INTERVIEW: Jason Butler Harner finds the complexity in ‘Edge of Everything’
Photo: Edge of Everything features Jason Butler Harner and Sierra McCormick as a father and daughter trying to figure out their new family dynamic. Photo courtesy of Lightyear Entertainment / Provided by Foundry Comm. with permission.
Jason Butler Harner is one of the most versatile and prolific actors of his generation. He has graced the stage in New York City many times, bringing authenticity and pathos to roles in The Crucible, The Coast of Utopia and Bernhardt / Hamlet. He’s a frequent presence on TV, with memorable roles in Ozark, The Walking Dead and The Handmaid’s Tale, among many others. And his film work includes big-budget fare like Changeling and indie movies like the recently released Edge of Everything, a coming-of-age story written and directed by Pablo Feldman and Sophia Sabella.
In Edge of Everything, Abby (Sierra McCormick) is a teenager who recently lost her mother and now must live with her father (Harner). The relationship between the dad and daughter is built on love, but it’s also an uneasy path they are forging. For Harner, the decision to join the indie film was a no-brainer.
“I will go almost anywhere where I think there’s quality material and quality collaborators,” Harner said in a recent Zoom interview. “Pablo Feldman and Sophia Sabella, they reached out to me during the pandemic on Instagram. They DM’d me, and we all had a lot of time on our hands. I said, ‘Sure, send me the scripts through my manager,’ and then he forwarded it. And I read it, and I really thought there was something with such integrity in what they wrote and such respect for every character.”
Harner appreciated that David, his character, wasn’t written with the usual tropes of typical dad roles. He wasn’t angry or clueless; instead, the film portrays him as a parent trying to figure out how to be there for his daughter, given the loss of his ex-wife and her mother.
“We just met, and we immediately hit it off,” Harner said about the creative team. “Their hearts are so big. They both come from the theater like me, and there’s something in the DNA of someone who comes from the theater that we just clicked right away. Yeah, I was going to do it, and then we thought that I wasn’t going to be able do it because I was doing The Walking Dead. And then the schedule opened up in such a perfect way that I finished The Walking Dead, and I went straight to San Francisco, shot for two weeks in the pandemic and then came home. Then they made this beautiful film.”
Harner has a long body of work, and one characteristic of his many roles throughout the years is that he plays people who often don’t pull punches. As the actor put it, he likes to uncover the fullness and complexity of each character he portrays, whether that character heads to some dark places, humorous places or sad places.
“I immediately got the position that he was in,” Harner said about the role of David. “And sometimes when you read a script, you’re hopeful that it’s not going to fall into the perfunctory tropes. More often than not you’re disappointed, but that was not the case here. I appreciated the struggle that he was in. I don’t have kids myself. I am the uncle to a lot of kids, both biologically family-wise, but also a lot of my friends from grad school and stuff have kids in high school and college now, which is insane. As the uncle or the guncle, if you will, I get a different kind of access, so it was nice to tap into that. The challenge with David, he has full responsibility versus someone who pops in and out. He’s doing his best.”
The experience of working on an indie film is a welcome one for Harner. He likes the motivation that is needed to simply jump in and hope everything works, given the budgetary limitations and time constraints. He admitted that sometimes these cinematic projects don’t pan out, but for Edge of Everything and another recent movie, The Big Bend, he had memorable experiences that were fulfilling.
“I’m lucky,” he said. “I have two films that are out right now, both with families where I’m a dad. In The Big Bend, which we made right before the pandemic and did one day of reshoot … I’m the father of two kids with Virginia Kull. It’s a beautiful film.”
Harner added: “Time is of the essence. You don’t get many takes. It’s a struggle, but it’s also collaborative in a way that I know from the theater. And I like on an independent film where you’re figuring out how to solve things together. There’s less bureaucracy getting in the way of direct communication. So in that context with Sierra, there was some discussion, and then I think we both touched on aspects about what we didn’t want the dynamic to be with references to things that we had seen. And therefore we know what we were after. Then there were times where we were very respectful of each other and used the getting to know each other in real life as part of the getting to know each other on screen of this father and daughter. … [I learned] to be a dad who is worried about his daughter and then also doesn’t quite know her as well as he should, and in this instance, I was getting to know Sierra over these two weeks when we shot as well.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Edge of Everything, starring Sierra McCormick and Jason Butler Harner, is now available on digital platforms. Click here for more information.
