His international career has allowed him to work with the best creative minds, and given that he looks to his mentors for inspiration, he will inevitably be adding ‘director’ to his list of achievements too. Boyd believes that all new ventures are worth the risk. He might fall flat on his ***, he says, but he’ll always stand up stronger.
It is tough coming up with a single title for 28-year-old Boyd Holbrook. As a model he was the face of Dior Homme and Viktor & Rolf ’s men’s fragrance, Antidote, and walked the runway for Dior, Burberry, Calvin Klein and many others. He’s also a sculptor, photographer, playwright and actor. He studied cinematography and has recently been taking music lessons to bone up for his star-making role in ‘Tough Trade’, a new television series created by Chris Offutt, the man behind some of the most compelling television of today. Playing a country singer seems to suit Boyd well, with his good ol’ Kentucky background. His international career has allowed him to work with the best creative minds, and given that he looks to his mentors for inspiration, he will inevitably be adding ‘director’ to his list of achievements too. Boyd believes that all new ventures are worth the risk. He might fall flat on his ***, he says, but he’ll always stand up stronger. Read More
Tim Blanks: What’s the story on ‘Tough Trade’?
Boyd Holbrook: It’s about a family of musicians, a dynasty, kind of like Hank Williams’s. Sam Shepard is Linwood Tucker. He came up the right way, playing in honky-tonk bars with beer bottles being thrown at him. His son, played by Cary Elwes, went ‘new country’, made a ****load of money, but lost a lot of dignity, and now he has come home to tell the family they’re millions in debt. I play his son Jackson, and my music career is going to save them. At the end of the pilot, I play a concert for all these people.
TB: I didn’t realise you sang too.
BH: It’s really just been a hobby. I play guitar. But it changed when I got down to Nashville. I had to get voice coaches and guitar coaches. It was frustrating at the beginning, but once you get to know all that stuff, it’s really incredible. I’m turned on to music in a different way now. We were doing 18 hours a day – if not acting on set, then working with a guitar or singing coach – for two and a half weeks. It was probably the best experience I’ve ever had.
TB: How old were you when you wrote your first play?
BH: I was 16, but it wasn’t that good.
TB: You have to start somewhere.
BH: I think that’s really it, man. At this point, I’ve fallen on my *** so many times, I’m cool. I don’t see it as negative. You’re not failing at anything, you’re just trying stuff out. If it doesn’t work out, so what? Try it a different way. That’s one of the coolest things about the creative process.
TB: But if writing was one of your goals from an early age, wasn’t modelling a distraction?
BH: I didn’t start modelling till I was almost 21. I was working at this theatre company in Kentucky, dying to move to New York, and some girl said, ‘You should try modelling,’ so I came up north and tried it out.
TB: From the outside, it always looks like a lot more fun for the male models than for the girls. It’s like a gang of buddies travelling around the world having a good time on someone else’s dime.
BH: Exactly, that’s pretty much what it was. I made some excellent friends.
TB: What would you say was your big break in modelling?
BH: Definitely when I got the job for Dior with Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin. When I was in New York before the Dior job, I was totally couch-surfing for at least two years. I was hustling, going to castings. And then I got that job and the work started coming in. That was cream, after that I didn’t have to even try. I saw a big shift.
TB: When you got to Europe and worked with people like Hedi Slimane and Inez and Vinoodh, did you get a sense that a boy from Kentucky was kind of exotic to them?
BH: Yeah, just as I was fascinated by them; by what an artist Hedi was and by the photographs Inez and Vinoodh made. My really honest interest in their work meant I wasn’t closed off. I wasn’t sitting in the corner trying to be cool. Maybe that was an opportunity for things to happen.
TB: If you were open to people like that, I imagine they must have been a huge influence on you.
BH: Yeah, things fit sometimes. I feel really blessed. I guess if I’d wanted to be an accountant, I’d have been sitting in the corner doing something else, but I was fascinated by, say, the contrasts in Inez’s work. I had no idea what it was, I just thought it was beautiful. And I wanted to do that. Our art programme in high school was cut due to a lack of funding so I think I started a little late. When people go to these big high schools, they probably start when they ’re 16 with drama or whatever, but that never existed for me, so I guess I was really hungry for what all that stuff was – seeing all these images and hearing all these stories.
TB: ‘Model-turned-actor’ is one of those modern career arcs that people tend to be scornful about.
BH: Yeah, what is that? It’s bull****. You have this idea that modelling would give you great training, but it may actually not be. A lot of the time, models who have done well in print assume they can go on and do acting, which may not be the case.
TB: What was the greatest lesson you took away from your time as a model?
BH: Being professional, respecting people. People in the fashion industry are artists and you must respect them.
TB: What impact did working as a model have on your writing?
BH: The greatest thing was it allowed me to have the time it takes to write. It freed up time to sit down and conceptualise projects. I wouldn’t mind making a bit of money from acting and sitting back for a year and concentrating on writing.
TB: I imagine Sam Shepard’s career, mixing acting and writing, is pretty much the kind of thing you’d like to have for yourself.
BH: It’s funny, one of my first acting roles was in a play called ‘Fool for Love’ that Sam wrote. And that got me a manager, which got me an agent, which got me auditions, which got me ‘Tough Trade’, which led me to work with Sam. So it kind of came full circle from his play, and when I told him that he just said, ‘I’m glad it was good for something.’ He’s such a humble guy. He’s a ****ing Pulitzer Prize winner; he’s my hero basically. He’s a true dude, a man’s stand-up persona, but such a beautiful, open heart with such empathy for so many people. It’s a rare thing to be so strong and so solid, and yet to be so soft in a certain way.
P.S.
Modelling also helped Boyd learn to see himself through the eye of the camera, a handy skill for any actor. The upcoming television series, ‘Tough Trade’, premieres on the new Epix cable network later in 2010. Boyd was photographed wearing a denim shirt and grey blazer by COS.
Lovely duo, Boyd and Jess have worked together before for BCBG 2/3 years ago I believe?
I'm curious.
I know I'll be hanging round here a lot from now on 
