He may have a showreel that stretches back to 1991 and a short film entitled Last Breeze of Summer, but Jayson Warner Smith’s career really hit a high in 2013.
Thanks to a recurring role in Rectify, Smith was able to etch his name into the TV audience’s brains and continue this momentum onto the silver screen.
Today, with his stock seemingly at an all-time high and his time in Rectify at an end, the natural question to ask is what is the next logical step for JWS? We already know he’s appeared in Mississippi Grind in 2015, but where else can we expect to see the man from Atlanta in the coming months?
Of course, to know where someone is going it’s often handy to look at where they’ve been and in the case of Smith, he’s been to a lot of places. Since nudging his way onto IMDB in 1991, Smith has racked up more than 25 credits playing anything from a doctor in Coma to a knife-wielding psychopath in Anchorman 2.
The Birth of a Sociopath
However, it was Rectify where he made his biggest impact on viewers as the incarcerated sociopath, Wendall Jelks. Despite landing the role as Jelks, Smith was actually slated to read for the role of Sheriff. However, a call to his manager and a homemade audition tape eventually earned him the part of stone cold nutcase, Jelks.
Unfortunately, like all good characters, Jelks didn’t stick around for long; however, the legacy left over from that role seems to have cast Smith in a new light. Although he’s still very much on the versatile side of the acting scale, his ability to portray leftfield characters has made him the perfect person to play parts with an edge to them.
Having the ability to slip in an out of personas, switching from personable to intimidating in a heartbeat isn’t easy, but Smith showed he was capable of that in Rectify and was soon at it again in The Vampire Diaries. Playing the part of Dean, a garage owner, Smith is at once a customer-facing car engineer and a bully. Often scamming his employees out of their wages, Smith (or Dean) uses his tall frame to belittle them into submission. Unfortunately, his reign of terror was cut short by Ivy who left him to bleed to death.
Creating Characters with a New Edge
Like all good actors, Smith is smart enough to keep his options open and to stop himself being typecast he recently appeared in Mississippi Grind. Playing the role of Clifford alongside the movie’s stars Ryan Reynolds (Curtis) and Ben Mendelsohn (Gerry), Smith is a relatively normal citizen.
Running into Gerry and Curtis as they journey across the South in search of gambling riches, Clifford not only offers some salient betting advice for the pair but adds to the rich tapestry of contrasting personalities in the film. Released in January 2015, the movie’s main motif may be gambling and feature numerous scenes of Curtis and Gerry playing poker (the former having to explain the how Texas Hold’em works to the latter), the story is one of personal evolution. In fact, according to Variety it’s a “bittersweet, beautifully textured road movie“ and Smith (Clifford) is an integral cog in that revolving wheel.
So Where Next for Smith?
Smith’s journey over the last few years has seen him turn from vanilla story lines to edgy plots involving violence, death and drugs. This journey has led Smith to his latest starring role in the independent film, Heavy Water. Described a dramatic horror, the film also features Carter Jenkins as River, a young man who returns home after five years in prison and faced with a choice: a broken family or a strange drug.
Smith plays the role of Mickey in the film, a man caught up in an odd world of secrecy, drug addiction, but ultimately, escapism. As River describes it, the water on the secret island where his father would swim as a child was different. Noting mattered on the island; the island was a place to escape. The illusions to drugs in this story characterise the film and dominate the lives of the characters on the screen.
For Smith, the role is another chance to explore the darker sides of life. Drawing on his previous experience as a sociopath, a bully and a killer, Smith delivers another convincing performance as someone able to traverse the line between the sanctity of normality and harsh reality. Although Jayson Warner Smith is set to feature in the upcoming movie, The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, there’s no doubt his reputation for playing dark characters has increased dramatically.
In fact, it’s a shame Smith wasn’t cast in the new James Bond movie, SPECTRE. Not only would his menacing persona sit as the perfect antithesis to Bond, but the director could have had some fun with Smith’s background as an Eagle Scout.
Unfortunately, that ship has sailed, but there’s no reason we couldn’t see Smith showing his evil side in something like Terminator: Genisys 2 (2017 release) or Black Panther (2018 release) in the near future.