How Wasteman Plumbs The Depths Of The Prison Thriller
David Jonsson and Tom Blyth break down the beating heart of Wasteman.
In Wasteman, Cal McMau’s feature debut, the beligerent Dee (Tom Blyth) moves like a feral child against his obstacles. A recent transfer to a prison too crowded to care, Dee goes to any length to prove that he belongs at the top of the proverbial food chain. When a bloody brawl with another inmate triggers a lockdown and brings a small army of guards down on him, he goes ballistic, smashing his own bloody face against their plexi shields. It’s something of a departure for Blyth, who tells Inverse that he prefers “keeping the lid on the kettle” — and has spent the past few years proving as much in quiet, slow-simmering dramas. Unlike the buttoned-up Coriolanus Snow, or his take on Billy the Kid, Dee is a caged beast in every sense of the word.
“Literally, I based the character on this documentary I saw of these cannibal chimpanzees that eat each other,” Blyth tells Inverse. McMau balked at that dramaturgical choice at first, but “it was so fun to play this guy who was just bouncing off the walls. It was a different muscle that I got to use.”
The term “fun” might not pair well against subject matter this brutal, but Blyth’s zeal is infectious. There is something compelling, almost diverting, about Wasteman — a sense of play that shines through despite its grounded take on the prison industrial complex. It helps that McMau pairs Dee with a protagonist that carries the weight of this world on his shoulders: Taylor (David Jonsson).
“Taylor, bless him, he’s actually quite tormented,” Jonsson tells Inverse. Thirteen years ago, Taylor was peddling pills to put food on the table for his newborn son — but when two teens overdosed on a bad batch, he was charged with manslaughter and has been serving time ever since. “He made a mistake that now means that his young child is having to pay for that mistake as well. There’s so much sacrifice that is going through his head.”
The unspoken question of whether it’s too late for redemption looms large over Taylor as he goes about his day-to-day, passing time as a cook (and, occasionally, a barber), nursing his narcotics addiction with what he can get on the inside. When he’s offered parole seemingly out of the blue, he finally sees an end to the cycle of apathy. Then, as if on cue, his final test appears: Dee, his new cellmate for the final weeks of his sentence.
Dee wastes little time dragging Taylor into the trouble he’s spent the past decade largely avoiding. McMau, meanwhile, dials up the claustrophobia and grit, pressing this odd couple deeper into an abyss that’s already swallowed so many before them. The trio took the responsibility of depicting those horrors seriously: characters like Taylor and Dee don’t necessarily have a voice in real life, and Jonsson and Blyth go above and beyond to be not just their voice, but to bare their souls. Wasteman is more than just good drama, meaty as the material may be for its duo. Taylor and Dee react to the stripping of their autonomy in two very disparate ways — one with feral bravado, the other with tortured introspection. Wasteman may posit Taylor as an unstoppable, corrupting force, but it also takes care not to vilify him outright, focusing its ire on the system that creates a so-called “wasteman” like him.
The pursuit of freedom was the driving force for Wasteman’s disparate leads.
“Everyone who’s unfortunately on that side of the justice system has so much freedom that they’d like to exercise that has been taken away,” Jonsson says. “And I think that as human beings, we’re only going to try and practice freedom... You’re always going to drive towards that.”
Wasteman doesn’t begrudge either of its subjects their pursuit of that freedom — even though, as Blyth admits, “we had very different requirements for our characters.” Dee has more or less accepted his lot in life, working to conquer his cage, while Taylor still pines for escape. That clash in sensibilities allowed Blyth to have a little more fun than his co-star: “I think it was actually one of the things that really drew me to him,” he says of Dee.
Another was the opportunity to work with Jonsson, an actor he’s long admired. The pair forged a kind of bromance on the set of Wasteman, one that Blyth insists has “carried forward” since — despite a handful of gross-out scenes involving an exchange of bodily fluids.
“We spent half a day with me just throwing up on David’s face,” Blyth reveals with a grimace. “I think it can’t help but bond you, honestly… if you both are in it for the right reasons, you end up becoming closer.”
There are few reasons better than McMau’s urgent debut; if the finished product is any indication, those efforts were well worth it.
