With opioid drama Painkiller, actor Taylor Kitsch is where he wants to be

NEW YORK – There are easier ways.

If you are 1.8m tall, with an athlete’s build, burnished skin and a heedless, sad-eyed charisma that makes audiences lean in so far that they fall over, Hollywood offers smoother paths. If you look, just a little, like a god who overslept, then you do not have to lose weight or gain weight or have panic attacks. And if you have spent years helping a close family member survive an opioid addiction, you do not have to take a role that asks you to portray a similar addiction, to immerse yourself in that pain, terror and need.

But Taylor Kitsch does.

In Painkiller, a six-episode series streaming on Netflix, the Canadian actor plays Glen Kryger, owner of a North Carolina motor repair shop. After he is prescribed OxyContin for a workplace injury, he descends into addiction. Slowly, at first, then in free fall.

Kitsch wanted the role. It reunited him with his frequent collaborator, American producer and director Peter Berg. It felt meaningful. And Glen is the kind of part that has defined the latter half of Kitsch’s career – characters who look at first like leading men, but slip from that groove because they are too wounded, too vulnerable, too compromised. Still, he could not read through even the first script without breaking down.

“I’m like, ‘Wait, there’s so much still that’s very raw,’” he recalled thinking. “Then I was like, OK.”

Kitsch, 42, was speaking on a morning in late June, on the patio of a house in the mountains above Santa Fe, New Mexico. He had been here for months, shooting another Netflix show with Berg, American Primeval, a series set on the American frontier in the 1850s, due out in 2024.

Kitsch grew up in British Columbia, mostly with his mother and older brothers. Later, two half-sisters were born. Injuries ended a hockey career before it really began, and after a brief and mostly unsuccessful stint as a model, he began auditioning for film roles. In school, he had always liked acting, liked the attention it brought.

He had done some background work as a teenager. He had no formal training, but his looks were enough to land him a few small roles.

Then he auditioned for Friday Night Lights (2006 to 2011), the NBC series set in the world of Texas high school football that was developed by Berg. Other young men had been shortlisted to play Tim Riggins, the team’s troubled fullback. But in a Hail Mary, Kitsch’s manager drove him onto the NBC lot and he was cast by Berg.

As the show wrapped its fifth and final season in 2011, Kitsch in 2012 lined up back-to-back-to-back roles in two blockbusters (John Carter and Battleship) and a sexy thriller (Savages), a slate that announced his status as Hollywood’s next leading man. The films all underperformed. He chose smaller films after that and returned briefly to television, starring in the second season of the moody HBO procedural True Detective (2014 to present).

Hollywood did not seem to know what to do with him at the time, and Kitsch, who moved first to Texas and then to Montana, did not know what to do with Hollywood either. He kept sliding out from under leading man parts. As a kid, he had wanted attention. Now in his 30s, he found that he wanted to disappear.

“Whatever it is that motivates other people – fame, money, celebrity, more followers – it was never like that. I just wanted to be a character actor that buzzed into certain things and, hopefully, made you evoke something.”

In these years, he also found himself caring for one of his younger sisters, Shelby Kitsch-Best, who was struggling with addiction to opioids and other drugs. He took time off, coaxing her into detox and sober living facilities, taking her to the hospital when she relapsed.

For his next major project, he signed on to play cult leader David Koresh in Waco, a 2018 Paramount limited series. He lost weight, learnt guitar, took voice lessons, practised one of Koresh’s sermons “a thousand-plus” times, he said. Though he had his first panic attack a month before filming, the preparation worked: Kitsch is unrecognisable in the role.

Now, there is Painkiller – based on the Barry Meier book Pain Killer: An Empire Of Deceit And The Origin Of America’s Opioid Epidemic and the Patrick Radden Keefe article, “The family that built an empire of pain”, in The New Yorker. It is the second prestige series, after Dopesick (2021), to limn the opioid epidemic. This project demanded a particular kind of preparation, much of it emotional.

Kitsch, who gained 11kg for the role, forgoes vanity in scenes in which his character Glen spills urine on himself or struggles to lift a tyre or overdoses in a pancake house. Kitsch understood Glen, up to a point. He knows what it is to be in pain – emotional, physical – and to want that pain to go away.

But he asked his sister to help him with the particulars, like how someone might look and feel if he were using or in withdrawal.

These days, he enjoys his time outside work, which was not always a given. Between shoots, he hikes, he fly-fishes, and he tracks and photographs the wolves that live near his home.

“I’ve started to live a little more,” he said. He also bought 9ha of land in Montana that he plans to make available as a sober retreat, with simple A-frame houses, maybe a sweat lodge.

He works less than he used to. After taking time off to help his sister, he never returned at quite the same pace.

“I pride myself on being picky, because it is so much energy and sacrifice. If I can’t be all-in and really be in service of something and be scared and uncomfortable, then I don’t want to do that.” NYTIMES

Painkiller is available on Netflix.