James Frecheville
James Frecheville is an actor, born 1991.
James Frecheville arrived fully formed. Animal Kingdom in 2010 was his film debut and it handed him Joshua "J" Cody, a teenager absorbed into a Melbourne crime family, a part that consists mostly of watching while everybody around him performs. He played it as near blankness, a risky choice for a lead and precisely why the film works: the audience has to read him, and reading him is the tension.
The career since has been an odd shape. He went to American independent films, playing Matthew Townshend in The Stanford Prison Experiment and Fitz in The Drop, then to Irish and Australian work that suited him better. Black '47 gave him Feeney in a revenge story set during the Famine, and it is the closest he has come to a second defining role. The Royal Hotel put him behind an Outback bar as Teeth, and The Dry sent him back to rural Australia again.
Television has used him for restraint, as Nick Dean in Requiem and Major Bill Veal in Masters of the Air. He remains an actor who is better in small films than in large ones, and the large ones keep calling anyway, with The Running Man and How to Make a Killing among his recent credits. The through line is a refusal to explain the character to the audience, which makes him frustrating in weak material and quietly gripping in strong material.
Movies (13)
TV (2)
Where to start with James Frecheville
There is no sensible alternative to Animal Kingdom as an opening move. It is the best film he has been in, the performance that explains every casting decision since, and a crime story that stays domestic and cold rather than operatic.
Black '47 is the second stop, a revenge picture built on a landscape and a grievance, with Frecheville doing most of it with his shoulders. The Royal Hotel is the most uncomfortable of his recent films and the most controlled. The Drop and The Stanford Prison Experiment are the American detour, both worth seeing, neither really his. On television, Masters of the Air is the handsome version and Requiem the strange one, a supernatural mystery that commits harder than most. The Dry rounds it out if you like Australian crime with dust in it.