With a trio of attention-grabbing roles in 2014 — The Normal Heart, American Horror Story: Freak Show, and Unbroken — Wittrock has taken Hollywood by storm.
Finn Wittrock at the premiere screening of FX's American Horror Story: Freak Show at TCL Chinese Theatre on Oct. 5, 2014, in Hollywood, California
Getty Images/Kevin Winter
Heads noticeably turned as Finn Wittrock entered Hugo's restaurant in West Hollywood, California, one mid-December morning — some faces flushed with horror, others with a flirty smile, but all with visible excitement. Given the year Wittrock's had, the attention is hardly surprising.
The 30-year-old actor began 2014 as Taylor Kitsch's doomed lover in HBO's Emmy-winning movie The Normal Heart, and he will close the year as an Air Force officer stranded at sea in Unbroken, the harrowing war drama from director Angelina Jolie that is poised to factor into this year's Oscar race.
While those two roles bookended Wittrock's big year, his true attention-getting, star-making, head-turning performance has been on FX's American Horror Story: Freak Show, where he stars as Dandy Mott, an emotionally stunted, entitled rich kid with serious mommy issues who's developed an unsettling obsession with bathing in the blood of those he's murdered. The heavily-GIF'd, widely talked-about performance is not only one of Freak Show's most memorable, it's also one of the most terrifying.
"Whenever strangers come up to me and say, 'I'm so scared of you,' I say, 'Don't worry, I only kill famous people,'" Wittrock told BuzzFeed News on Dec. 15 with a laugh, flashing the mile-wide grin Ryan Murphy has used to terrorizing effect on the current season of AHS. While some might scoff at being turned into an object of horror, Wittrock takes fan interactions like those as a sign he's doing his job well.
"The response has been very positive — very big, but very positive," he said. "It's cool that the biggest thing in my career hasn't been run of the mill; it's very different than anything I've ever done or anything I will ever do and I'm so happy that Ryan gave me a chance to stretch and push the limits."
Wittrock as Dandy Mott in American Horror Story: Freak Show
Michele K. Short/FX
Pushing boundaries has long been of interest to Wittrock, who caught the acting bug at a young age — thanks, in no small part, to his father, an actor and a voice teacher. Eventually, summers at Shakespeare and Company in Lenox, Massachusetts, led Wittrock to L.A. County High School for the Arts. "That's when I started studying acting and couldn't turn back," he said. "I've always known it's sort of the only thing I could do."
After graduating from LACHSA, Wittrock was accepted to the Juilliard School in New York City, the training ground for some of Hollywood's most acclaimed stars. And less than a year after completing his Juilliard education, Wittrock was cast on All My Children, where he played the nefarious Damon Miller for nearly three years. "Juilliard was so theater-focused and great, but I feel like the soap was my boot camp training for camera acting because it's so different," he said. "Film and television are so piecemeal. You do one scene and then you put it to bed and then you do a scene that comes before. In a play, you have to go from beginning to end every night, and that's harder, but also more fulfilling, in a way."
That's why, at the end of his All My Children contract, Wittrock returned to the stage as Happy Loman in Mike Nichols' acclaimed 2012 Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman alongside Philip Seymour Hoffman. "A lot of the stuff that's happening now, I can trace back to Death of a Salesman," he said, very matter-of-factly. "Francine Maisler, the casting director, saw Death of a Salesman and called me in for Unbroken. The casting director of Normal Heart had seen Salesman too. I look back on it now and it's like one thing led to another; it was a chain reaction."
Following The Normal Heart, Ryan Murphy — a writer, director, and producer known for creating an unofficial company of resident actors with whom he works — added Wittrock to his troupe and cast him as Dandy in the fourth season of American Horror Story. Though the role has become one of the year's most noteworthy, it wasn't initially designed that way.
"The part was not supposed to be as huge as it became," Wittrock said, exhaling a literal sigh of relief. "It was supposed to be six to eight episodes, but on day one, [Ryan] was like, 'Do you want this to be a series regular, because I have a lot of ideas for Dandy and we're really excited about where this character will go.' I was like, 'Yeah!' But I had no idea what was coming."
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