Emile Hirsch
Born: March 13th, 1985
Place: Palms, California
Major Awards and Citations: Broadcast Film Critics Association Awards (2008): Nominated for Best Actor for ‘Into the Wild’ Gotham Awards (2007): Nominated for the Breakthrough Award for ‘Into the Wild’ Mill Valley Film Festival (2007): Won Best Actor for ‘Into the Wild’ National Board of Review (2007): Won Best Breakthrough Performance for ‘Into the Wild’ Online Film Critics Society Awards (2008): Nominated for Best Actor for ‘Into the Wild’ Palm Springs International Film Festival (2008): Won the Rising Star Award for ‘Into the Wild’ Screen Actors Guild Awards (2008): Nominated for Best Actor for ‘Into the Wild’ Young Artist Awards (2003): Nominated for Best Young Supporting Actor for ‘The Emperor’s Club’

Oscar Snubs: ‘Imaginary Heroes’ (2004), ‘Into the Wild’ (2007), and ‘Milk’ (2008)

I happen to share a birthday with Emile Hirsch (presents are always welcome…just kidding…maybe), but that’s not the reason I admire him as much as I do.  Many truly started to appreciate him with his magnificent work in ‘Into the Wild,’ but I’ve been a fan since day 1.  He’s one of the more underrated young actors in the industry and one of the few who seems in it for the craft more than anything else.  Even those few occasions when he’s appeared in larger scale roles it’s been for a reason other than a payday, and I admire that.  Plus he’s just an incredibly talented actor.  Hirsch strikes me as someone that could wind up with a whole gaggle of Oscar nominations one day, especially considering his penchant for choosing interesting roles to tackle.  Also, consider this a make up for somehow forgetting him on my article of the future A-list actors.  Strange, considering he’s one of my favorites.  With that, let us move on now and go Under the Circuit with Emile Hirsch!

Hirsch got his start on television with a host of guest spots on programs like ’3rd Rock from the Sun’, ‘Sabrina the Teenage Witch’, ‘The Pretender’, ‘NYPD Blue’, and ‘ER’ before landing a TV movie 2001 called ‘Wild Iris’.  This led to him getting cast in his first feature role and he was off from there.  It was ‘The Dangerous Lives of Alter Boys’ (2002), followed quickly by ‘The Emperor’s Club’ that same year.  Both are underrated and well acted little films, and Hirsch quickly had established himself as a young actor to watch.  It didn’t hurt that he was getting to work alongside actors like Kevin Kline and Jodie Foster, not to mention fellow up and comers Paul Dano, Jessie Eisenberg, and Jena Malone.  2003 had him appear in a tiny melodrama called ‘The Mudge Boy’, a mediocre flick but one that has one of his most ignored performances in it.  The movie itself is nothing to write home about, but Hirsch was quite good in it.  People still didn’t really know who he was at this point (even though I’d mentioned him a few times to friends and such), but the next year he’d get his first crack at the multiplex.

2004 brought two of my favorite performances of Hirsch’s.  There was ‘The Girl Next Door’, an edgy romantic comedy that was unjustly ignored by moviegoers despite it being a sweet and sexy modern take on the ‘Risky Business’ type of film.  There was also the indie flick ‘Imaginary Heroes’.  The former gave him some exposure to a broader audience, but the latter was an acting tour de force (and my second favorite performance to date by him).  It’s a dysfunctional family drama with some dark comedy underpinnings, not unlike ‘American Beauty’.  This one could have been a contender for some awards, but it never got out of the art-house theaters.  For my money, his exclusion from the awards race (alongside co-stars Sigourney Weaver and Jeff Daniels) was an absolute snub.  But it wouldn’t be his first…

The thing about Emile Hirsch is that he seems to be a picky actor.  At this point he was a known commodity and likely could have gotten some decent mainstream work, but instead spent the next few years doing offbeat fare that skirted indie and mainstream like the surf/skate flick ‘Lords of Dogtown’ (2005) and the crime drama ‘Alpha Dog’ (2006).  Both were supporting parts alongside more terrific actors and actresses.  He also went the super indie route in 2007 with a smaller part in the ensemble film ‘The Air I Breathe’.  What this all was doing was getting a filmmaker interested in him for a part that would do wonders for Hirsch.  Yes, Emile was about to team up with Sean Penn.

‘Into the Wild (2007) was my favorite film of that year, and Hirsch’s amazing turn as doomed wanderluster Christopher McCandless was my favorite performance as well that year (plus his best ever).  Penn and Hirsch got to the root of this character and it just came out perfectly on screen.  Hirsch got some good precursor attention but it never translated into the Oscar nomination many expected, despite even SAG nominating him.  This snub is one of the worst in the Academy’s last 10 years, but snubs are nothing new.  The quality of the work remains, and boy oh boy is it ever profound.

Armed with some clout, Hirsch opted to join the much anticipated Wakowski Brothers adaptation of ‘Speed Racer’ in 2008.  A strangely experimental kids film, it was a box office bomb, but he was hardly the issue.  He played Speed just right, just sadly in the service of a doomed film.  As if to atone for that, the same year also had him work again with Penn, though this time in a supporting role in the Harvey Milk biopic ‘Milk’.  While Penn won Best Actor, Hirsch was ignored for Supporting Actor, though he was cited in a number of Ensemble nominations that season.  It’s another terrific performance from Hirsch, something becoming quite common at this point.

Since then, he’s only done a supporting part in 2009′s would be Oscar player ‘Taking Woodstock’, but he’s coming back onto the radar this year.  He made the festival rounds the past few months with ‘Killer Joe’, expected to open next year, and he’s starring this week in an interesting looking alien invasion flick called ‘The Darkest Hour’.  Does it have any chance of getting him nominated this year?  Of course not (though one would love to be surprised), but perhaps next year a Supporting nod for ‘Killer Joe’ could be in the cards.

Going forward, he’s got 3 very baity films on tap for the next year or so, ensuring that Hirsch  will be in the awards game.  There’s the drama ‘The Motel Life’, which sounds like it has potential, the melodrama ‘Venuto al mondo’, and Oliver Stone’s upcoming thriller ‘Savages’.  I know I’m looking forward to all 3, and you should be too.  The more Emile Hirsch we get, the better it is for us all.

Emile Hirsch will get his due soon enough, he just needs to get the right traction for these roles.  He’s got a world of talent and I expect the Academy to recognize him before all is said and done.  Time will tell of course, but he’s just too good to be ignored forever.  I’ll be reporting in on ‘The Darkest Hour’ soon, but for now let’s go watch some of his older films and get excited for his future!  It’s certainly a bright one…

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