Apple TV’s take on the classic story The Mosquito Coast premieres on the streaming service April 30. While it follows the same characters as the great American novel, the series serves as something of a prequel by having paranoid inventor Allie Fox (Justin Theroux, Maniac) drag his family down to the Mexican border first.
The reason for their abrupt exit from the United States is that Allie is a wanted man, and the government is after him for reasons unbeknownst to either the audience or his own children. But the ascetic lifestyle to which he has accustomed his family, whether they like it or not, makes them well-equipped for a life on the run without even cellphones or television to entertain them.
Theroux spoke to Screen Rant and several other press outlets about his familial connection to the source material, as it was written by his uncle Paul Theroux, and shared his own way into the complicated character of Allie Fox.
You have the best resource imaginable in your uncle [author Paul Theroux], and in knowing a little bit about the family members that inspired Allie Fox. Did you also revisit Harrison Ford’s portrayal, and is there anything you took from that to inspire your performance in the show?
Justin Theroux: His portrayal of Allie Fox, I think, is unforgettable. He’s really excellent in that movie. And it’s that weird thing where you’re having to try and forget what he did so well. But at the same time, obviously, I’m working with different materials altogether. The character is the same, but what I’m doing in our story is different.
I haven’t really nor would I want to do any side-by-side comparison, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we arrived just as actors at the same conclusion on certain things. It’s kind of like you could see two different actors play Hamlet, and I’m sure they’d be wildly different. But at the same time, certainly, it is still Hamlet. You’re gonna discover some some similar things, perhaps; cadence or things like that.
Does the fact that this source material is a novel your uncle wrote add to the challenge of not only adapting a novel but also modernizing it?
Justin Theroux: No. If anything, it gave me a kind of comfort. Because all the ceremony that is usually stood on when you’re having to meet the author of something that you might be doing was obliterated, or didn’t exist in the first place. So, I was able to just pick up the phone and say, “Hey, guess what? I’m doing Allie Fox,” which was a thrill for both of us. And also, I have a pre-existing cordial relationship where I could just ask him anything I want at anytime that I want; text him have and coffee with him. So, that was really fun.
Also, as I mentioned before, there’s large elements in the character that are from my family: my grandfather, uncles, and probably more than he’d like to admit, Paul himself. So, if there’s any sort of inside baseball, it’s that, which is that I was able to just reach into my own memory of these people and pull out elements of them in playing it. Which is really a luxury that I’ve never had before.
A lot of people who actually watched the movie or read the book do know how it ends. Will the series end in the same way, or can the viewers look forward to a twist?
Justin Theroux: I actually don’t know how our version of the book ends. But Peter Weir at one point said, in the making of the movie, that it’s one of the most anti-Hollywood [endings]. It’s so untraditional, because it’s essentially a story that happens in reverse. Normally, obviously, a movie begins with, “Here’s a family. Now they’re in trauma, now they’re getting themselves out of trauma, now they’re fine.” The book and the movie are the exact reverse of that, where it starts with them fine, and then things get worse and worse and worse.
I think it’s great for us, because hopefully we’ll have a lot of runway to tell this story over multiple episodes and hopefully seasons. I don’t know how it’s going to end, and even if I did, I probably wouldn’t reveal it here. But what I do like is that these characters certainly have places to go that they haven’t gone yet. And it is this series of pricks and fractures that happens to them over the course of their travels, which is very similar to what happens in both the book and the movie.
That to me is actually the most compelling thing about it, at least these relationships and watching them splinter. Watching Allie, who really ties himself to the mast of his own convictions, weather this storm that is going to continue to unfold. I just find it – at least in the playing of it, I can’t say for the watching of it – fascinating. And it’s one of the things that I love about him so much; that he is by turns charismatic and interesting, and also infuriating. I hope if I’ve done my job right, that comes across.
What can audiences expect for your character’s evolution over the series?
Justin Theroux: I don’t know specifically, but I can say for anyone that wants to consult the book, there’s an unwinding that starts to happen to him.
Interestingly, in my conversations with Paul, when I was asking him who inspired Allie – aside from family etc., as he’s obviously a composite of many people. But I said, “What was the reason for creating this character?” At the time when he wrote the book in the early 80s, it was a few years after the Jim Jones massacre or mass suicide. He was fascinated by that story, about how a guy can go from a pretty benevolent preacher in the Midwest, then move to San Francisco and by all accounts have a very inclusive, open-minded church that eventually had to leave the country and eventually moved deep into the jungle.
He said it’s not a direct comparison to Allie Fox, Jim Jones, but he said there’s absolutely a grain or several grains of that character in there on a smaller scale with Allie. Because Allie is so lashed to his own convictions, and the way he tries to indoctrinate his family and his own belief system, there is this element of the cult of family that he thinks is interesting.
This is a family like no other that I’ve met, where they are essentially living a monastic lifestyle, cut off from television and phones, all the things that we think are absolute necessities, and living off the grid. In breaking out of the US and throwing up a grenade over their shoulder, I think he’s really living his dream. But it’s exactly his dream, it’s not necessarily everyone else’s. So, he’s constantly trying to marshal the troops, his kids and his wife, and keep them in alignment with his own beliefs.
The Mosquito Coast of the book is in Honduras, but in the show, we’re starting off at the US-Mexico border. How does that reflect the real-life situation between the countries, and how does it change your perspective as an actor, playing a modern colonialist in some ways?
Justin Theroux: Yeah. He’s almost like an Uber-American. I don’t think of him in political terms; I don’t think of him as Republican, Democrat, Independent, or anything like that, but I think he’s that classic kind of antihero – a “head west” kind of pioneer. And with that comes an incredible amount of hubris and, like you said, a colonial mentality that he can somehow bring wonderful things to wherever he’s going.
In Allie’s case, it’s inventions. As one character, I think, really presciently points out: you say you want to get out of America as you hate it. But essentially, you are America and you’re bringing that with you. You can’t leave your personality behind when you travel.
As far as the border crossing, it wasn’t lost on anyone that even that in and of itself is sort of an act of privilege on his behalf. Because he’s essentially fleeing something that would impinge on his way of life, and it’s a choice for him. Whereas for the people that are going north in the opposite direction, it’s a necessity to find a life for the first time, I would argue – or flee very real dangers. We don’t really underscore it too much, we sort of let it be what it is, but it’s obvious.
It’s not really necessary to underscore, I don’t think, but it speaks to just the fascinating mentality that makes him like Jack London and Jack Kerouac, the way he’s so convinced that [his convictions] are correct. He’s the kind of guy that I would probably love to have dinner with, but I certainly wouldn’t want to live with him and absolutely not be him.
Given your familiarity with the book and material in the movie beforehand, what surprised you the most about stepping into Allie Fox’s shoes and putting your spin on him?
Justin Theroux: I was surprised at how fun it was. I was expecting his nattering on to become exhausting, but what I found was that in the playing of him, it’s so nice to play someone who doesn’t question their own convictions. It must be nice to just be the smartest guy in the room at all times and not have much self-doubt.
I usually play characters that are conflicted or have, at least in the last series, a very fragile emotional life. And there’s none of that with Allie. If you opened up his chest, it would be the exact same thing that’s registering on his face. There is no real interior life; it’s just all forward lean. And that’s shockingly fun to play, like playing an axe murderer without a conscience. I’m not comparing him to an expert, but you know what I mean. It just is what it is.
The book was written in the early 80s, before we even had cell phones and internet. How does that modern technology impact Allie’s rejection of all things modern?
Justin Theroux: It’s one of the paradoxes of Allie that he rejects it all, but he’s also very good at it. He’s pretty facile with a hard drive and a keyboard and a SIM card, which I think just speaks to what we might reveal as his previous life.
It’s more toys and props that we get to play with, as part of what we’ve done when we’ve updated it. You can’t ignore those things. But it also shows how radical his philosophy is of bringing up his children; the fact that you can’t imagine a kid without a cell phone these days, or a television set for that matter, or a computer. That they read books is almost anathema to everything else. It’s one of the fun things.
I mean, there’s a couple things we changed in order to serialize this. The most obvious one is we created a fire on their backs through the device of this government agency that’s wanting them. And that’s really the propellant that gets us into the stuff that we want to be in, which is the relationships and the travel and the adventure of the show.
What do you think the benefit is of turning the novel into a series in 2021, with hopefully more seasons to come, rather than a movie?
Justin Theroux: We’ll see if there’s a benefit to it. The movie, which I thought was fabulous – I know a lot of people didn’t think so or it didn’t do very well financially, but I thought it was a very good movie. But if it had a flaw, it was that it was too short. It’s such an enormous character to jam into an hour and 45 minutes, or whatever their running time was, which led Harrison Ford to have to take some very hard left and right turns with the character in order to get to the credits sequence.
Whereas in a series, I feel like we have an enormous amount of real estate to play, and it’s the wonderful thing about the 10 Episode series, where you can really lay one card down at a time and take your time in revealing all the characters. I think that’s going to be the fun of it. The thing that makes TV great now is we have the opportunity to create characters that have really long, overarching arcs where they grow.
That’s the difference between television now and television is 20 or 15 years ago, or network television, where it’s usually buttoned up. A body shows up, it’s dead, they have to solve a crime, and then they all toast with their coffee mugs. Then the next episode, it’s just a different body in a different part of the city that’s dead, and they do the same thing over. The characters don’t really evolve or change; maybe one of them has a drinking problem for half a season, but that’s about it. Here, we get to really do deep dives, and that’s why I like it.
The Mosquito Coast premieres on April 30 through Apple TV.
