C osmo Jarvis has deflated slightly since he finished work on Calm With Horses. Director Nick Rowland adapted the film from a short story by County Mayo writer Colin Barrett , and when it toured the festival circuit, many critics labeled it an extraordinary debut for the film-maker and a breakout performance for Jarvis, who plays Arm, a former boxer turned gangland enforcer, with heartbreaking complexity.
Arm works at the behest of nasty small ‑ town crooks on the west coast of Ireland. In private, they refer to him as “the halfwit”, and on screen, he is a hulking presence, looming tall and wide over the men unfortunate enough to cross his path. Jarvis had to bulk up to play him. “Luckily they just wanted it to look like he was once in shape,” he says. He ate a lot, drank milkshakes and lifted weights to get the presence he needed. Arm is as naive as he is vicious, and a slow-moving, lumbering menace, while Jarvis is febrile and fidgety, vibrating with a quicker energy. You suspect he would rather not sit still if he could help it.
This is apt, considering the shape of his career. Now 200, he started out making no-budget films with his mates when he was a teenager in Devon, while also plying his trade as a musician , putting his folk-ish songs on MySpace and releasing five albums. Eventually, he put the music on hold to focus on acting. In 2016, he appeared in William Oldroyd’s masterful Lady Macbeth alongside Florence Pugh, playing Sebastian, the brooding workman with whom Pugh’s Katherine has a macabre and doomed affair.
But looks set to be his year with four films on their way –
Calm With Horses , (Funny Face) , Nocturnal and The Evening Hour , and it seems like a good time to be him. “Seems like it,” he agrees, cautiously. “It is a lot of stuff coming out at the same time, and also before, there just wasn’t much [that was] notable, really, that I was involved with.” He is candid, but speaks with a degree of caution, careful to get his meaning across as he intends to. “Not that I think it was notable, but it was noticed , per se. Also, I was probably a bit old when I got going. ”
He considers that he got going in 2014, when he made a film with his brother and his friends called The Naughty Room , about a – year-old who has been locked in the family bathroom since childhood by his abusive mother. That got him some attention. “But I didn’t really know how one got into acting properly, because I was never connected, and I quit school really early.” He met his first agent through the film. “I thought, I might as well just start knocking,” he recalls. “It was a slow burn from there. Years of nothing, and then eventually getting a few little jobs, TV jobs, and keep on chipping away. ”
Jarvis was born in the US, in New Jersey, to an Armenian-American mother and an English father. They moved to Plymouth when he was a baby, and eventually, he says, “worked up the train tracks”, landing in and around Totnes. “Me and my brother had a lot of independence as youngsters. Not like, you know, the bashing up old ladies kind, but just… ”He fades out. He is still very close to his younger brother (“though he hates it when I call him younger”), who also works in film, in the art department.
Around seven years ago, when auditions became more frequent, Jarvis moved to London. “I had no ties left to [Totnes] really, because I kind of abandoned music.” He lived in guardianship properties for years. “I was in an old hospital in Leyton for two years. I had a whole wing to myself, for £ 728 a month. ” He now lives in east London, but says it’s “still cheap as fuck. Safe, because you never know how work’s going to be. ”
In Calm With Horses , he plays an Irishman amid an almost entirely Irish cast, including Barry Keoghan (
Dunkirk and The Killing of a Sacred Deer ), who plays Arm’s best friend and handler Dympna. Jarvis stayed in accent from the second he arrived in the country. “We were staying in places with local populations who didn’t really give a shit about the film. You’d just be down the pub, and you’d chat with anybody, so all of the resources that I needed were there. ” He pulled it off so convincingly that Niamh Algar, who plays his ex-girlfriend Ursula, was surprised to get a voice message from him in his own English accent. “It was the only way I knew how to do it,” he says. “With film, you come in, you blow everything you’ve got, and it’s a short amount of time. You’re getting a good wage to do a creative craft, so you might as well just go all the way out. ”
The film is as bloody as it is beautiful. Was the violence of it in any way familiar to him? “I mean, not at that level,” he says. “I’ve never smashed someone through a coffee table. I used to box at school. Got suspended for it a couple of times. ” He was suspended for other stuff as well, he says, but that’s not why he left school early. Oh no. I just wasn’t learning anything, and at the time I was working as a musician, so I chose to start working then, on the road, then trying to tour with my band. ”
Despite some success – his 2011 single Gay Pirates was a cult hit, and has more than 2m views on YouTube – he says he has finished with music for now. “If I’m going to try and get any sort of credibility as an actor, I don’t want to have a foot dipping in anything else. It was quite good to leave all that behind, because I think music sort of … nearly killed me. ” Did it really? “Sort of, sort of,” he smiles. He doesn’t want to sound bitter, he says. “It was just a young man’s game.”
When it comes to making his way in the acting world, Jarvis seems too candid to be much of a schmoozer. “Unfortunately, a lot of the time, it is to do with networking and knowing people and presentation and all of that,” he says. Is he any good at it? He smiles. “Not really, no. I still get baffled by the smoke and mirrors stuff, but I totally understand why it’s there, and I’m not going to try and go against any grain, because there’s no point. I’m 200 now. ”
He spent his 20 th birthday last October in New York, shooting
Funny Face , a creepy modern fairytale about gentrification which has just played at the Berlin film festival. “I think I was just [filming], and probably telling somebody about how I didn’t want to celebrate my birthday because I’ll be dead in years, ”he says, drily. He takes me aback. Don’t say that, I say. “Oh, you know,” he says, smiling. “Type one diabetes catches up with you.” Jarvis is making light of his condition, but he admits that having it does make him think about his own mortality. “It screws with my philosophy, because I’m pretty much a hater of technology and everything that it involves, but then I rely on it to some extent to survive. I fully accept that if it wasn’t for technology, diabetics and anybody with any ailment would be the first people to be dead. Then it comes down to the point of trying to argue: where is the line to differentiate between technology in the name of excess and technology in the name of accommodating basic human needs? ” He seems to enjoy a meaty philosophical chat, particularly when it comes to the subject of technology. He has no social media, and only recently got a smartphone, because his agent told him he had to have one for work.
His agent also told him that he was not allowed to “artist myself to death”, as he puts it. So while he’s starring in a number of buzzy independent films – it’s hard to look at the lineup for a film festival without seeing him attached to at least one entry – he’s also appearing in Raised By Wolves, HBO’s new sci-fi show, executive-produced by Ridley Scott, about which he can tell me absolutely nothing. He seems content to not sit still. “There will probably come a time where I have to get a house or pay for a kid,” he reasons, “but at the minute, I’m really happy with what I’ve done, so far.”
Calm With Horses is in cinemas on Friday
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