Joseph Quinn spent his spring camped out in a 19th-century manor some 50 miles north of London, training to play a Navy SEAL with a coterie of the most promising actors of his generation. There’s the Emmy-nominated Will Poulter and Golden Globe-nominated Charles Melton; Netflix stars Noah Centineo, Kit Connor and Henry Zaga; prestige TV drama alums D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (Reservation Dogs), Adain Bradley (Industry), Cosmo Jarvis (Shogun), and Finn Bennett (True Detective).
Each morning he and his castmates would get up at 6am, pile into cars and head to boot camp. “It involves learning how to fire weapons, running with heavy things, lifting heavy things, and getting to know some brilliant people,” Quinn says. “There’s a team ethos in the SEALs that’s bleeding into our process.”
When the day is done, it’s back to the manor, where the lads move in packs about the halls wearing the grime of the day’s work, as peacocks and pensioners on walking holidays wander the grounds. Quinn descends from the upper floors of the manor and stops to whisper with a few of his castmates loitering in the foyer. After a quick huddle, they abandon him to GQ, and we pull away to a quiet corner of the house.
Quinn isn’t allowed to talk about exactly what he has been doing that day, but you can spot red clay on his socks and a few flecks of mud still stuck to his ears. He and his castmates are all here preparing for Warfare, Alex Garland’s next project for A24, which he’s co-directing with Ray Mendoza, the military adviser on Civil War. Quinn describes the film as “an anecdotal piece about a mission in Iraq going terribly wrong.” Will Poulter plays their captain. Mendoza, who served for over 16 years as a member of Seal Team 5, has put all the actors through the wringer.
Their rapport is even more evident in the way Quinn gushes about them all: “Kit Connor is wonderful, I’m learning from him every day.” “Michael Gandolfini is the funniest man I’ve ever met.” The hardest thing he’s had to do at boot camp is “have dinner with Taylor John Smith.” (He gave Smith a lot of grief, before clarifying that he adores him.) In a long line of war movies with iconic casts, this is one hell of a lineup. Warfare may be this generation’s Black Hawk Down.
Quinn fits right in. He’s now an ascendant star working on an impressive list of projects. He’s currently on screens in Hoard, a so-uncomfortable-you-can’t-look-away trauma drama directed by Luna Carmoon. Then, across the next 18 months, he’s set to appear in a slew of franchise films that will likely dominate our collective cultural consciousness for a few weeks apiece. He’s about to support Lupita Nyong’o in the highly anticipated A Quiet Place: Day One. This autumn he dons imperial robes in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator sequel. And next summer, he’ll appear in the biggest role of his career: Johnny Storm, the Fantastic Four’s Human Torch, in Marvel’s long-awaited third attempt at bringing one of its biggest comic book properties to life on screen.
Quinn has gone from Netflix’s mega-franchise Stranger Things to the heart of Disney’s next big swing in less than two years. “Stranger Things changed my life professionally in ways I couldn’t imagine,” he says. As the lovable metalhead Eddie Munson, he charmed 140 million viewers and turned the character’s T-shirt into a bestselling piece of Netflix merch. This created some inevitable whiplash for Quinn personally. “It’s nuts, I don’t know how else to describe it.”
He had little time to adjust to the late night TV appearances and hordes of fans. Right after season four, he went to London to shoot the third instalment of A Quiet Place, a prequel that explains how the series’ sound-sensitive monsters took over the planet. Even though it’s less than a month from opening, Quinn and the team behind it are holding information close to their chests to avoid spoilers. He says the most important part of the shoot for him was the opportunity to work with Nyong’o, who set an example of how to act – and how to be an actor.
“I learned a lot working with Lupita. The way that she conducts herself, just as a human being, as well as the choices she makes as an actor really informed whatever the fuck I thought I was doing. She’s very discerning,” he says. “By no means am I saying that I am, I just saw that in her. So I guess it was, at the risk of sounding a bit lofty, trying to give myself a little permission to be selective.”
The lesson came at the right time for Quinn, who suddenly has more options to choose from. Working with Nyong’o gave him the confidence to take bigger swings. Case in point: as he was wrapping A Quiet Place: Day One, he heard rumblings about an opportunity he never would have considered in the past: Gladiator II. He decided to throw his hat into the ring.
“I just really wanted to be involved. Then I heard that Paul [Mescal] was doing it, and Denzel Washington was doing it, and they were really trying to do it right.” Quinn landed the part of Roman emperor Geta, and suddenly he was in Malta alongside Washington and Mescal, with Ridley Scott rolling eight cameras at a time.
“I was like, ‘Eight cameras?” Quinn then does his best impression of Scott’s Geordie accent, “and he’s like ‘You gotta know where to fucking put ’em.’” He laughs. “Clearly he does. Watching that puzzle, watching him harness all those pieces and put them together was fascinating, truly.”
The production was a spectacle of suitably epic proportions. “The set of Gladiator II is a wonder to bear witness to. You know that Rutger Hauer speech at the end of Blade Runner? “‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,’ that’s what it felt like, just seeing it all,” Quinn says. “Ridley’s ambition, you see it in every frame. The film is reaching for something that is very much its own thing but also has reverence for the first film.”
Gladiator II returns to the Colosseum. Scott and team rebuilt the set in Malta in the exact same spot where they shot the original in 1999. Quinn says that’s where the shift in his career really hit him for the first time. “That was the most substantial moment,” he says. “I shared a few funny looks with the cast and gone, ‘Yeah, this is beyond.’” Mescal was an anchor for him when the magnitude of it all became overwhelming. “I’d met Paul before and thought he was just wonderful,” he says. “It’s comforting going into that environment where you know someone. It does kind of calm it all down.”
Working with Washington did not have the same effect. “He’s in that rare echelon of movie stars. I grew up watching all of his films,” Quinn says. “Watching him do his thing, and to some extent doing it with him – or trying to keep up with him, I should say – it’s ‘pinch me’ stuff.” When I ask if that means we can expect him to be sharing many scenes with Washington’s character, he dutifully evades the question.
Quinn has had to pinch himself a lot lately. The bigger-budget movies he’s working on these days bring higher expectations, more stress, and a more complicated balance between creative freedom and the ambition of scale. He compared working on Hoard, Carmoon’s indie film about a young woman struggling with mental illness, to megaprojects like Gladiator II. “Obviously, the more money that gets involved, the more grown-ups are involved, and the grown-ups want a return for their investment, very understandably,” he says. “Whereas if you're working on something that's more intimate there's a kind of collective ownership among the artists involved.” That sense of collaboration gave him the leeway to dive into the “gnarly and complicated and challenging material” of Hoard.
“But sometimes something comes along where there's more money involved, and there's brilliant people involved. And hopefully, you can have both, I think, but it's increasingly hard,” he adds. “Ridley wants both.”
Thus, the importance of discernment. That’s what led him to Relapse, American Psycho writer Bret Easton Ellis’ forthcoming directorial debut. Quinn is a serious Ellis fan and highly recommends his latest novel, The Shards (set to be adapted by Ellis and directed by Luca Guadagnino for HBO). The two met for a chat in West Hollywood, an encounter Quinn remembers as particularly intimidating. “He was very Bret Easton Ellis. Very Los Angelean, very funny, very dry, and probably a bit suspicious” of Quinn’s interest. But Quinn’s enthusiasm for the script won the day. He describes the script as “classic Ellis”. “He occupies this dark and glamorous world and he has such a skill for investigating these utterly loathsome yet magnetising characters. You can’t help but look at them and want to be around them.”
In his most exciting new role, however, Quinn is venturing about as far as you can get from Ellis’ dark and violent milieu – into the recently beleaguered Marvel Cinematic Universe. “That was a surprising phone call,” Quinn says. Johnny Storm, the flashy hothead of the space-radiated superhero team, is a juicy role. In its 2005 version, the character was Chris Evans’ stepping stone to playing Captain America; Michael B Jordan played Storm in the 2015 reboot, which failed to catch on with audiences. Quinn hasn’t fully processed his entry into Marvel yet, in part because “the wheels are getting moving.”
This incarnation of the Fantastic Four–Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards, Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm, Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm, and Quinn—will start production in July. The stars have had little exposure to each other so far. “I’ve met Ebon very briefly, Vanessa I have lots of mutual friends with,” Quinn says. He and Pascal have been to Rome and back on Gladiator II. But Quinn is most excited to meet John Malkovich. “He’s one of my all-timers,” he says. Malkovich’s role in F4 is still undisclosed. I ask Quinn if Malkovich will play a big baddie, and his entire body tenses. A sign that he is Doctor Doom, or just that Marvel PR has given Quinn shock therapy?
So far, Quinn has only gone in for a costume fitting and started on physical training. “I’m eating stuff and lifting things. I’m working with someone great—if you’d cast someone as a personal trainer, you’d cast him, he’s a rhinoceros of a man,” Quinn says. “He’s very good at his job, he gets me to do the things I don’t want to do.” All this has left little time for Quinn to breathe. It’s all happened so fast, Quinn says, that “You can’t think. You just have to go with it.”
Quinn turned 30 in January, and all the running and jumping and heavy things at Warfare boot camp have him feeling his age. “I blinked, and now you’ve got these young fuckers, like Kit Connor and Finn Bennett, bouncing back. Me and Poulter are just holding our knees. I don’t know how it’s happened, I’m no longer the young one.” Still, the birthday was a rare chance to take time for himself, what he calls a “period of recalibration.”
The types of roles Quinn is playing these days make it harder and more important than ever to keep his head straight. There’s an unavoidable sense of whiplash when he hops out of the Colosseum and slides into superhero spandex. “These opportunities are amazing, but they have moments of being confusing,” he acknowledges. All the while, there’s a growing cohort of grown-ups to please. “You know who you are from the way you respond to pressure. There are tools to respond well and tools to respond not so well, and you have to figure that out in real time.” Sometimes you have to get away from it all—he took a solo road trip around Italy last year—but most of the time he heads home to London to take it easy. “I’m trying to do the ‘adulting.’ There are these phrases that get thrown around like “‘social batteries’, that I used to roll my eyes at, but it is kind of imperative. Rest is nice!”
Quinn’s pressure-response tools are typical of someone entering their 30s—cooking, exercise, seeing pals, gardening. Get him talking, and he’ll preach enthusiastically about repotting plants. “I’m doing my herb garden these days, which is pretty sexy,” he laughs. “I’ve got some coriander going, some rosemary going, some mint. All the herbs you could imagine except for tarragon. Tarragon has dodged the draft. I’ve got your standard geraniums, some palm trees. It’s all cooking at a pretty nice heat.”
It takes years for an actor’s career to take off, distorting our perception of the age that an actor “breaks out.” That distortion is especially pronounced in Quinn’s trajectory, because the world got to know him playing a character who couldn’t graduate from high school. After riding the wave and weathering the hype of Stranger Things, Quinn has had to adjust very quickly to being one of the grown-ups – an actor who can hold his own alongside movie stars and Oscar winners. Perhaps the secret, though, is that he already was. What’s changed is his clarity of mind. “I know myself more than I did at the beginning of the decade,” he says. He’s learned “bravado doesn’t buy you a lot with people,” and it’s all about showing up and doing the work.
It’s nearly time for Quinn to leave Bootcamp Manor behind. When production on Warfare finishes, he’ll have a little time to recalibrate before hitting the promotional circuit for A Quiet Place: Day One. Then he’s off to shoot Fantastic Four. “God willing, I’m going to get myself to Glastonbury,” he says. “And after that we’re into skin-tight suits and fire.”
Styled by Angelo Mitakos
Grooming by Mike O’Gorman
Prop styling by Joshua Stovell and Benthe DeVries
See Joseph Quinn at GQ Heroes in Oxfordshire, from 3-5 July, in association with BMW UK. For more information and tickets, visit GQHeroes.com.