Ezra Miller Male Revelation of the Year

Ezra Miller may not be a household name and if the 19 year old actor has his way he will never be. Paper magazine takes a look at "an actor, and also a singer, and also, in his own estimation, an artist (in the way, he hastens to add, that everyone is an artist)".

Ezra Miller played Lincoln Center before he was a decade old and the Metropolitan Opera House not long after.

He made his name in a string of eye-catching little independent films (Afterschool; City Island), and arrived incontrovertibly with a frightening, dead-eyed performance as a budding psychopath in last year's We Need to Talk About Kevin.

In September comes The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky's adaptation of his own best-selling young-adult novel. With its cracked sweetness and plainspoken honesty-- characteristics relatively rare in teenage popcorn flick -- Perks feels like an inheritor of the John Hughes canon. Logan Lerman plays the central character, Emma Watson the romantic lead, and a supergroup of Hollywood talent (Paul Rudd, Joan Cusack, Dylan McDermott, et al.) rounds out the supporting cast. But it's Miller, with his twitchy, galvanic performance as the irrepressible Patrick, who looks (as it might be written in a high school yearbook) most likely to walk away the breakout star..

It has already been a good few years for Miller, originally of New Jersey ("the dirty borough," he says), currently stationed in a postwar apartment building on a side street in Chelsea. The upshot of his remarkable performance in We Need to Talk About Kevin was that suddenly Hollywood needed to talk about him. His Kevin costar Tilda Swinton loves him. So do critics. At the Cannes Film Festival, where he went with Kevin, he walked off with the Chopard Trophy, for the Male Revelation of the Year.

Revelation has been something of a Miller specialty. Though he says that "outside of art, I don't really want to have anything to say to the mass public," he has been steadily expressing himself to reporters -- not always necessarily to his own credit -- since his star began to rise. So when he brings out that, "I just started, as of a month ago, to my own extreme displeasure, being my own publicist," it can inspire the same wry wariness as when an alleged criminal elects, lawyer-free, to mount his own defense.

Scoot on over to papermag.com for more on the intriguing Ezra Miller.

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