When did Christopher Abbott first read John Steinbeck? Well, the actor knows what he’s supposed to say.
Abbott remembers being assigned East of Eden during high school, where many readers first discover the great American writer’s work. He just… never
did the assignment. “I wasn’t a good student by any stretch of the imagination,” Abbott tells Rolling Stone.
It took a cross-country trip with musician friends — driving their tour van and slinging a few T-shirts — for Abbott to pick up a Steinbeck book of his volition. He started with Travels With Charley, a nod to life on the road, but eventually found his way to East of Eden, which he now considers one of his favorite novels. Now, the actor has returned to Steinbeck’s epic tale of generational trauma, betrayal, and forgiveness. Abbott stars as Adam Trask in Netflix’s eight-episode adaptation, created by Zoe Kazan and released earlier this month. While the show follows Adam through his entire life, from youthful competition with his brother to his stilted attempts at parenting to his eventual deathbed, the main story is the push and pull between Adam and his wife, the cunning and often villainous Cathy Ames, played by Florence Pugh.
“[Adam’s] lost. He’s this vagabond living out in the world, and the relationship with his brother makes him come back home,” Abbott says. “Then all of sudden, this wounded bird shows up. Adam recognizes something in Cathy. He thinks they’re these two wounded people finding each other that would keep each other safe, to a fault.”
Abbott had his breakout moment with the HBO millennial comedy Girls, playing Marnie’s shapeshifting, obsequious boyfriend Charlie. Since then, he’s tackled everything from minor features to standout supporting work in films like Vox Lux, Sanctuary, Poor Things, and The Testament of Ann Lee, making even brief appearances onscreen feel memorable. But this year, his career has taken a big leap: In February, he was nominated for his first Tony Award for playing Biff Loman in the revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of Salesman. Following East of Eden was a surprise cameo in Nathan Fielder’s genre-bending documentary You Can See Everything. And in August, it was announced that he would be taking on the role of Charles Xavier (Professor X) in the highly anticipated X-Men reboot expected in 2028. That project, in particular, could turn Abbott into a household name. But that’s a prospect he doesn’t seem too pressed to interrogate at the moment.
“I’m not really thinking about [fame] that much,” he says. “I don’t feel like I’m particularly famous. It hasn’t been this sudden exponential jump in anything. My life is pretty simple. I just walk around and do errands. I don’t know what’s going on out there.”
While Abbott demurs about the more glamorous trappings of the gig, he’s clear that he was excited about the “big challenge” East of Eden presented. Diehard fans of the book might not recognize some aspects of Abbott’s Adam — firstly because he’s the physical opposite of how Steinbeck describes the character. (Adam is written as fair and blonde, while his more morally gray, often physically violent brother Charles is described as having darker hair and features.) The change even threw Abbott at first. “I thought maybe the email was wrong, and or Zoe said it wrong,” he says of learning which role Kazan envisioned him for. “I sort of typecasted myself at first.” But the choice was intentional, and based on reasoning Abbott quickly came to understand.
“All the allegorical themes in East of Eden are very much playing with opposites,” he says. “The series and all the characters are playing with a lot of duality. What one presents as is not necessarily what one’s inherent nature is.”
At its core, East of Eden is a richly layered philosophical debate played out over three generations of one family — and largely through one of the most mysterious characters in the American literary canon in Cathy. Seven decades since the novel’s publication, there is still no consensus around this woman who manipulates Adam and eventually abandons their family, leaving him with the children she never had any interest in mothering. Is she a remorseless monster? Is she a victim shaped by trauma? Can she be both at the same time?
Abbott says one of the hurdles in portraying Adam was trying to grasp the rationale behind his choices. Cathy is clear that she’s uninterested in a quiet life on a California farm. But Adam pushes her, only to be blindsided when she flees. “Adam can be, especially later in life, very naive,” Abbott says. “He’s becoming his father while looking for a replacement for his mother, who he didn’t have. He thinks he thinks he finds that in Cathy, and he’s so overwhelmed by that feeling that sometimes he hears what he wants to hear.”
It’s difficult, knotty material, but Abbott praises Pugh for making the volatile and ill-fated relationship feel deeply lived-in. “My litmus test for any actor is, ‘Are they there in the room with you?’ I love when actors are just present, when [they] want to play tennis and really be in the room with you,” Abbott says. “Florence does that to the nth degree. She’s one of the most present actors I’ve ever worked with.”
The grand sweep of the story means that in eight episodes Abbott plays versions of Adam over 30 years of his life. He has to exude youth and then shed it as Adam becomes scarred by betrayals and painful rifts with his family. Perhaps his greatest achievement in the series is the feeling of dead-eyed despair he brings to Adam’s later years. It lingers on him after Cathy’s departure, as the family caretaker, Lee (Hoon Lee), raises Adam’s children, and his close friends beg him not to waste his life. It suffuses every word he says and glance he takes at the gorgeous Salinas skyline. And Adam’s biggest fight — and ultimately, his most significant choice — is to slowly let it go in the series’ final scene.
“When [Adam’s] closer to his deathbed, he realizes who he’s become and how he became the father his father was to him. All of a sudden, life went by for him without even noticing it. That’s the devastating realization for Adam,” Abbott says. “But then to close the Cathy chapter of his life, to release that, it’s heartbreaking and poetic and allegorical. It’s epic.”
It may be that Abbott was able to bring added gravitas to the part as he’s going through his own life transformation at the moment. The actor welcomed a daughter with his partner, Aubrey Plaza, earlier this year. But don’t think he’s taking any lessons on parenting from Steinbeck’s story.
“I think East of Eden is a little too dramatic and biblical and crazy for me. I’m not drawing from the show for this part of my life,” he says with a laugh. “[Fatherhood], it’s still quite new. Sleeping is a thing that I was never really good at anyway, so I’m par for the course at this point. I don’t like to talk too much about personal family stuff, but it’s just amazing. It’s like the best movie ever.”
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