Florida — Austin Abrams Has Had an Autumn From Hell. It’s Made Him a Star
Austin Abrams traveled to Dominica before filming Whalefall to observe a sperm whale in its natural environment. From a boat floating in the turquoise waters off Nature’s Isle, he watched groups of the large, gray marine mammals pass nearby.
“ This probably sounds silly, but making a whole movie about these kinds of whales, it felt just strange not to have an interaction with one,” Abrams says. “It makes you realize they’re not animals. They have the same essence of a person, basically. It feels like you’re meeting individual beings that are on another level. They just have a really lovely energy to them. Something I kept hearing was, ‘Have good energy, because they can pick up on it.’”
According to Abrams, maintaining positive energy is essential to attracting the animals.
That experience appears to have been a fitting prelude to the actor’s own rise in popularity. The 30-year-old Sarasota, Florida, native has worked in front of the camera since childhood, making his film debut in 2011. Yet 2026 has marked a significant turning point in his career.
Abrams has attracted a substantial following for playing ordinary men struggling to navigate extraordinary circumstances, most recently in last month’s horror hit Resident Evil and Whalefall, now in theaters. The latter is a thriller adapted from Daniel Kraus’ 2023 novel about a grieving scuba diver who is swallowed by a whale.
His growing fame has made Abrams an unexpected star, although his relatively low profile — and apparent reluctance to reveal much about himself — may be part of what makes him so appealing.
Abrams commits so thoroughly to his unassuming, everyday persona that it can seem almost deliberate. When asked personal questions, he often responds with bashful disbelief, as though he cannot understand why anyone would be interested in his life.
Mention an old article claiming he demanded an agent when he was eight, and he groans. Asked how he spends his free time, he gave The New York Times a similarly understated answer: “I’m staring at walls, mostly. I don’t know, man.”
His musical preferences are equally difficult to pin down. Abrams recalls listening to jazz earlier in the day, although it is unclear whether he chose it himself or whether Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” happened to be playing nearby.
When confronted with an interview clip in which Charlie Heaton claims Abrams once spent 15 minutes going beast mode in a backyard cold plunge, the actor bursts out laughing.
“What the hell? Why is he saying something like that? I don’t think 15 minutes is accurate, to be honest.”
What Abrams does reveal, however, suggests a longstanding commitment to his craft.
The son of doctors, he began acting in community theater before moving into supporting film roles. He played the awkward best friend in John Green’s 2015 coming-of-age movie Paper Towns and an ill-fated bully in Guillermo del Toro’s 2019 adaptation of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.
“Movies were always something I was really fascinated with from a super young age,” Abrams says. “People will tell me stories about them walking in and me watching some movie when I was way too young. It was like being transfixed.”
He describes himself as a shy child, adding that he “probably still am a bit.” Theater, he explains, offered him an outlet he needed.
“I just remember feeling free” onstage, he says.
His ambitions grew after he discovered the work of Heath Ledger and Daniel Day-Lewis. Their performances helped him recognize that acting could become more than a casual creative pursuit.
That was “when I started to wake up to the real possibility of it. What could be done,” Abrams says.
Ledger remains a particularly important influence. His understated performance in Brokeback Mountain served as a reference point for Whalefall, both for Abrams and director Brian Duffield, who included the film on a Letterboxd list of inspirations for the project.
“You go back and look at the rest of his work [before The Dark Knight], and it’s all so experimental and that is super exciting,” Abrams says. “He’s constantly taking swings and just trying things that you’re literally seeing on camera work and not work. Seeing him do all these different kinds of characters was really inspiring.”
In Whalefall, Abrams plays Jay Gardiner, a young man struggling with his difficult relationship with his father, Mitt, played by Josh Brolin. Mitt is passionate about diving, while Jay has little enthusiasm for the ocean.
After Mitt drowns himself while suffering from a terminal illness, Jay ventures underwater to recover his father’s remains. His search takes an unexpected turn when he ends up inside a sperm whale, where he must fight to survive. As he struggles to escape, memories of his childhood and his troubled relationship with his father resurface.
Much of the film unfolds with Abrams as the only person on screen. He moves between scenes featuring a resentful teenage Jay and those depicting the grief-stricken, exhausted adult version of the character.
“Jay so badly wants his father’s approval, but also it’s almost as if he seems incapable of doing what he needs to do to achieve that,” Abrams says. He explains that this conflict leaves Jay feeling inadequate.
Duffield says Abrams impressed him immediately during the audition process.
“Austin came in and auditioned and was just extraordinary out of the gate, really heartbreaking and emotional,” the director says. “He has an amazing ability to make everything feel specifically and uniquely tailored to him; he’s not just like a casting headshot. He takes it upon himself to kind of get to know the ins and outs of the characters that he’s playing.”
According to Duffield, Abrams also became an expert scuba diver while preparing for the film. He developed a close relationship with Patrick Dykstra, a whale expert whom he regularly contacted whenever he had questions about the animal at the center of the story.
The film’s underwater sequences required Abrams to spend considerable time inside elaborate practical sets representing the whale’s mouth and stomachs. Encased in a structure resembling a sack, he spent 40 days filming inside the constructed whale.
His character battles a giant squid that has also been swallowed, struggles against gravity as the whale dives deeper and desperately searches for a way out.
Dialogue is sparse during these sequences, leaving Abrams to communicate much of Jay’s fear through facial expressions and physical performance.
One scene finds Jay forming a bond with a stray jellyfish, recalling Tom Hanks’ relationship with his volleyball companion, Wilson, in Castaway.
“When you’re spending so much time alone, there is so much comfort in just finding a friend,” Abrams says, “whether that friend is a living thing or not. At that time, with everything that’s going on, it just feels it feels like Jay needed a friend.”
But when asked what he was thinking while spending those hours inside the whale set, Abrams declines to elaborate.
“You talk about those things, and, then, ultimately, it’s so much less interesting,” he says. “Also, it can be quite personal. There’s certain things that you don’t even tell anybody — even friends.”
His guarded approach may also help explain how Abrams has maintained a degree of mystery despite his sudden rise to prominence.
In recent years, he has moved comfortably between a shy romantic in Euphoria, a clever and popular teenager in Netflix’s 2022 film Do Revenge and a drug-addicted character whose comedic timing stood out in Zach Cregger’s Weapons.
Cregger’s follow-up, Resident Evil, gave Abrams a different kind of opportunity. Cast as Bryan Hodukavich, a seemingly clumsy but unexpectedly resourceful hero, he found himself propelled into leading-man territory.
Bryan is a medical courier charged with transporting a cure for the zombie plague spreading through his city. Audiences have responded to his awkward handling of oversized guns, his grief over losing his beloved Jordans to toxic ooze and his excessive politeness toward bloodthirsty monsters.
“It’s great to be in the theater and hear someone in the audience say something that my character says one second later,” Abrams says. Often, the audience reaction amounts to something like, “Oh, shit!”
In Whalefall, Abrams brings a similar sense of vulnerability to Jay, whose physical struggles are accompanied by deeper emotional conflicts. Together, the two films have presented audiences with familiar, relatable characters placed in increasingly extreme situations, helping viewers connect with the actor portraying them.
That connection is visible in the popularity of Bryan’s sheep hat from Resident Evil, which has become one of the season’s most sought-after Halloween costumes.
When told about the trend, Abrams responds with characteristic understatement.
“That’s cool. That’s sick,” he says. “What that means is that people hopefully connected with what you did, and that’s the most that you can ask for in doing this.”
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