Introducing Luke Grimes
by Jacob Brown

For the better part of 3 years this young actor has been all the buzz, on the precipice of stardom, all without a single one of his films actually hitting the silver screen. Now, having landed a coveted spot on a hit tv series, and with his film projects finally seeing release, luke grimes is is ready for the limelight.

Luke Grimes is the biggest movie star you’ve never heard of. When he walks into the Soho Grand’s lobby—an hour late after spending the morning getting the hangover beat out of him with reeds at a Russian bathhouse—everyone stares, but no one can place his face. “I do seem to have a weird curse,” says Grimes. “My first movie was supposed to come out two years ago, but hasn’t yet. The last one was supposed to come out in August. Maybe March, they’re saying now.” That first film was All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, directed by Jonathan Levine, in which he stars opposite Amber Heard. The second was Assassination of a High School President, in which he stars opposite Mischa Barton and Bruce Willis. Grimes shrugs off the setbacks, “I think one day before I die, I might have a movie come out.”

The betting money in Hollywood says that movie will be sooner rather than later. Even if his projects have experienced bad luck, the industry buzz hasn’t waned, and his current turn on the ABC phenom series Brothers & Sisters, with Sally Field, might just be the tipping point. But a long path to success is nothing new for Grimes. He grew up in rural Ohio, the youngest in a very religious family. His dad is a preacher, as is one of his brothers; the other is a music minister. “Growing up I believed in it fully. And I thought something was wrong with me when I couldn’t speak in tongues,” says Grimes. “I used to try but I knew I was faking it.”

Grimes is conscious of the fact that to most people, the church stuff can seem pretty intense, but to him, his family is open-minded. Since the age of 6 he knew he would become an actor, and when he finished high school and decided to have a go at it, his parents supported him. They even suggested and helped pay for acting school. Of course they intended him to take local classes, but he set his sights on New York’s American Academy of Dramatic Arts. “They mortgaged their house to pay for it,” he says. “They prayed on it and felt good about it.”

As corn-fed boys are wont to do upon leaving their family and church for the first time, Grimes went a little wild in New York: dorm life, drinking, clubs, girls. If nothing else, the time he drunk-dialed his mom probably clued his family into his evolution. But for Grimes, more than the tasting of forbidden fruit, it was the realization that he was no longer following some ordained path that represented the greatest break. “It took awhile. I was ingrained with a point of view that wasn’t necessarily my own. And I began to realize I didn’t have it anymore,” he says. “I completely respect and understand my family’s beliefs. But for me right now, it’s about not knowing, not having a place to end up.”

After two years of conservatory and a brief stint back in Ohio pouring concrete to earn cash, Grimes finally made the move to Hollywood; he bought a cheap Honda and drove. “I watched through the windshield as it changed from green to desert to California,” he remembers. “It freaked me out. It wasn’t like school. It was like, this is my new life.” Things were slow at first. He worked at a Santa Monica movie theater and drank a lot of whiskey, usually alone. But it was future costar Mischa Barton who (unintentionally) set his career in motion. Before leaving New York, he’d met her and she’d invited him to her birthday party. There he met publicist Craig Schneider.Grimes forgot about it, until, after a few weeks in Los Angeles, he found Schneider’s business card. Within days he had full representation.

Grimes has developed a close circle of friends in L.A., mostly guys in the band he drums for, Mitchell’s Folly. But living in a city he agrees is a little bit Godless isn’t easy. Only recently, with a steady Brothers & Sisters paycheck, could he even afford to move into his own place. That meant that last summer, while filming director Cam Archer’s forthcoming sophomore feature with Ellen Barkin, he was waking up every morning on a couch before heading to the set. “That makes it a little harder to get into character,” he admits. Grimes reveled in the film’s complexity, and compares Archer’s indeterminate style to that of Luis Buñuel, the director of Belle de Jour. It’s rumored that Barkin handpicked Grimes for the role because he reminded her of Johnny Depp, whom she used to date. “Ellen and I did have some pretty heavy scenes. Maybe she had a Johnny flashback,” he laughs. “She really went for it. You are worried about it affecting you—as a guy, if you know what I mean. You don’t want to embarrass yourself. But I think from now on I am going to just enjoy it. If it affects me, then it’s like, “Sorry guys, I’m just really in character.”

Luke Grimes is goofy and an undeniable heartthrob, but he’s also a born actor. In Mandy Lane—in which he gets a hand job in a car and a blow job in a barn before getting shot in the head, and for which he and his costars bunked together for a month and behaved much like the boozy, horny teens they play in the film—Grimes stands out, imparting a sense of inner complication to a role that could have easily been played as flat.

In Archer’s film, his character is a young up-and-coming actor with whom Barkin becomes obsessed; he plays both that “real person” and the fantasy version that exists only in Barkin’s character’s imagination. It’s the psychology of the human condition that fascinates Grimes. “Do you ever feel like there are so many versions of yourself that you don’t know which to pick? Acting is a way to be all of them,” he explains. “Not that I’m sitting around all day having existential conversations. But it’s the job: investigating people, seeing why they are the way they are, why they make the decisions they make.”

Throwing himself into a character may be one of Grimes’s great strengths, but it’s the inevitable cause of some heavy letdowns. One of his very first auditions was for a 2005 CBS Elvis miniseries, and he spent two weeks literally becoming Presley. He was absolutely sure he had the King nailed. He got the callback to sing for the writers, directors, and producers, but a few minutes in, flubbed it: “My guitar slipped and fell on the ground. I could feel my cheeks burning. And then I got the, Thank you very much.” After a weeks-long buildup, everything was over in a few moments. Jonathan Rhys Meyers
ended up getting the part.

“I cried all the way home. I actually called both my agent and manager sobbing—not something I’ve done again. I’ve actually never talked to them about it,” he says. Of course the wound has mostly healed, and Grimes has gained valuable perspective. “That was one of my very first auditions. The role was always gonna go to Jonathan Rhys Meyers,” he says. “But I will tell you this now. I am going to make an Elvis movie one day. I will blow Kurt Russell and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and whoever else, out of the water. I will be the best Elvis ever.”