BOYD IN THE BUBBLE
STUCK IN COLOMBIA WITH THE BREAKOUT STAR OF NARCOS
“I was consumed with my own personal depression, my own personal scenario at the time. What happened over the course of the journey was that I started noticing the different types of trees. I started noticing beauty, the details.”
Asquat Catahoula Leopard dog named Nola drags herself up the steep streets of Bogota’s colonial center with one hind leg wrapped in plaster and strapped in a decorative sling.
She’s a long way from her Louisiana home, and, like her owner, she’s struggling with the thinness of the air and the unfamiliar faces in Colombia’s capital city.
Nola’s disheveled master arrives at our meeting downtown with the knuckles on his right hand raw and swollen. He, too, looks like he’s been through a war. “Oh that, that’s just makeup,” says Boyd Holbrook as he sparks a cigarette and smiles, shrugging off his recent battle with notorious cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar in Netflix’s dangerously addictive miniseries Narcos.
At thirty-four, Holbrook has grown out of the androgynous good looks that paid his way through acting school in New York, where he modeled for the likes of Calvin Klein and Dior. And for his latest role in Narcos as Steve Murphy, the no-nonsense DEA agent, Holbrook has traded his wispy, French philosopher’s beard and carefully coiffed mop for a standard-issue law enforcement moustache and receding hairline.
He’s still got more than a hint of James Dean about him, yet he manages to damp down his infuriating handsomeness with an ethnic cardigan and beat-up leather boots, making him look like one of the backpackers tucked away in the hostels nearby. Only an expensive-looking Swiss Certina timepiece offers a clue to the earning potential of a hit TV show’s biggest star.
“I think the good thing about this show is that it’s very transparent,” he says. “America is not the good guy and Colombia is not the bad guy. The best line in Narcos is ‘There would be no Pablo Escobar if there was no American consumption’ and that’s true. That’s the facts.”
Life outside the show has been difficult for Holbrook. It’s only been a year since the actor reached his lowest ebb in Bogota, losing twenty-five pounds due to a combination of the relentless pace of shooting for TV, coming to terms with a breakup (he calls it a “divorce”), and the painful loss of his friend, mentor, and father gure, the photographer David Armstrong. “It was depression,” he says. “On the same day that my best friend died, I got a call from my girl to tell me it was over.”
“If something is good, it’s going to take a long time. The journey is worth it. You grow and you learn.”
“David was the first person in my life to encourage me,” says Holbrook. “He told me to do everything I wanted to do. No one had ever told me that before. He was a very important figure in my life. Important figure is not even close to what he was.”
The “girl” he’s talking about is his ex-fiancée Elizabeth Olsen, the younger sister of the Olsen twins, Mary-Kate and Ashley. They met on the set of Very Good Girls. According to Holbrook, she turned out to be less so.
Discovered while building sets in a small theater in his hometown, the sometime model, sculptor, poet, writer, producer, and director has packed a lot into his voyage from Prestonsburg, Kentucky, to the back alleys of downtown Bogota. He’s carved out a career by following his creative impulses.
“The craftsmanship is an art form in itself. I love getting the form perfect,” says Holbrook. “Getting the carpentry perfect, you know. Then behind that there are ideas that keep you curious. With any medium, whether it’s filmmaking or painting, you’re having a dialogue, a conversation with someone,” he says.
“I want to escape from my own skin so bad you have no idea. It crawls.”
“If something is good, it’s going to take a long time. The journey is worth it. You grow and you learn.” Holbrook has shown sculptures in New York galleries and written a screenplay, Uncle Sam, which grabbed Gus Van Sant’s attention enough to earn him a small part in Milk alongside Sean Penn. He’s also directed a two-minute film, Peacock Killer, based on the shortest of Sam Shepard stories. Yet having worked with iconic directors such as Terrence Malick and David Fincher, it still peeves him when actors with less talent and commitment to the cause ask him, ‘What are you doing here?’ when he arrives on set.
A regular on the undercard, Holbrook is doing all he can to spend more time on-screen with the three actors he admires most — Joaquin Phoenix, Guy Pearce, and Christian Bale, who brought Holbrook onboard for an upcoming Malick film. His ambitions stretch well beyond season three of Narcos. Driven by last year’s double loss, he’s not waiting for anyone to give him a leg up.
Holbrook moved out of the Williamsburg, Brooklyn, apartment he shared with Olsen and headed upstate to a small town thirty miles west of Woodstock, where he landscapes and works on private projects with New York–based documentary director and producer Madeleine Sackler. “She’s the boss. Nobody comes close to Madeleine.”
Together they’ve formed Madbrook Films to work on a series of projects with seed funding from Holbrook’s Narcos windfall. They have three scripts in pre-production spanning the extreme realities of life inside a maximum-security prison, a nineteenth-century lunatic asylum, and a post-apocalyptic world without water. “I like something that’s completely alien to me,” says Holbrook. “I want to escape from my own skin so bad you have no idea. It crawls.”
In his search for release, it’s easy to see why he shuns the Hollywood scene in favor of a small circle of friends on the East Coast. “I’m lucky,” he says. “I don’t need to be in LA to fight for parts anymore.”
Even with five films squeezed in between two seasons of Narcos, Holbrook still found time earlier this year for a BMW motorcycle ride through Chile from Santiago to Punta Arenas, with one of his “four true friends,” sculptor Fernando Mastrangelo. The cathartic road trip helped piece Holbrook back together again. “Artists are like wells,” he says. “You suck all the water out, and then you’ve got to put it back.”
“I was consumed with my own personal depression, my own personal scenario at the time. What happened over the course of the journey was that I started noticing the different types of trees. I started noticing beauty, the details.”
“Artists are like wells. You suck all the water out, and then you’ve got to put it back.”
The next stop on his road to recovery was Nola. He picked her up in New Orleans while shooting The Free World, an independent Jason Lew production that brings together Holbrook and another small-screen megastar, Elisabeth Moss of Mad Men. He says the film, out in 2016, is the best thing he’s done since last year’s Little Accidents, the independent production in which he plays a coal miner from a backwater town who’s suffered a stroke.
Each of Holbrook’s roles takes him further away from his days of playing the baby-faced boy toy to model Omahyra Mota in photographer Ellen von Unwerth’s 2005 ’y-on-the-wall series Omahyra & Boyd. “You kind of get bored with embarrassing yourself after a certain period of time,” he says on the second day of our downtown Bogota photo shoot. He’s had three hours of sleep and he’s topping up last night’s buzz with a cold beer for breakfast.
“I have no consciousness of how I come across, I don’t gauge myself. I am free in the fact that I am a complete fucking fuckup. I am a disaster,” he says. “I have embarrassed myself so many times that I can’t embarrass myself any more. I just operate.”
