LA Times

Once an actor finds his name popping up in Oscar conversations, he’s pretty much arrived in the industry, right? Actually, no, not necessarily, says Jeremy Strong, who plays unscrupulous lawyer and Donald Trump mentor Roy Cohn to much acclaim in “The Apprentice.”

“There’s a thing called ‘arrival fallacy,’ which is that the horizon is just always receding. You don’t arrive. I mean, I’ve never felt like I’ve arrived. It’s just a search, and you’re on the frontier of uncertainty and doubt, and taking risks.”

“And then the bottom falls out, and you keep looking,” adds Adrien Brody, who plays the Holocaust survivor and visionary architect at the heart of Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist.”

“That frontier just keeps moving,” Strong agrees.

Even now, with this season’s breakout performances and glowing reviews, a conversation among several actors shows they share the same fears and doubts as the rest of us.

“I don’t think I ever looked at the next job and went, ‘All right, it’s coming and here we go.’ I think it’s always just the terror of, ‘OK, I got the job. Am I going to ruin it?’ The fear of, ‘I’m wrong for it,’” says Kieran Culkin, who stars in the affecting “A Real Pain” with the film’s writer-director, Jesse Eisenberg.

These three actors — along with Peter Sarsgaard, who stars in “September 5,” about the terrorist attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics; Colman Domingo, who plays an incarcerated man who discovers the transformative power of art in “Sing Sing”; and Sebastian Stan, who not only plays the future president in “The Apprentice” with Strong but also stars in “A Different Man,” a cautionary story of inner discovery — got together last month for The Envelope Actors Roundtable moderated by Spectrum News 1 host Kelvin Washington. They shared their thoughts on auditioning, responding to fear and the hard truths of the world around us.

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