admin “Todd Haynes could ask me to play a fucking rock and I would say yes,” Cory Michael Smith tells me. In Haynes’ latest film, May December, he kind of does— although his character, Georgie, is more like a meteorite. Haynes’ sultry, campy psychodrama unspools around a TV star, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), who is researching her upcoming role as Gracie (Julianne Moore), a character loosely based on schoolteacher turned tabloid mainstay Mary Kay Letourneau. Letourneau went to jail in 1997 after leaving her husband and children for her sixth-grade student, Vili Fualaau, reimagined here as Joe, played by Charles Melton. Gracie and Joe have gone on to form a new family; Smith plays one of Gracie’s kids from her first marriage, who’s now in his mid-30s, much like Joe.
Until Georgie shows up, Elizabeth has been lulled into the sense that all has been largely forgiven and Gracie is beloved by those around her. But about 40 minutes into the film, that spell is broken. Elizabeth is meeting with Gracie’s lawyer at a tiki-style restaurant; there’s a young man onstage reedily performing Peter Frampton’s “Baby, I Love Your Way.” He looks like a full-on ‘90s boy-band member– bottle-blond hair, chipped black nail polish, an array of adolescent necklaces and bracelets. “Jesus Christ,” he chides the band, “can you play this any slower?” This electrified man-child then catches sight of Elizabeth, jumps off the stage and bounds to her table, slapping her (and us) in the face with his manic intensity. It’s Georgie, who proceeds to introduce himself to Elizabeth with a query: “How much are they paying you?”
A grown man frozen as a self-centered 15-year-old (“We’re in the back, with the old families,” he says when his family bumps into Gracie’s new one at a graduation dinner), Georgie personifies the fallout from Gracie’s actions, wearing his mortification on his sleeve. Smith is perfect for it. Best known for playing the frenetic Riddler in Gotham, he’s is a master at the quicksilver turn, from penetrating (“Why don’t you look me in the eye and tell me how selfish I am, and I’ll tell you if it’s a match,” he says to Elizabeth) to wistful (“I gave him a hand job and he never spoke to me again,” he recalls in the same sitting) all at once.
Part of the reason Smith can pivot adeptly from Frampton’s schmaltzy 1975 hit to the cabaret-y 1972 Leon Russell single “Tight Rope”—“I’m up on the tight wire/Flanked by life and the funeral pyre/Putting on a show for you to see”—is because he majored in musical theater in college and has studied jazz piano. He first appeared on Broadway in Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 2013, before landing “Gotham” on Fox a year later; he’s also starred in the sci-fi Amazon Prime drama “Utopia,” the WWII Netflix miniseries “Transatlantic” and, on the big screen, as a closeted gay man dying of AIDS who returns home in Yen Tan’s film 1985.
Smith has worked with Haynes three times—first in Carol as a private investigator, then in Wonderstruck, and now in May December. We spoke on Zoom; his hair was back to normal, and the vibrant carnivalesque paintings behind him evoked the theme of contrasts May December and Georgie both touch on.
