A KNIFE IN THE DARK

Jacket **Diesel**, shorts **The Sacred & the Profane Vintage,** jewellery Graham’s own, necklace **Zadig&Voltaire**

Graham Campbell on Ryan Murphy’s intoxicating thriller of psycho killers and Armani deep cuts.

In the cool, pared-back prose of Bret Easton Ellis’ psycho killer novel The Shards, Buckley Prep quarterback Thom Wright is a usual suspect for Ellis’ satire. Ellis’ characteristically deadpan take on the archetype describes Thom as having “an intriguing blankness”. Only an actor alive to people’s true depths can make an art of such a disposition; this is what newcomer GRAHAM CAMPBELL achieves with his stoic, deeply felt turn in Ryan Murphy’s sun-drenched, drug-fuelled adaptation for FX.

T-shirt **Jkeefer**, shorts **Umbro**, jewellery Graham’s own

“I’ve never been interested in an archetype. I’ve never been one, and I’ve never known one,” says Campbell. Much like The Shards’ own path to screen, Campbell’s story has followed the woozy, fated logic of a dream. A born performer, the Juilliard actor dropped out of college with no plan other than to “get some tuition back in my pocket”. In a Hollywood-worthy twist, he crested into Broadway fame opposite Sarah Paulson and Elle Fanning in the Tony-winning Appropriate. “That play came to me at a really important time in my life. I had just dropped out of college. It looks now like I dropped out to do the play. But it was actually much more irresponsible than that,” Campbell admits, chuckling. “I dropped out to wander the streets, and I got the audition about two weeks later. So, in a lot of ways, Appropriate felt like a continuation of my education; it served as a bridge from the academic world of the theatre to the real day-to-day of the industry.”

Left Sweater and headband **Dagger**, underwear **Dsquared2**, socks stylist’s own, jewellery Graham’s own
Right Headband **Dagger**, underwear **Dsquared2**, socks stylist’s own, jewellery Graham’s own

Right Headband **Dagger**, underwear **Dsquared2**, socks stylist’s own, jewellery Graham’s own

The roiling depths and extraordinary sensory details Campbell confers to his parts have been plain to see. “Intense”, an epithet all too liberally applied to young male actors, is accurate for Campbell, who makes Wright the least boring jock on television. With soulful eyes and a dome of blonde curls straight from a Caravaggio portrait, Campbell’s arc as Thom is dark and deeply satisfying. His broad shoulders seem to shudder with those first shivers of a young man shaking off his first intimations of mortality. “There was a little passage in the book that said, ‘Thom has pain, Thom knows pain.’ I took those two things as my launch point. Then the rest of it was a bit of weed-whacking, trying to discover who this person was, and how somebody would react to their given circumstances that are getting more and more tumultuous. It gave me the greatest creative collaboration of my life to this point. Together, [Ryan and I] moulded something that takes that archetype and flips it on its head.”