Austin Abrams, the 30-year-old actor from Sarasota, Florida, has been acting since he was five. Despite starring in two back-to-back blockbusters and being touted by half the internet as the next Timothée Chalamet, he would rather talk about anything else — swimming, the geography of England, London traffic.
From teen roles to blockbuster survival thrillers
Abrams has been stealing scenes for over a decade. He made a name for himself as troubled teen Ron Anderson in The Walking Dead (2014), rambunctious teen Ben in Paper Towns (2015), the oddly astute teen son of Ben Stiller in Brad's Status (2017), and the gentle teen love interest of Barbie Ferreira in Euphoria (2019). Nearly a decade later, he is finally graduating high school — but adult Abrams is fighting for his life.
Earlier this summer, he played the central character in Zach Cregger's Resident Evil reboot — Bryan, a medical courier who would rather be chilling with his girlfriend than practising self-defence in a zombie apocalypse.
The whale stomach ordeal
Now he is back on the survival thriller train with Whalefall, where he plays reluctant scuba diver Jay, who would rather not be inside the belly of an 80-foot sperm whale. The role required weeks of filming inside a to-scale whale stomach, pushed from the outside by the crew to mimic gestation.
“I'd get back in my bed after shooting and close my eyes, and I would see the walls [of the stomach],” he says. He is put through an almost laughable amount of pain in the film — bitten by a squid's beak, burned by stomach acid, and having his eardrums perforated by pressure.
According to Cregger, Abrams never complains. Instead, he revelled in the discomfort. “It ends up kind of having a toll on you, wearing on you, but you welcome that,” he says, “because it's all just helpful.”
Looking ahead with Brad Pitt's advice
Abrams is looking for something a little more “seated” for his next role. He has had any number of talented co-stars — Ryan Gosling, Josh Brolin, George Clooney — but when choosing roles, it is the words of Brad Pitt, with whom he worked on 2024's Wolfs, that ring truest.
“He said: ‘You have to do the things that affect you and that you're drawn to because that's the best chance that you have that it's gonna affect other people,’” he recalls. It is a good north star to follow, and with the way Abrams is going, Pitt or Chalamet-sized stardom could certainly be on the way — if only he didn't have to talk about himself in the process. Whalefall is in cinemas now.
