Skyler Gisondo has been the comic relief in Booksmart , the exasperated son in The Righteous Gemstones , and the plucky sidekick Jimmy Olsen in last summer’s Superman , a reliable and always welcome screen presence since he began his career in a Pizza Hut commercial at the age of six. Gisondo has been working pretty much non-stop since, but Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime gives the Florida native something entirely new to chew on as Dan, an aspiring actor infatuated with Robert Pattinson’s Chris Hansen until his hero worship gives way to real disillusionment. A day after the movie’s release, Gisondo got on a call with Woody Harrelson, who he acted with recently, to talk about getting thrown out of your comfort zone, the rush of foil surfing, and that time he got stoned out of his mind in Santa Monica.
SATURDAY 12:45 PM SEPTEMBER 25, 2026 ATLANTA
SKYLER GISONDO: Thank you for making the time.
WOODY HARRELSON: Oh, you’re welcome. I mean, it was a sacrifice. I couldn’t wake and bake today like I wanted.
GISONDO: [Laughs] I’m sorry about that. Where are you?
HARRELSON: We’re in New York. Dude, I watched Primetime , and what a fucking movie. Your performance is extraordinary.
GISONDO: That means so much coming from you. I was terrified the entire time. I told the director in our first meeting, “I don’t know what you’ve seen of mine that made you think I could do this.” I don’t think any of us knew what kind of movie we were making. Because Lance came from the documentary world, things were always changing and alive. If he and the cinematographer got super into one element of a scene, it would become all about that.
HARRELSON: How do you mean? Give me an example.
GISONDO: Rob was always just shot out of a cannon, so if he did something physically different or walked somewhere else in the scene and it was an interesting frame or an image, Lance would be like, “Sky, go over there.” He’s just calling out from video village and it kind of broke my brain at first. You can never have too much of a game plan.
HARRELSON: That’s exciting. I don’t know if I’m supposed to keep it under wraps, but you come in halfway through the season in Brothers . I didn’t realize how good you were until we were on set together and the funniest things you came up with. I’m not even sure in the actual final mix whether they got your best stuff because you did so many cool things and were always unpredictable.
GISONDO: Going into that experience, I was so damn nervous because you’re such a hero of mine. I had not had that much fun, in I don’t know how long.
HARRELSON: You inspired me to be more open to just trying new shit, because you were so free.
HARRELSON: Anyway, I wanted to go back, because if you look at your IMDb page, you never stop working, but I know you struggled your first five years, because you didn’t start working until you were six, so you had that five-year struggle. [Laughs] How did you get through that period?
GISONDO: [Laughs] Odd jobs, I picked up what I could. The truth is, I would’ve started earlier if I could have. I was born in Florida, and my parents were oceanic engineers.
HARRELSON: I was going to ask you about that. What was that like?
GISONDO: My dad would go offshore, and back in those days, it was all about fiber optic cables on the ocean floor during the early days of the internet. So I wouldn’t really get to go be with him because he’d be off on barges in the craziest places, dealing with heavy machinery, but we’d get to sometimes visit job sites, and I loved it. I was so taken by just the scale of the stuff that he was doing. But even though that’s what they were into, for whatever reason, I was obsessed with movies. I don’t know how I got the idea in my head that that was within the realm of possibility. It did tie in because my dad had a project in Hermosa Beach, so the whole family came as a vacation, and because we were in L.A. and I’d been incessantly begging my mom to let me be on TV, she was like, “You know what? I’m going to take him to an agency. Maybe they’ll take him on an audition, and at the very least, he’ll stop bothering us about.”
HARRELSON: Once he gets rejected a couple times.
GISONDO: [Laughs] Exactly. And fortunately, the first thing was a Pizza Hut commercial. I went, and it was like a cattle call. There were a hundred kids there. I got it, and my dad thought it was a scam. He was like, “How much is this going to cost us? What’s going on?” And somehow, it worked out. After six long, difficult years of not working, I finally got my big break there.
HARRELSON: [Laughs] Well, you’re so interesting to watch. I feel like you always see your motors turning and you see you thinking, like in Primetime , really, just such good solid work, so strong.
HARRELSON: Cinematically, it is beautiful. Don’t you think?
GISONDO: I would look at the monitor and think every frame of this movie looks like a painting, and I can’t believe I get to go step into it. You see yourself on the monitor and you think, “I’ve never even seen myself in a world like this.” I don’t know if you felt this way, but usually when I’m watching stuff that I’m in, inevitably I’m like, “Why’d they use that take?” And with Lance, it was the opposite. I was watching thinking like, “Man, I don’t know where he found that. That looks awesome. I don’t remember doing that!”
HARRELSON: That’s where you get to feel so lucky, all those elements coming together. And your man, Robbie Pattinson, fantastic. He continues to surprise me how good he is.
GISONDO: Lance said it best: he jumps off a cliff in every take. There’s this electricity coursing through him that bleeds into every scene, into every other actor on set. Being in a scene with Rob, he gets you completely out of your own head, and you’re just present. Thankfully, there was always this meta thing going on that would work for the scenes and for the character, because I was coming in as somebody in awe of Rob, and then Dan is somebody in awe of Chris, thinking Chris is ten feet tall.
GISONDO: So it was helpful, that kind of nervousness. Going in, I thought maybe he’s going to be really heady and he’s this actor’s-actor kind of guy. Man, he could just go in and out of shit so easily. He would give you the most specific, craziest performance in a take, and then he was out of it. He was just Rob, and he could talk about it.
HARRELSON: He’s not one who stays constantly in character.
GISONDO: No, man. It’s like a light switch. Sometimes I feel like there’s some imposter syndrome for me that stems from—you see the way certain actors talk about acting or think about it, and you’re like, “Man, I don’t really think about it that way, so maybe I’m not that kind of actor.” But then seeing how it looked for Rob, I was reminded this can really take on any kind of shape. There’s no rules. There’s no one methodology.
HARRELSON: Well, your choices are great. This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time.
HARRELSON: I mean, there’s good movies out there, but this thing is superlative.
GISONDO: It’s funny, when we were making it people would ask, “How’s it going?” I would always say, “It’s definitely going to be the coolest thing I’ve been a part of. I don’t know how many people are going to see it because it’s so weird.” It’s been so cool to see people really respond to it. It ended up being, in some weird way, a more accessible movie than I think we thought it would be.
HARRELSON: How was Venice? Did they go crazy for it?
GISONDO: The crowd responded. We were all soaring after that, man. And you get the ovation, which is awesome, but nobody prepared me for how awkward it is. They’re clapping, but you’re clapping too.
HARRELSON: You’re like, “Okay, let’s get out of here. What?”
GISONDO: I didn’t know what to do. I just kept asking Rob, “How long, man?” He’s like, “You just keep going. You just keep doing it.” That whole day was one big out-of-body experience.
HARRELSON: I think that you’re probably going to be on the [award] circuit with this. It’s going to get nominated for everything.
GISONDO: It never entered my consciousness that this was that kind of movie, or that it was within the realm of possibility. And seeing that sentiment out there, I literally feel like I was playing pickup basketball at the YMCA or something, and on the way to the parking lot, a scout from the Lakers stopped me and was like, “Hey, man, we’d love to have you to the facility.” At no point in time were any of us like, “If this goes great, there could be an awards conversation.”
HARRELSON: And you worked with Jennifer Lawrence back in 2009.
GISONDO: That’s so funny. We were on the last of a dying breed of live-audience, four-camera sitcoms called The Bill Engvall Show . I was nine the first season, and she was fifteen, and it was in between the second and third season that she did Winter’s Bone and became this enormous movie star.
GISONDO: We fought like real brothers and sisters, because we were those ages where we were always getting on each other’s nerves. Looking back now, it’s so funny that she went from The Bill Engvall Show to Academy Award winner within a few years. I haven’t seen her since, but hopefully one day we could reminisce about The Bill Engvall Show . I don’t know how many people have seen it.
GISONDO: I’ll get you the episodes. [Laughs] No, you don’t need to. I wouldn’t say that you missed an enormously important show, but it was fun.
HARRELSON: Are your parents still living in Florida, or did they move to California?
GISONDO: Yeah, when we moved out here, that was it. We never went back. I grew up in Manhattan Beach, and my mom’s still there.
HARRELSON: So you’re still living in Manhattan Beach?
GISONDO: I’m close. I’m on the West Side, but I live ten minutes from her. I like being close to the water, because I’m surfing most days or getting on the foil.
GISONDO: Yeah. Have you done that out in Hawaii?
GISONDO: It’s the most fun in the world. You feel like you’re flying. It’s like snowboarding on a powder day, that weightlessness.
HARRELSON: I’m going to do that with you next time we’re both in California.
GISONDO: I would love that. I just got a second one, so we could go, and I just started surfing with it too. The one I have is from this company Flite.
HARRELSON: Orlando was telling me about Flite. Orlando Bloom, he’s got the same. I was using the Lift, and I like that, but he said, “No, the Flite’s better.”
GISONDO: I think so. They kind of scare me though. You get going fast, and it’s no joke hitting the water at those speeds.
HARRELSON: Especially when you fall towards the fin. I just missed the fin three weeks ago. I’ve got enough trouble with the betrayal of my looks that I don’t need to have this fin crease across my forehead or something.
GISONDO: I think you’d look cool, man, showing up with a big-ass scar.
HARRELSON: You’re very kind. But anyway, what else should we talk about? You also got Meet the Fockers, or not Meet the Fockers . What’s it called?
GISONDO: Awesome. I worked with Ben when I was 17 on a Night at the Museum movie, and that was a formative experience, so to get to reunite with Ben 12 years later was awesome.
GISONDO: And then of course, Robert De Niro. It felt insane to be in the same room as him, let alone doing scenes with him. And Ariana Grande was so great.
GISONDO: It is so beyond me what she’s able to do. She’s one of the greatest singers ever, and then deeply funny. On top of all of that, she was so generous and deferential. We’d be working on stuff and she’d be like, “Whatever you think.” And I was like, “You’re Ariana Grande. We can go with whatever you want.”
HARRELSON: I just was hanging out with Bob, he’s such a sweet—
HARRELSON: Yeah. We went over to his house here in New York, and nine dogs came to the door. They’re these little dogs, they get to do whatever they want. Thinking about Bob De Niro, you don’t think of him inside of this world with a zillion dogs.
GISONDO: Everybody calls him Bob, which I learned very quickly, but I could not bring myself to. I was calling him Mr. De Niro because anything else would’ve felt insane. I started to feel weird, I could sense he wanted me to just call him Bob. At the end of the first week, I switched. I was like, “Alright, Bob, thanks so much for a great week.” I could be reading too much into it, but I think he was proud of me at that moment.
HARRELSON: [Laughs] Well, dude, it’s a pleasure. Is there anything more fun than press? Goddamn it, it’s so fun!
GISONDO: [Laughs] At the end of Fockers , we were doing a poster shoot, and it was a long day of awkwardness. At one point I said to Ben, “How you doing, man?” And he’s like, “Great. The only reason I do the movies is so we can do this.” He’s so over it.
HARRELSON: I had a revelation this time, and it was helpful that I was doing most of it with Matthew McConaughey I’m stuck for an answer, no problem, look to your left. Here he goes. He’s like the ultimate quarterback. But I had this realization, because part of the big problem is you don’t want to feel like a salesman. It’s not your job to be a salesman.
HARRELSON: So when you do these things, you just ride the moment. In a way, it don’t matter if you talk about the project, you ride the wave.
GISONDO: I remember once you said to me when we were at The Woods—I don’t know, we can cut that if you don’t want it, but you said something to me about—
HARRELSON: The Woods, you mean the world’s most beautiful dispensary on Santa Monica in WeHo?
GISONDO: [Laughs] In Santa Monica. We were there that night, and, I haven’t even talked to you about this after, but I don’t smoke weed for real, for real. So going into that night, I was like, “I know if I smoke in a public setting like this, I’m going to freak out.” But as soon as I got there and you handed me a joint, that all went out the window, because as you know, you’re on the Mount Rushmore of the coolest people in the world to accept a joint from. It’s like you and Willie Nelson. I took the tiniest baby hit, and within ten minutes, I was as stoned as I’ve ever been in my entire life. I was sitting there freaking out, and you said to me, “You got to ride the boat, brother. You got to ride the boat.” And I’ve had that mantra. It’s something I’ve said to myself in press when the days get long and I feel myself starting to zone out a little bit. I literally, I think, “You just got to ride the boat, brother. You just got to ride the boat.”
HARRELSON: [Laughs] Thanks, buddy. It’s always a pleasure being around you. I love your appreciation for life and for the life you’ve been given and your studiousness and your hard work. It shows so much in Primetime .
GISONDO: Woody, you are the absolute man. I’m going to bottle up this moment, I feel like I could run through a brick wall right now. You’ve fired me up.
HARRELSON: I’ll be in touch with you. We’ll be back in November, so maybe we can get out in the water. It’d be nice and cool then.
Source: Fashion
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