Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty
One would be hard-pressed to find anything in common between two of the summer’s more notable indies: David Cronenberg’s dystopian horror flick Crimes of the Future and Lena Dunham’s satirical sex comedy Sharp Stick.
Each movie is provocative in its own way. Cronenberg dares the viewer to stick around as Viggo Mortenson offers up his own organs for excavation, while Dunham’s film centers around a virginal twentysomething who arranges to have random men come over for anal sex and bukkake. And each one stars an actor playing against type, with Kristen Stewart as a mousy (and horny) research assistant in Crimes of the Future, and Dunham herself as a Silicon Valley-type matriarch in Sharp Stick.
The films’ one uniting factor is a perhaps more surprising piece of casting: an actor who appears in both movies, playing radically different roles. This summer, Scott Speedman is having a moment—and not one that those who love him from his teen drama days would expect.