The wait is over: Thursday, September 17th, Resident Evil hits the cinema, or rather, the standalone original installment of the saga brought to life by Zach Cregger. With the goodwill of critics who would rather not prejudge a film they haven’t seen, judging it from the tone they think they’ve understood from the trailer and from what those who have seen it say (in the meantime it’s not a comedy, even though there are laughs), we join the ranks of all those — and there are quite a few, of all ages, gamers and non-gamers alike — who have been drawn in, carried along, amused, and at the same time shocked by a film that, in its body-horror incarnation, brings back to the cinema a saga whose premise and setting it preserves, yet reinterprets with the technical precision, irony, and imagination that Cregger has shown he possesses in abundance with only three feature films to his name. But there’s another element that decisively contributes to the success of Resident Evil: the lead role entrusted to Austin Abrams as an ordinary guy whom everyone, behind the console or in front of the screen, can identify with. He is literally present in every scene, he leaps, he shouts, he runs like crazy, he climbs, ascends stairs, vaults fences, and utters countless “fuck” (bet he outdoes Tarantino in this), and above all he conveys every single emotion the director intends, which is precisely that of someone who would suddenly, by pure chance, find themselves living such an absurd situation.
Who is Austin Abrams and where had we seen him?
Zach Cregger had the right instinct: after giving him in Weapons the irresistible role of James, a drug-addicted thief who becomes involved in the film’s events almost unwittingly, in which Abrams, almost unrecognizable, delivers alongside Amy Madigan the film’s best performance, he cast him confidently as the lead of Resident Evil. For the Hollywood writers’ strike in 2023, as is known, the cast of Weapons changed entirely, but Abrams clung to a role he loved very much and felt would bring him luck, to the point of being the only original actor present in the film. But who is this newly thirty-year-old actor, where does this determination come from, and where (surely) had we already seen him before his literal breakout? The writer recalls him as the annoying kid, Ron Anderson, from the fifth and sixth seasons of The Walking Dead, the Alexandria resident who targets Carl then Rick Grimes, accused of having killed his zombie parents and later outed by Michonne. At the time, Austin, who turned 30 on September 2 of this year, was still a kid, but he had already acted in films and TV shows. After all, he had been precocious: at five he started acting lessons, and at nine he began performing on stage. He arrived on the big screen in 2011 in the thriller Ticking Clock with Cuba Gooding Jr., followed by A Lie for Love and his television debut in The Inbetweeners.
In 2013 he lands a role in Gangster Squad by Ruben Fleischer, which also features his future Weapons co-star, Josh Brolin. After another string of small roles, he draws notice with the nine episodes he appears in the series The Walking Dead, as we discussed (2015-2016). Despite this, it takes a bit more grind to rise, and in cinema he lands a more substantial role only in 2019 in the not-so-memorable Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. The ascent continues on TV with several episodes in miniseries and series such as Dash & Lily, This Is Us and especially Euphoria, where he has a longer arc to develop the role of Ethan Daley, alongside Barbie Ferreira, in the first two seasons of the popular show. On the big screen, in 2024 he appears in Wolfs – Lone Wolves by Jon Watts with Brad Pitt and George Clooney, but it is Zach Cregger the mentor who nurtures him, and after Weapons he offers him his first lead role. We are glad that this long apprenticeship managed to bring forth such a talented actor, endowed with a thousand shades, at ease in both drama and comedy, and not even the typical nepobaby (his parents are both doctors). And if you see him on the big screen in Resident Evil, we are confident you’ll agree with us.
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