Will Poulter on challenging stereotypes in new opioid drama: ‘Shame on us for stigmatizing people’

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Every week, Annette Deao, a drug dependency counselor, sits in the county jail and offers incarcerated people in rural Ohio a chance at recovery. One bright day she meets Cody, a young man who shuffles towards the lectern and quietly says that he’s ready to give it a shot. “His self-respect is in the basement,” said Will Poulter, the British actor who plays the character. “He doesn’t like or accept himself enough to embark on helping himself.”

Directed by Adam Meeks, an Ohio native, Union County is a bruising yet poetic depiction of a real life drug recovery court in Bellefontaine, Ohio, where individuals join long-term treatment programs with daily sobriety testing. Though the film is led by Poulter and Noah Centineo as foster brothers taking steps to get clean, much of the supporting cast is made up of first-time actors who share their real – and often painful and non-linear – stories of recovery. The hybrid of narrative feature and documentary-esque elements combine in a deeply affecting watch that is anchored by Poulter’s natural-feeling approach to the role.

“It was clear to me from the outset that Adam wasn’t interested in making a film about a community as he was in making it in with a community,” Poulter said, speaking via Zoom a few days before Union County’s US release. “Top of mind was not interfering with the recovery process and not infringing on the path that the participants were walking. I think that’s the reason they were so generous.”

Far too often, Hollywood gets its stories of addiction wrong, with surface-level treatment in misfires such as Beautiful Boy, Ben Is Back and Hillbilly Elegy. After seeing Meeks’s contemplative 2020 short film of the same name, which also collaborated with Bellefontaine locals, Poulter felt sure that Union County would do justice to the subject. “In the representation of addiction on screen there is a tendency to focus on devastation and the negative side of things,” Poulter said. “What I appreciated about Adam’s approach was that it was more weighted on the success of the program. It has an over 50% success rate which is phenomenal – incomparable in some ways – so it was really about platforming that above all else.”

Since breaking out as a child star in 2007 in British comedy Son of Rambow, Poulter has traded teenage parts in centrist Hollywood fare such as We’re The Millers and The Maze Runner for subtle, sturdy work in auteur-driven projects such as Ari Aster’s Midsommar, Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit and Alejandro G Iñárritu’s The Revenant as well as receiving Emmy nominations for turns in TV shows Dopesick and The Bear. Poulter is undoubtedly dedicated to his work – in a trait which has seen him undergoing rigorous chef training for The Bear and an intense workout regimen for Marvel’s Guardians of The Galaxy Vol 3 – but also has a taste for the unexpected. In the past year, he has canoodled with a Haim sister in the band’s All Over Me video, played a stuck-up boutique manager in I Love Boosters and guest judged on RuPaul’s Drag Race vs The World.

Union County is the best showcase to date of Poulter’s ability to inhabit a character’s skin. At the start of the film Cody is broken down, near mute and blinking heavily as if he’s still trying to comprehend how he ended up here. You can imagine another actor over-doing it, but there’s an unshowy confidence to Poulter’s performance that captures the the young man’s quiet pride: he may live out of his car, but spends evenings hand washing his clothes and drying them on a line rigged between trees.

With Meeks’s precise instinct for detail, Union County is grounded enough to make its flickers of hope feel earned. Most memorable of the first-time actors is Daeo, whose kind but firm counsellor becomes a parental figure to Cody as he gets back on track. “When Annette says ‘I’m really proud of you,’ it’s the first time he’s ever heard that in his life,” said Poulter.

“There are plenty of people in their mid-20s who have never had that kind of affirmation or support,” he went on. “And yet we hold them to the same standard as people who have been told they are loved on a regular basis. That’s shame on us for stigmatizing people in that position.”

Filming the movie sounds almost unbearably heavy. “It was emotional,” the actor said. “I don’t know how Annette does the work on a daily basis. As an actor I was simulating these experiences and I went home every night, whereas the real participants are in an 18-month program and the work and recovery is never done. So however it was for me, it pales in comparison to what it was like for the real participants.”

Despite promises by Robert F Kennedy Jr, the health secretary, a recent report found that the Trump administration has cut more than $1bn in federal funding to mental health and addiction programs. “Those kinds of rollbacks are devastating to me because I can’t detach myself from the idea that that is informed by a lot of harmful stigma and misinformation,” Poulter said. “The stigmatization of addicts is such that we don’t afford the compassion that we would to anyone dealing with a mental health issue to someone who has substance use disorder.

“When people think about an addict using heroin, they don’t think about the teenager who was prescribed Oxycontin for an injury at the age of 14,” he continued. “They don’t think about the possibility they might have been in a relationship characterized by domestic violence. They don’t think about the eviction that forced somebody onto the street.”

Poulter has often spoken up about political causes and publicly supports Palestine as well as migrant and LGBTQ+ rights. Does he think that the current US administration has twisted priorities? “This isn’t me trying to sort of dodge a political question, but I am not educated enough on the latest here in America to answer that,” he said. “But I do know that there is so much misunderstanding, and I’d like to think that our film will hopefully move people to think differently about substance use disorder.”

The actor said he aims to “maintain a balance” between mainstream films and artier fare. A few days before we talked, reports circulated that he was set to star in Rapture, a medieval body-horror from director Jordan Tannahill about the “deep, passionate relationship” that develops between monks played by Poulter and Heartstopper’s Kit Connor. I am devastated to learn that the project is on pause. “I got whispers of the same thing, but I’m not working on that at the moment,” he said. “I really hope I can work with Jordan in the future; he’s so talented.” His upcoming TV roles sound no less intriguing: the Netflix hostage drama Rabbit, Rabbit alongside Adam Driver and Regina Hall, and the Apple TV dramedy Beat The Reaper.

There’s one role that Poulter doesn’t mention: his rumored return to the Marvel cinematic universe. With December’s Avengers: Doomsday promising to be a fresh start to the franchise, will we be seeing more of his Adam Warlock character soon? “Do you know what? I have no idea,” he said. “As you probably know, even if I did know I couldn’t tell you. I genuinely have no information on that, but obviously I’d be honored to come back.”

His blockbuster future may be under embargo, but Poulter is unequivocal about the kind of movies that are closest to his heart. “I love independent film more than anything,” he said. Earlier this month, he embarked on a road trip with Meeks and Deao to screen Union County at small movie theaters in Ohio. “Going to local independent cinemas in towns like Akron and Dayton, I’m reminded of just how sacred those spaces are,” he said. “I want to maintain a relationship to independent film as long as independent film is happy to have me.”