Jonah Hauer-King has been crying a lot. “It used to be this thing I really struggled with, both in my personal life and at work,” says the 30-year-old actor, who immortalised The Little Mermaid’s Prince Eric in live-action form two years ago. “But now I cry all the time!” Any specific reason? “Oh, not bad stuff,” he clarifies, smiling. “I think maybe I shut down some feelings and emotions from stuff as a child, and over the years, I’ve just processed them. And then that well of emotion is just there… waiting.”
It’s hard to imagine that the well has simply been sitting tight this entire time. After all, Hauer-King is quickly becoming one of Britain’s most in-demand talents, with three films out this year alone. A well-equipped emotional toolbox is, I suspect, a major asset, particularly for someone with such an eclectic CV. Prince Eric led to his role as a Slovakian Jewish man who falls in love with a fellow prisoner in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Sky’s The Tattooist of Auschwitz. And that led to this year’s I Know What You Did Last Summer, a fitful reboot of the Nineties horror franchise, and Netflix’s A House of Dynamite, a highly anticipated political thriller that marks the latest film from the Oscar-winning Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow. “It was an amazing thing just to be around her,” Hauer-King says of the filmmaker, citing her as one of the top five people in the industry he’d wanted to work with.
