“Justified” actor Damon Herriman has found himself in a pretty interesting position here in 2019: he’s been typecast as Charles Manson, playing the notorious cult leader in both Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, now playing in theaters, and the upcoming second season of Netflix’s “Mindhunter,” arriving on August 16th.
In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Herriman plays a young Charles Manson in the year 1969, while “Mindhunter” will see him playing an incarcerated Manson in the 1980s. In the latest episode of the Back to One podcast, Herriman talks playing double duty as a real-life madman, touching upon the vast differences between the two versions of the same character.
“Mindhunter came first,” Herriman told the show’s hosts. “[Charles Manson] is in jail at that point. So yeah, it’s different. Because of that age gap. Manson, in the Tarantino movie, is pre-jail, and he’s kind of in his court jester… out there just living on the ranch and taking drugs and having sex. He’s in that sort of whole cult life world. And then in jail, he’s an incredibly bitter, angry man. A certain lightness existed in him in the early stuff…he doesn’t feel like the same guy anymore when you see him in jail. He looks pretty pissed off most of the time.”
“The closest thing I can think of to him is a homeless person,” Herriman continued, speaking about getting inside the mind of Manson for the Netflix series. “Maybe someone with schizophrenia that you see talking to themselves on the street. A lot of his interviews have that sense, where [he’s] just spouting stuff that doesn’t make sense. Other times it does make sense, like a lot of sense. So clearly the guy was mentally ill. I’ve read and watched a whole hell of a lot; I still don’t really know what made him tick.”
After filming “Mindhunter,” Herriman found himself as a younger version of Charles Manson on the set of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, with Quentin Tarantino directing him.
“[Tarantino] knew that I had done it, because obviously it would’ve been weird to keep that a secret,” Herriman explained. “But he didn’t ask about any of it. He certainly didn’t say, ‘I want you to do something different.’ But there was enough already that I found that was different about him. And I looked different in that too.”
Herriman only plays Manson for one brief scene in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but he noted in the interview that he did shoot an additional scene that didn’t make the cut.