Just 35 years old, Caleb Landry Jones counts in his filmography collaborations with directors like Jordan Peele, Jim Jarmusch, Sean Baker and Luc Besson. With the latter he has recently collaborated for Dracula – L’Amore Perduto, as part of the famous vampire, after being already the protagonist of Dogman of the same French director. This could be the principle of an important director/actor partnership that might be better talked about in the future. But now, in 2025, Caleb Landry Jones received a discreet success, due to his talent and the characters he staged, often romantic and fragile males, sometimes pathetic, sometimes dangerous, sometimes iraconic.
Texano, raised in Richardson in Dallas County, but his appearance is more reminiscent of a delicate Scandinavian boy. The first film he ever participated in, with only one scene, is Not a Country for Old Coen Brothers, when he was only 16 years old. The choice to pursue a career as an actor came only a few years later, when after earning $5,000 cash from the film The Last Exorcism, he decided to move to Los Angeles to try to become a pro. In just a few months he managed to obtain a part in X-Men the Beginning, then reaching the great distribution.
After two years in fact, in 2012, he got his first lead role with Antiviral. Directed by Brandon Cronenberg, David’s son, is a mix of dystopia and horror, where people obsessed with celebrities inject the same diseases as their idols. Jones is the protagonist Syd March, also self-infected, but he begins to investigate the reasons hidden by the continuous deaths of famous characters. From here onwards, he has bazzicato numerous sets of independent films, with parts both small and more important, including Tom à la ferme by Xavier Dolan and Heaven Knows What of the Safdie brothers, up to Scappa – Get Out by Jordan Peele where he plays Rose Armitage’s brother, Jeremy.
Since 2017, it has been the year of the debut film of Peele, that Jones’ career has received a surge of notoriety. In the same year he is alongside Tom Cruise and Jesse Plemons in Barry Seal, the story of the DEA informant former drug smuggler. Also in 2017 he was Red Welby in Tre Manifesti in Ebbing, Missouri by Martin McDonagh, a film winner of numerous awards worldwide, premiered at the 71st Venice Festival. He also played Willem Dafoe’s son in a Dream called Sean Baker’s Florida. Despite these minor roles, the caring of the films to which he participated has made him even more known to the workers.
After participating in the return of Twin Peaks as Bobby Briggs’ son, returning to the small screen years after the two quick appearances in Breaking Bad, Jim Jarmusch wanted to insert him into the nourished cast of the dead did not die, between Tom Waits, Iggy Pop, Tilda Swinton, Bill Murray and others. It was on that set that Caleb Landry Jones’ musical career really started. Thanks to Jarmusch’s advice, the actor managed to enter the thanks of the Sacred Bones label, with which he published three albums. Many years earlier he collaborated with a friend of his, Robert Hudson, with whom he created the Robert Jones group, but who never managed to go beyond the borders of the city of Dallas.
The consecration of Jones’ ascending acting talent arrived in 2021. With the direction of Justin Kurzel, the independent Australian film Nitram tells, without ever mentioning it explicitly, the life of Martin Bryant, author of the massacre of Port Arthur. Jones interprets with great conviction and transport the boy who in April 1996 decided to open fire, killing 35 people. Nitram tells the life of the killer boy and does not show the massacre. Despite this, the Australian government has not given any state funding to production. However, all this has earned the actor the Prix d’interprétation masculine at the 74° Cannes Film Festival, an edition held in July through Covid. In an interview with NME, Jones returned to acknowledge his talent with Nitram: “Perhaps being recognized in that way gives some kind of credibility. And I mean, I haven’t been the protagonist many times.”.
Two years later he returned to the leading cinema, as the paraplegic disguised as the protagonist of Dogman by Luc Besson. They were Jones and Besson together to design the character of the protagonist Doug, working on it for a year, tied by their cynophilia. The actor’s commitment and dedication to this role, told in various interviews, also went on the paraplegic condition of his character, with Jones who lived months in wheelchairs to appear as credible as possible. These attitudes represent the passion but also the excellent feeling with the role to play, which are never ignored by directors of thickness like Besson.
It is no coincidence that the protagonist is Caleb Landry Jones in the new French film. As it turns out in Besson’s interview with Deadline, the director had no other actors in mind for his Dracula. And Jones therefore gladly accepts, triggering just that kind of functional couple collaboration that led to the cinematic success couples like Fellini-Mastroianni, Scorsese-De Niro and many more. The basics for which this couple continues to collaborate are here, but nothing is ever taken, especially in this environment.
L’articolo Caleb Landry Jones, the rapid rise of the new Dracula proviene da SentieriSelvaggi.
