talent

ALL THE

WRIGHT MOVES

IN HIS BREAKOUT ROLE, LOS ANGELES ACTOR TREVOR WRIGHT PLAYS A POOR, ARTSY, GAY SURFER TRYING TO COME TO TERMS WITH HIMSELF. IN REALITY, WRIGHT’S LIFE IS A LITTLE MORE MALIBU THAN MARGINAL

Trevor Wright has impressive young Hollywood credentials. His mother is a casting director. He’s made the rounds, attending Beverly Hills High School, Malibu High School, and Colin Mcewan High School, the last a private affair in Malibu. Perhaps most impressively, at 8 years old he was chosen to appear in Paula Abdul’s Forever Your Girl video as the Muppet Baby version of James Dean on a Triumph motorcycle who throws down a black leather jacket. Wright even says that he took Callum Best and Brody Jenner to their first Hollywood clubs, a feat that might seem seismic depending on where you spend your attention. Thankfully the 26-year-old actor has a good sense of humor

about his circumstances and is amused when he’s asked how many other cast members of The Hills he hangs out with. “One of my best friends is Justin Brescia, you know Justin Bobby?” he responds, referring to Audrina Patridge’s companion who mumbles and wears knit hats. “He’s actually a good friend of mine. We ride motorcycles together.” Wright is serious, but he laughs. “It was definitely a plus that I grew up here,” he admits. “I’ve done my share of being in the scene and all that, but I never got caught up in it. I know my limits and what’s important to me.”

Wright has come a long way from his first adult role eight years ago—playing Cute Guy on the television series Roswell— and his first film, a 2004 family comedy called MXP: Most Xtreme Primate, about a snowboarding chimpanzee that sounds like it might be good. “The chimp had the most amazing reactions,” Wright says. “I would be eating cereal in a scene and the chimp would grab the bowl or some crazy thing, and you don’t really know what to do because the trainer is telling you not to look it in the eye.” Shelter, a gay surfer drama that begins a limited theatrical release this spring (it’s the first project from the feature division of here!, the gay cable network), is a turning point for the actor. It allows him to subvert his rebel image and showcase a more heartfelt persona. The film follows Zach, played by Wright, an aspiring, skateboarding street artist and line cook in his early twenties who lives in working-class San Pedro, California. Over the course of the film, Zach contends with his longing to attend art school; a disparaging sister (played by the fascinating, sad-eyed Tina Holmes) who drinks, smokes, works in a supermarket, and sometimes wears rings on all of her fingers; his responsibility for her young son (she’s a deadbeat mom); and—most dramatically—the unprecedented feelings he discovers for his wealthy best friend’s gay older brother, Shaun (played by an unaffected Brad Rowe), who, after a failed relationship, is hiding out in one of the family mansions in Laguna Beach where Zach keeps his surfboard. Its post-gay, post-Brokeback Mountain take on the coming-out narrative has an ocean standing in for the mountains and an undone independent look. Zach is played as a straight dude who’s gay, and his big reveal turns out to be a relatively casual concern. His best friend’s reply is, “We’re still bro’s right?” just before making the far-more-flustered Zach accept a bro hug. “I describe it as a love story. Someone who’s never really known what love is until he met his connection,” Wright says.

He’s a natural for the role not only because he makes for an engaging and atypically understated gay character, but also because he spent his high school years as a skateboarder with bleached hair in Southside shirts and Nike Cortezes, listening to Primus. Wright was ready for a challenge, although with some apprehension. “I said, ‘this is amazing, I love it, I totally completely one hundred percent want to do it.’ I was just worried about it because it is a gay-ish kind of film and I didn’t want it to be that cliché of the sunsets and the beautiful this and the love making and the shirts off and all of that. I pictured this edgy and gritty, darkish kind of film and the director Jonah Markowitz was on the same page and I’m so stoked that I did it.” Zach’s first same-sex kiss was also Wright’s. “It was weird, because usually I would take the lead in the kiss and I just had to let go. It was two men forcefully kissing,” he says and then laughs.

Wright recently proposed marriage to the actress Odette Yustman, from the television show October Road and the movie Cloverfield. They met at a birthday party. “My friend said he would introduce me, and then she walked up, pushed him out of the way, and said, ‘Hello, I’m Odette,’ and I’m like, ‘Oh my god, you’re so my type,’” he laughs. His proposal was unconventional. “I did it in the nude,” Wright says. He left a trail of rose petals up the walkway of their house into the living room, turned on the fire, laid out a blanket, lit candles, and sat Indian-style on the floor in a heart outlined with more rose petals. “I was so freaking nervous, it was like I’d never met the girl before. I was shaking and was like, ‘I just want you to know how much I love you,’ and then I got on one knee and proposed,” he says. “I just wanted to be completely natural and give myself to this woman that I absolutely love.” Now Odette is forever his girl. Mark Jacobs

Trevor Wright in Los Angeles, December 2007 Photography Yu Tsai Styling Martina Nilsson Grooming Riku Campo (Célestine Agency) Sweater and jeans Dolce & Gabbana

Shelter is out in June 2008 from Regent Releasing

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