Wyatt Russell was sitting in a tiny donut shop about a mile from the beach, looking slightly wonderstruck at the steady stream of adults buying themselves a treat in the middle of an L.A. summer day. None of the patrons so much as glanced as Russell, whos hunched over a table near the door in a baseball cap and a gray Sturgill Simpson T-shirt. There was no reason for them to guess that this jovial, pale-bearded dude was the star of a new television show, AMCs charmingly eccentric dramedy Lodge 49, which premieres August 6. Nor was there a clue that he is the nexus of prime celebrity D.N.A., the child of Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell.

But then, Wyatt Russell has spent practically his whole life trying not to be recognized—or, at least, not to be recognized in that way. From a young age, he threw himself into hockey, spending after-school hours practicing in working-class Long Beach, where Lodge 49 is set. “I saw a really different type of L.A.,” he said. “A lot of the people who lived there had a trade—carpentry, plumbing, construction.” Although he attended private school by day, hockey allowed him entrée to a wider, “realer” world beyond Hollywood.

His movie-star parents “were both raised lower-middle class/middle class in the 50s and 60s. They didnt let us forget those values . . . its just the way they were,” he said. Hawn and Russell encouraged their sons interest in hockey. And that, he continued with a goofy little laugh, “made me feel normal. When you are 12, thats all you want: to be more normal. Its weird when people are looking at your parents and stuff. These friends didnt care. They were doing the daily grind and figuring out how to be good people.”

These are exactly the kind of people who populate Lodge 49, a darkly whimsical series about the aptly named Dud (Russell), a down-on-his-luck ex-surfer and pool cleaner who stumbles upon a fraternal lodge brimming with secrets. Its members are ordinary men and women like Ernie (Brent Jennings), a struggling plumbing salesman, and Blaise (David Pasquesi), a pot dealer, who live in Long Beach, where the industry is contracting and working folks are barely getting by.

Dud and his twin sister Liz (Sonya Cassidy) each deal with the crushing debt their recently deceased father has left behind in different ways. While she is exhausting herself trying to make things right, Dud has retreated into a kind of dreamworld, hanging out at the local donut shop next door to his dads defunct business and looking for “signs and symbols” that will show him another way to live.

Created by author Jim Gavin, the series—whose title intentionally echoes Thomas Pynchons cryptic novel The Crying of Lot 49—is shot through with surprises, but ridiculously hard to synopsize. Show-runner Peter Ocko suggested this: “Under all of the stuff going on in this very real world is the sense that this is a knight and a squire, who come together in the first season and set out on a quest.”

Russell began to offer a description of his own, but it unraveled even as he spoke. “It plays out really slowly, and what you think it is, it is not.” He took off his hat, smoothed his lanky blond hair, then replaced the cap and continued. “It is really about everyday normal life with a twist of magical realism.”

Gavin “understands the seen and the unseen, the things you drive by and dont even think about,” Russell said. The role has made him much more aware of ordinary places, like the nondescript Department of Transportation building he spent hours in recently after his car got towed. Or those rundown hockey rinks of his youth, which were “so utilitarian, but they were this place of joy for kids to come and play the sport they love. It didnt matter what it looked like. You felt like, I am in this weird place that nobody knows about—this funny, falling-down building! Nobody knows I am here, or would expect that I would be here.”

Russells youthful hockey habit turned into a career: he played professionally for a few years in Europe, until an injury at the age of 24 put an end to that dream. Although he had done a few tiny parts in his dads films as a kid, Russell said he had never especially wanted to be an actor. Post-hockey, he decided to give the industry another try. He began getting small parts in indie films; it was Jim Mickles We Are What We Are in particular that made him feel, “Oh, I understand why people like making movies! They were my movie family; they started me off on the right path.”

In 2014, Russell was playing a young Duane Allman in the Gregg Allman biopic Midnight Rider when a horrifying accident occurred. While shooting on a railroad bridge, a crew member was struck and killed by a freight train. Russell scrambled out of the way to safety. Asked about it now, he quietly said he doesnt feel comfortable talking about the incident, “because of the family that lost their daughter.” He did admit that it altered him irrevocably: “After that experience, I said, I dont know if this is what I want to do. I didnt take it as a sign, but things happened that made me feel I didnt like the nature of the industry.”

Then a small role in Richard Linklaters Everybody Wants Some!! changed his mind. Linklater insisted all his actors spend weeks together at his Austin ranch. “It was basically like a summer camp,” Russell said, a big, sunshiney smile overtaking his face. “We would read the script every day, go in the pool—it literally brought me back to what it was to be a kid . . . Everybody had gone through things, whether it was a near-death experience or whatever, and we all connected in a way that was so pure that it changed my life and the way I viewed everything. I dont want to die going, I wish I was nicer, or I wish Id been a little more open.”

Throughout the conversation, Russell was clutching a pink paper bag with a cruller inside it. Finally, he opened the bag and tore off a hunk. He said that he loves his character in Lodge 49 because Dud is an optimist, and maybe even a little bit of a mystic. Dud “believes theres some higher order beyond whats going on right now,” Russell said. “I do want to see the magic in shit. I like the idea of being able to look at this horrible floor and be like, There was a dude or woman somewhere who made this tile out of nothing.”

The biggest difference between actor and character is that “I am a logical person . . . I have to talk something out for days sometimes before I can make decisions,” Russell said. “I would like to be more like Dud sometimes.” Here, he put his head in his hands. “Just fucking let it go, dude. Just enjoy your moment . . . What I like about Dud is if there is a door and it is open, he will go in.”

Russell circled back to his childhood, to the boy who avoided celebrity-kid stuff by hiding out in nondescript rinks in the margins of Los Angeles, slamming pucks across the ice. “I can be a little bit cynical. When you are a four-year-old and you have people coming up to your parents doing weird shit, and you see people you know turning into different people later on in life—it puts a little bit of the cynical tint on human beings. Youre thinking, That is shitty. Why would they do that?”

He can understand why people might try to use him, but knowing that pushed him to surround himself with the right people—and to embrace the Dud inside him. “You cant take life too seriously, and that is part of Dud,” he said earnestly. “We are here one day, and gone the next. Enjoy the donuts!”

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Vanity Fair

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Wyatt Russell was sitting in a tiny donut shop about a mile from the beach, looking slightly wonderstruck at the steady stream of adults buying themselves a treat in the middle of an L.A. summer day. None of the patrons so much as glanced as Russell, whos hunched over a table near the door in a baseball cap and a gray Sturgill Simpson T-shirt. There was no reason for them to guess that this jovial, pale-bearded dude was the star of a new television show, AMCs charmingly eccentric dramedy Lodge 49, which premieres August 6. Nor was there a clue that he is the nexus of prime celebrity D.N.A., the child of Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell.

But then, Wyatt Russell has spent practically his whole life trying not to be recognized—or, at least, not to be recognized in that way. From a young age, he threw himself into hockey, spending after-school hours practicing in working-class Long Beach, where Lodge 49 is set. “I saw a really different type of L.A.,” he said. “A lot of the people who lived there had a trade—carpentry, plumbing, construction.” Although he attended private school by day, hockey allowed him entrée to a wider, “realer” world beyond Hollywood.

His movie-star parents “were both raised lower-middle class/middle class in the 50s and 60s. They didnt let us forget those values . . . its just the way they were,” he said. Hawn and Russell encouraged their sons interest in hockey. And that, he continued with a goofy little laugh, “made me feel normal. When you are 12, thats all you want: to be more normal. Its weird when people are looking at your parents and stuff. These friends didnt care. They were doing the daily grind and figuring out how to be good people.”

These are exactly the kind of people who populate Lodge 49, a darkly whimsical series about the aptly named Dud (Russell), a down-on-his-luck ex-surfer and pool cleaner who stumbles upon a fraternal lodge brimming with secrets. Its members are ordinary men and women like Ernie (Brent Jennings), a struggling plumbing salesman, and Blaise (David Pasquesi), a pot dealer, who live in Long Beach, where the industry is contracting and working folks are barely getting by.

Dud and his twin sister Liz (Sonya Cassidy) each deal with the crushing debt their recently deceased father has left behind in different ways. While she is exhausting herself trying to make things right, Dud has retreated into a kind of dreamworld, hanging out at the local donut shop next door to his dads defunct business and looking for “signs and symbols” that will show him another way to live.

Created by author Jim Gavin, the series—whose title intentionally echoes Thomas Pynchons cryptic novel The Crying of Lot 49—is shot through with surprises, but ridiculously hard to synopsize. Show-runner Peter Ocko suggested this: “Under all of the stuff going on in this very real world is the sense that this is a knight and a squire, who come together in the first season and set out on a quest.”

Russell began to offer a description of his own, but it unraveled even as he spoke. “It plays out really slowly, and what you think it is, it is not.” He took off his hat, smoothed his lanky blond hair, then replaced the cap and continued. “It is really about everyday normal life with a twist of magical realism.”

Gavin “understands the seen and the unseen, the things you drive by and dont even think about,” Russell said. The role has made him much more aware of ordinary places, like the nondescript Department of Transportation building he spent hours in recently after his car got towed. Or those rundown hockey rinks of his youth, which were “so utilitarian, but they were this place of joy for kids to come and play the sport they love. It didnt matter what it looked like. You felt like, I am in this weird place that nobody knows about—this funny, falling-down building! Nobody knows I am here, or would expect that I would be here.”

Russells youthful hockey habit turned into a career: he played professionally for a few years in Europe, until an injury at the age of 24 put an end to that dream. Although he had done a few tiny parts in his dads films as a kid, Russell said he had never especially wanted to be an actor. Post-hockey, he decided to give the industry another try. He began getting small parts in indie films; it was Jim Mickles We Are What We Are in particular that made him feel, “Oh, I understand why people like making movies! They were my movie family; they started me off on the right path.”

In 2014, Russell was playing a young Duane Allman in the Gregg Allman biopic Midnight Rider when a horrifying accident occurred. While shooting on a railroad bridge, a crew member was struck and killed by a freight train. Russell scrambled out of the way to safety. Asked about it now, he quietly said he doesnt feel comfortable talking about the incident, “because of the family that lost their daughter.” He did admit that it altered him irrevocably: “After that experience, I said, I dont know if this is what I want to do. I didnt take it as a sign, but things happened that made me feel I didnt like the nature of the industry.” Continue reading “Wyatt Russell Looks for Magic on Lodge 49”