FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Entertainment

This Movie Star/DJ Is Now Getting Paid to Play Video Games, Too

Ansel Elgort is some movie hunk EDM bro living it up at E3 and I'm not at all bitter about having to interview him.
Colin Young-Wolff / Associated Press for Activision

You're familiar with Ansel Elgort, even if his name isn't immediately recognizable. He's that handsome guy who isn't Miles Teller from the young adult dystopian sci-fi series that isn't The Hunger Games. He's also the guy who made tweens and adults alike bawl their eyes out with his The Faults in Our Stars performance. As the titular character in Edgar Wright's forthcoming Baby Driver, 23-year-old Elgort is poised to soon become a household name.

Advertisement

Meanwhile I'm out here, age 30, regarding invites to press screenings of movies as monumental career achievements. Not satisfied to graciously accept the movie stardom jackpot the universe has blessed him with, Elgort greedily decided to carve out a second career for himself as an EDM act. Formerly as Ansølo, and now dropping all pretense to just go with his legal name, Elgort's worked with heavy hitters like Logic, NERVO, and the Chainsmokers and performed at prominent fests like Electric Zoo and Ultra.

As if double dipping in the good life wasn't already enough, this fucking guy has the cheek to take up yet another mantle that many would kill for, this time in the video game space. Fulfilling the childhood fantasy of every gamer ever, Elgort's been hired by Activision as a celebrity spokesperson to promote Destiny 2, the highly anticipated sequel to 2014's FPS juggernaut. Essentially, this means he is paid to play video games.

With the gaming industry raking in more consumer dollars than both movies and music combined, this deal surely belies a business savvy extending beyond simple wish fulfillment. Which is great for him, I guess.

I met up with Elgort at E3 2017 in Los Angeles to chat about what it was like to work with one of my favorite directors, what it's like to have all this free time to play games because you're never stressing about finances, and what it's like to essentially be Charlie Bucket at the end of Willy Wonka and get everything you ever want in life handed to you.

Advertisement

I can only assume he was paid 10,000 x more to sit through this interview than I was.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

VICE: How'd you wind up getting paid to play video games?
Ansel Elgort: Well, I'm a big video game player. I mean, anyone who plays video games—you come to something like this and see everyone waiting in line for hours and hours. And I get invited to walk in through the back door and come try all the new games. It's pretty awesome. Activision invited me and asked me to be an ambassador, which is amazing.

What does that entail, being a game ambassador? You traveling to foreign countries to promote, too?
I should be. That'd be cool. [To his team] We should do that.

I went to the Activision headquarters and got to see some behind the scenes Call of Duty stuff last year. I'm a big fan of their brand, and I think everything they make is great.

Besides the Activision lineup we have here, are there any other games you've seen at E3 that you're stoked to play?
Well, I… [looks to team] Are you contractually not allowed to compliment other games?
Hmm. Yeah, probably not.

What are your earliest gaming memories?
I played this game called Power Pete on the Macintosh. I had it on my big brick Mac, one of those big, gray towers. I also remember playing Oregon Trail, of course. The first first-person shooter I ever played was Goldeneye for N64.

Did you adhere to the "no Oddjob" rule?
[Laughs] No, we didn't, but we should have! I was always the younger brother who was bad at it anyway.

Advertisement

That's the younger brother's role, though. So, when you played with your siblings, did you rig up screen blockers for multiplayer? You know what I'm talking about?
I do. No, we would "screen rape" all the time. That's part of the game, man.

How does gaming fit into your busy work schedule now?
Now I have—and it's made me much worse at games—this giant screen, like a movie theater, in my house. How has that made you worse?
To play on monitors is much better because of the latency. Downstairs [on the E3 demo floor] when I was playing Destiny 2 on the monitors, I was actually not bad. Well, the first game I was pretty bad. The second round I was better. I got to play with some of the design team, and I was better because latency was better. You feel like you're really in it. Everything is instantaneous.

What do you hate about representations of gaming in film or TV?
It's the same with representing anything: They should actually play the game first. If someone's playing a character in a movie who's into painting and just waving the brush around, it looks like they have no clue what they're doing.

And you see this for video games in movies. [The actors] clearly have no clue what they're doing, and it shows. It takes you out of it for a second, and you should never be taken out of the scene, as an audience member. There are plenty of people who play video games who will look at it and go "that guy's never touched a controller before."

Edgar Wright is one of the few directors who seems to get gaming and loves to incorporate elements from it into the visual and editing style of his films. Are there any of those gaming motifs in Baby Driver?
I'd say so. There's a movement to the way he puts things together. The action is so stimulated, and the way he cuts everything together and the way everything is timed out is so perfect.

And these games here put a lot of thought into the timing of the action, too—sometimes even doing it better than action movies. With it all being digital, developers can essentially do whatever they want, and Edgar somehow finds a way to do whatever he wants, too.

Follow Justin Caffier on Twitter.