried chicken,” he recalls. Of course, Merritt had his moments of feeling overwhelmed by the whole endeavor, but when asked about them, he shrugs them off as just part of the job-his first job ever, in fact-and says he remedied the stress the way any kid would. Left: Jacket, shirt, and turtleneck by Calvin Klein Jeans. “Like if I got shot right now, I wouldn’t be able to cry.” “I couldn’t even cry right now if I wanted to,” he insists. After being cast, Merritt enrolled in intensive acting classes, which would later come in handy when he needed to, for example, cry on demand in a scene that took a whole day to film-or at least, he says, what felt like it. And while Merritt’s background isn’t exactly this risqué, he and his character share a fearlessness of failure.īy now Merritt’s elevator pitch, his inexperience proved to be exactly the ingredient White Boy Rick needed. Wershe raked in more than any fifteen-year-old should ever make, bringing home money his father couldn’t.
After his father was threatened with prison for illegally selling weapons, he did a short stint working as an informant for the cops, first buying and selling drugs under their purview before turning it into his own personal business. In short, he befriended the Currys, then one of the city’s most powerful black drug-dealing families (and from whom he earned the nickname White Boy Rick), and eventually started his own hustle. rose through the drug underworld of Eighties Detroit. That same quiet bravado and novice’s confidence are arguably part of how the real Rick Wershe Jr. Because when it comes to Merritt-who admits with a sly grin and a drawl to not even knowing who McConaughey was beforehand-he simply cannot fail at something he never thought would happen to him. It also helps that Merritt, now seventeen, embodies the kind of “grit” (Demange’s word) that no kid actor from some famous, well-connected family could bring. Anyone past a certain age would crave the freedom he has to shape his own potential and make mistakes. In interviews and at screenings, Merritt’s co-stars-including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Brian Tyree Henry, and Bel Powley alongside McConaughey-and director Yann Demange pat him on the shoulder and regularly dole out not-so-secret handshakes between affirmations like “very mature,” “big-hearted boy,” and “humble.” There is the sense that the Hollywood elite who handpicked him from the principal’s office at Dundalk High, a suburban public school outside Baltimore, after auditioning hundreds of students regard his regular-ness as something remarkable-to the point that they perhaps even envy Merritt in the same way the CEO envies the intern. Even before playing his father in the new film White Boy Rick, about Detroit’s youngest drug kingpin, the seasoned actor supported bringing on a then-fifteen-year-old neophyte and helped convince the studio to take a chance and cast a random kid from Maryland with no previous acting experience in the title role. Matthew McConaughey might be Richie Merritt’s biggest fan.
CAST OF EUPHORIA RICK MOVIE
HOW RICHIE MERRITT WENT FROM HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT TO MOVIE STAR
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