“Thank you!” the actor Nicholas Braun calls midsentence, flashing a thumbs-up to a stranger who shouted, “You’re awesome, Greg!” from the crosswalk on Hudson Street. Mr. Braun is sitting outdoors at an unpretentious cafe, his old haunt from when he lived in Greenwich Village. Sporting a New York Nico T-shirt, an A24 baseball cap, and a five o’clock shadow, the fan-favorite “Succession” star looks downright un-Gregish today, yet has been recognized for the second time since leaving his apartment. “That’s how it goes, I guess,” he says, with a shrug.
“I’m becoming known for playing Greg, and I think at this point I have to actively try to widen that as much as I can,” Mr. Braun says.
On June 30, the 33-year-old actor will appear in “Zola,” a new movie about two strippers on a Florida road trip gone awry, based on a viral
thread by A’Ziah “Zola” King. Mr. Braun plays aspiring influencer Derrek, who is the guileless boyfriend of a sex worker played by Riley Keough and who “so desperately needs therapy,” he says.
Derrek is hungry for viral fame, something Mr. Braun learned a bit about during lockdown. Aside from his role on HBO’s hottest show, his Instagram bits have gained a cult following for their sendups of online culture. Fans have gone so far as to print photos from his recent British GQ cover on T-shirts.
“Zola” director and co-writer Janicza Bravo describes her film as “stressful comedy,” because “there is a good deal of humor, but it’s where anxiety and humor go hand in hand,” she said. Sidelined to a grimy motel while his girlfriend trades sex for money, Derrek is at the emotional heart of the story. Like Zola, “he’s sold a bill of goods that doesn’t come to be, and he really is very much in love with this woman who he sees, who he believes sees him, but she doesn’t,” Ms. Bravo says.
For some actors, playing a distraught Vine bro might seem like an opportunity for maximalism, but Mr. Braun’s understated performance tugs audience heartstrings. “He does this thing that’s really hard, which is he’s performing a comedic piece but he’s taking it so seriously that you feel for the character,” his co-star Ms. Keough says. “He’s not mocking the character. He’s really empathizing, and that’s what makes him so fun and funny to watch. He’s not laughing at Derrek, you know?”
Ms. Bravo says his approach to performing, “which is not dissimilar to my own approach, is ‘let the humor speak for itself.’ Nick is not worried about landing the joke.” Instead, his characters’ intense sincerity highlights the absurd situations surrounding them.
It’s a sensibility that plays out in “Succession,” with Mr. Braun as the one somewhat-normal character navigating a family of eccentric plutocrats, and which will likely play out in “Cat Person,” a psychological thriller based on a viral New Yorker story of the same name. Mr. Braun, who says he finds dating to be “awkward and sometimes forced,” recently signed on to portray Robert, whose romantic overtures toward a 20-year-old are described in the story as “shockingly bad.”
In the same vein, Mr. Braun’s improv bits on Instagram poke fun at the ridiculousness of social media and the way users engage with it. During quarantine, he wrote a pop-punk pandemic anthem, created a gibberish NFT (which was put up for auction by a fan), and hypothetically asked out Kim Kardashian, prompting multiple rounds of headlines and a follow-up video. Recently, he shared an Instagram Story “to thank everyone for their outpouring of support for my root canal situation,” riffing on a certain genre of fan appreciation video.
In Mr. Braun’s opinion, it’s difficult to show who you are online without relying on tropes or flattening parts of yourself into a brand, “like, ‘guys do this,’ ‘girls do this,’ ‘cool guys do this, ‘DJ guys do this,’” he says. He is an avid film photographer but prefers to keep his favorite pictures for himself. If he posts too many, he says, “then I’m just photography guy.”
Still, his diaristic snaps of downtown Manhattan give fans a window into the types of details he notices around the city. “I tend to find humor in things no matter what they are,” Mr. Braun says. Recently, he started shouting out street performers, encouraging followers to send them tips via Venmo or Cash App. The account is remarkably candid, despite being mostly ironic and showing little of his personal life.
A flair for the arts seems to run in his family. His father, Craig Braun, is best known for designing provocative album covers for the Rolling Stones and the Velvet Underground. “He was wearing crazy outfits and going hard at these parties, and had eight Porches,” Mr. Braun says. “I don’t think of myself as that guy.” Growing up, Mr. Braun lived with his mother and younger brother in Fairfield, Conn. By the 1990s, his father was working a corporate job and starting to act. “His life was changing so he didn’t have the eight Porsches anymore. He crashed a couple of them. He crashed a plane.”
Acting became a father-son bonding activity. As a teenager Mr. Braun booked
projects like “Sky High,” “Princess Protection Program,” and “10 Things I Hate About You.” From there, he appeared in comedies before landing critically-acclaimed projects like “Succession” and “Zola.”
For fun, Mr. Braun writes music; though he has a deal with Atlantic Records, he’s in no rush to release anything. “I’m in this gestating process where I’m trying to figure out what I want to say.” He says the best dialogue, too, has a musicality to it. “Where are the turns? Where does it move? If you’re writing a scene, or preparing a scene that has been written for you, what are the notes? Because it can’t just be the same note through the whole thing. It’s kind of all musical, I think.” He pauses. “That might sound lame to say.”
Mr. Braun hopes to establish himself as a multi-hyphenate. At any given time, he says, he has “10 plates spinning,” and focuses intensely on a project before finishing or tabling it. He has long wanted to produce music and direct, and the pandemic offered time to experiment while work on the third season of “Succession” was postponed.
During the early months, Mr. Braun self-isolated at a friend’s guesthouse. He treated the alone time like a writer’s residency. “I thought, ‘I have a little kitchen, I’m going to make breakfast every day, I’m going to meditate, and then I’m going to write for three hours a day or however long I feel like writing.’”
Since shooting “Zola,” he had been maintaining a file of ideas inspired by his own and friends’ dating experiences; during quarantine, he expanded those snippets into a full-length screenplay. “I feel like I see some people ram themselves down the road of marriage and family and permanent lifestyle with someone, maybe if it’s not the right time or the right person,” Mr. Braun says, a trend that serves as the film’s premise. He plans to star in and direct the passion project, and says he’ll be able to make it “cheaply and soon,” depending on his coming schedule.
This summer, he will continue filming the third season of “Succession.” Unable to comment on the brewing civil war in the Roy family, he reassures that “a little bit more of Cousin Greg’s personal life gets rounded out, which is good.”
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In the first two seasons, the audience only ever encounters Greg in the context of the Waystar clan. “He does have a life outside of it. You have to,” Mr. Braun says. “You can’t always just be knocking on Kendall’s door, asking ‘What are you doing tonight?’ You’ve got to have some friends. He’s not getting after-work beers with Tom,” especially now that Tom (presumably) knows Greg salvaged those incriminating, kerosene-soaked documents.
There is one thing, ironically, that Mr. Braun can’t quite figure out: Twitter, the birthplace of “Zola.” “I don’t know how to engage with it, you know?” he says, appearing genuinely bewildered. “I look at my mentions every once in a while, and I’m like, ‘What the hell? What do I do with any of this?’”
But on Instagram, he flexes “a weird part of my brain that maybe makes me an individual,” he says. “I just want people to try and get an actual sense of me.”
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