Talks

“A House of Dynamite” star Tracy Letts fears we may be cooked.

“Consider the possibility. There are a couple of existential crises we’re facing. So we should probably consider what that means if, maybe not in your lifetime, but your kid’s lifetime or whatever. What happens if we’re just all fucking done?” said the Pulitzer-winning playwright and character actor extraordinaire, who plays General Anthony Brady in the new political thriller directed by Oscar-winner Kathryn Bigelow. The film provides a chilling look at what could happen if a nuclear missile were launched at the United States.

Letts sits outside with IndieWire on the patio of a West Hollywood hotel, finally taking a breather after an intensive two days that saw him open his play “Mary Page Marlowe” at the Old Vic Theatre in London, wake up at 6 a.m. the next day to fly 14 hours to Los Angeles, and attend two screenings of “A House of Dynamite,” including its Los Angeles premiere. But even before it became the most-watched film on Netflix in one week, Letts was already happy with how audiences responded. “People seem to dig the movie, people are liking it, which is cool,” he said. “Or if they’re not, they’re not telling me, which is probably wise.”

Before he landed on what the film’s message may be, Letts signed on to “A House of Dynamite” simply “because it was a Kathryn project. And then when I read the script and saw the role she had in mind for me, that didn’t make it less interesting to me,” he said. “Everything about it for me was just ‘Go, go, go.’ I didn’t have any hesitation.” Though he identifies most with playing dad to the titular role in “Lady Bird” (“I’m a guy who likes to sit and read the paper and let the women make all the decisions”), the military role still felt close to home in a sense. “I’m a general and giving orders and that voice of authority, I can do it. They’re probably all just impersonations of my dad or whatever, but I can do it,” he said. Though “anybody who knows me knows I’m an old softy.”

Early questions Letts had for director Bigelow included “Is he George C. Scott in ‘Dr. Strangelove’? Is he a [war] hawk?” As he would later learn from his interactions with real-life generals advising him on his performance, there’s little time to discuss politics with only 18 minutes until a major American city is about to be wiped out by a missile. “He’s really just talking game theory. ‘If you do this, then they do that. If you don’t do this, then they might do that.’ It’s game theory. He just puts it out there for the president’s consideration. I was comfortable with all that because the argument made sense to me,” he said. 

Again, Letts had access to multiple three- and four-star generals who had sat in STRATCOM, running through scenarios like the one seen in “A House of Dynamite.” He walked away impressed. “Those guys know their job intimately,” he said. “They drill [those scenarios] 400 times a year. So they’re very practiced at it. And the objective in the moment of crisis is a simple one. Collect information, pass information up the line.” If anything, it is the efficiency and clearheadedness of his character in particular that makes “A House of Dynamite” all the more terrifying.

“The scenario it presents is scarily plausible. There aren’t a lot of things that happen that couldn’t happen. It’s not a Martian who appears, right? This is not science fiction. This is just next to reality,” said Letts. “If you’re going to make that kind of movie, you can’t miss on some of the technical details. All that stuff’s got to be right.”

That all starts with the screenplay from Oscar nominee Noah Oppenheim, who, as the previous head of NBC News, has rubbed elbows with many of the players who would be involved in a National Security emergency. “People get mad at me if I make light of research,” said Letts, but “you do what you need to do. And certainly in a case like this where so much of the research has been done for you, which the dramaturgy is on the page, the research has been done, it’s been vetted, re-vetted, they surrounded me with all of the context I would need in order to be able to pretend with authority, which is all the job really entails as an actor. To be able to get a good haircut and put on the uniform and walk out on set and know the lines, hopefully, and be able to deliver them with some authority, [and] to deliver that language in a way that feels natural.”

Going through those motions, informed by all that research, the film proved to Letts that Americans “are not as prepared as we think.” He added, “This movie shows a scenario in which everything kind of goes right. The government’s functioning pretty well. Not all of the equipment necessarily functions the way we would want it to, but I think they even quote at one point that those [Ground-Based Interceptors] are supposed to be functioning at a 61 percent success rate, but even that’s under ideal circumstances.”

In the world of “A House of Dynamite,” “Everybody in the government is functioning well and thoughtfully, that’s if everybody is accepting the gravity of the moment and doing their jobs well.” And the President of the United States, played by Idris Elba, seems sensible. “Imagine a scenario in which he’s maybe not all the way there, or perhaps even manifestly irresponsible. Then it becomes a much scarier consideration,” said Letts.

Ultimately, “we’ve built a machine, a very complicated device. If all the parts function properly inside that device, if everything works the way it’s supposed to work, civilization’s over,” said the star of what his new film illuminates. “What if we just reconsider the machine entirely?” Letts mentions that he has been recently asked about a shot of Lincoln’s bust in “A House of Dynamite” and what that may invoke, something that also stood out to him the first time he saw the film.

“Of course, you immediately think about the presidents who have risen to the moment, those that haven’t,” he said. “But the second time watching it was like, ‘Oh, none of that matters.’ Civilization is wiped out. President? Meaningless. It doesn’t matter. It’s all gone.”

“Kathryn won’t cop to this,” but “artists are starting to grapple with this idea of what does it mean if we’re really done here?” said Letts. He uses Thomas Vinterberg’s recent series “Families Like Ours,” about Denmark being evacuated in response to climate change, as another example. These projects provide the warnings that, if not heeded, prove “it’s not going to get better. It’s only getting worse.”

With all that said, the actual experience making “A House of Dynamite” was still enjoyable. “It’s an ensemble piece. Everybody’s chipping in to help where they can, which is the nice thing about it,” said Letts. “There’s nobody who’s the obvious kind of awards player. It’s like we don’t have to do that. So everybody’s there for the right reasons. It’s just all Kathryn, Kathryn, Kathryn.”

Having now worked with Bigelow on her first film in nearly a decade, reminiscent of her other work like “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty,” which both received Academy recognition, Letts is more excited at the thought of the director dipping even further back into her oeuvre. “I’m old. I remember seeing ‘Near Dark’ in the movie theater very well. And so I think of Kathryn as more varied than just this kind of documentary/military [style]. I know that she’s got more tools,” he said. “I hope she goes back to that stuff, frankly. I heard the word ‘Western’ at some point. I’d be thrilled if that were a reality.”

Letts himself has recently developed a reputation as the King of Physical Media, boasting of a collection of around 11,000 DVDs, so there is a slight irony in his latest film being distributed by a streaming service. “There will come a moment where I get to hold my hand up to say, ‘We should have this 4K available too,’” he joked, also campaigning for director David Fincher’s Netflix films, and Martin Scorsese’s Apple film “Killers of the Flower Moon” to release physical 4K copies.

However the film has made him feel about the world, Letts’ best experience with “A House of Dynamite” has been seeing it in a theater. “To have that Volker Bertelmann score just vibrating your sternum, and in a way sort of telling you when to breathe, or how to breathe throughout the movie, I just don’t think it’s going to play the same at home as it is on the big screen. So I hope people check it out in the movie theater.

“A House of Dynamite” is now out in select theaters nationwide and streaming on Netflix.