Jesus wept. Nearly two millennia later, American psychologist Richard Lazarus theorized the human ability to cognate stimuli via the process of “coping mechanisms.” Half a century followed, and mastermind thriller author Harlan Coben has crafted a surrealist psychodrama series that prods at the inner workings of human grief by way of a paranormally gifted forensic psychiatrist. Lazarus’s story is one as human as our capacity for empathy and for imagination; it’s a story that refuses to stop being told. 

Who better to reify the name to a modern audience than affable British heartthrob and leading man of the last fifteen years, Sam Claflin? 

“Naturally speaking, cycles do often repeat themselves,” Claflin grins from a living room in New York City on a late August morning. The actor, who stars alongside Bill Nighy and Alexandra Roach in Coben’s Lazarus as the aforementioned psychiatrist uncovering the truth about his sister’s brutal murder and his father’s sudden suicide via cold case files and a sudden onset of necromancy, finds himself drawn to the circularity of human behavior—in large part because he believes that any cycle can be severed: “I love the nature of repetition, and the cycle of destiny and fate,” he ponders, “But people are able to break it, you know?” 

Claflin, who first entered the global public’s consciousness in the fourth installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise as love-sodden missionary Phillip Swift, became well-known throughout the 2010s for his impish embodiment of Finnick Odair in The Hunger Games franchise. The actor’s earnestness, something to do with an open-faced vulnerability and perhaps more shallowly, a mop of coppery hair and a signature crooked smile, saw him a staple in the romantic sphere with an ability to tug at the heartstrings of his viewers—he lived (and, quite frequently, died) onscreen in a spate of heart-wrenching films—in Love, Rosie, Me Before You, Adrift. Sam Claflin has, more than likely, made you cry.

If you’ve cried because of Sam Claflin, you should know he’s made himself cry, too. Claflin hasn’t ever sought out any particular throughline in any of the roles he pursues—in fact, he claims he selects jobs with  “no real rhyme or reason,”—but if a script moves him, “it’s a sign.” This is evidenced in Claflin’s dramatic roles in the years following the franchise sweetheart streak—as fascist Oswald Mosley in Peaky Blinders, and as Lieutenant Hawkins in The Nightingale (a role he’s described as “traumatizing” for its intensity and requisite violence, in which he plays a police officer that rapes and murders Aboriginal people in the struggle for supremacy.)

“At the beginning of my career—and I’m not by any means complaining—I had these incredible opportunities to work on these huge budget productions,” Claflin reflects. “I felt that in those types of movies there was so much riding on whether or not I did a good job, and it terrified me to a point where I [wanted] to do more independent movies, to prove that there were more strings to my bow…I wanted to play people that weren’t me, that I could hide behind, to show everyone that I was a real actor,” he says. “Daisy Jones & The Six was the introduction to a different side of me. I’ve now realized I connect with [roles] where I lean into my experiences and my emotions and use them as my superpower, rather than try to hide behind [an unrecognizable] mask.” 

Indeed, Claflin’s 2023 turn as rock star Billy Dunne in limited series Daisy Jones & The Six saw Claflin reckoning with fame and growing old in ways that felt familiar. The show, a fictionalized rendering of a rock band loosely based on the story of Fleetwood Mac and the Laurel Canyon artist collectives of the 1970s, saw Claflin with a newer, harder edge—it was not his character’s charm cast to the forefront, drawing viewers in and coaxing them into their own complexity, but rather Billy Dunne’s failures, his inabilities to be faithful or successful or good or honest, that earned Claflin—alongside co-star Riley Keough—several 2024 Golden Globe nominations. 

Claflin’s working “superpower,” as he describes it, is self-recognition. It’s a power supplemented by his ongoing work of self-discovery, well-documented on his social media pages (see: an Instagram highlight labelled “books” featuring titles The Let Them Theory, It Begins With You, Atomic Habits, The Untethered Soul). We speak of generational pattern breaking, and Claflin mentions lessons he’s picked up from controversial celebrity guru Jay Shetty. He shows me another book placed just outside of the camera frame, Sarah Wilson’s First, We Make The Beast Beautiful  (“This is to start reading today because I finished another book yesterday,” he qualifies.) 

When speaking about his role as Laz in the forthcoming Coben series, Claflin utters words like “toxic” and “gaslighting.” His is a vocabulary audiences have grown familiar with over the past decade, a behavioral nomenclature for the twenty-first century, employed—to its own detriment at times—as a tool towards understanding the mysteries of human obstinacy. 

This curious tension, that between the naming of a behavior and the use of the name to invoke guilt and fear, makes Coben’s Lazarus all the more interesting: in it, Coben explores the role of the psychologist, a supposed locus of reason and pathos in the lives of the most vulnerable, and the textures of power the expert is able to exert upon there subjects as it pairs with the structures of familial power. If the horror genre holds a mirror to the anxieties of the modern public, the vessel through which thrill is delivered in Lazarus speaks to our reactions to those anxieties: Claflin as Laz, and Nighy as his father Dr. L, examine questions of inheritance between father and son, but between doctor and patient, between memory and reality. 

“I think as much as we all think that we love being in control, we also love to be controlled,” Claflin says of the genre. “[We watch things that make us uncomfortable] because it’s about letting go of control.” Lazarus, then, presents an interesting conundrum at the crux of the viewing public’s psyche: more generally, why do we love seeing what Claflin would describe as “toxic” characters onscreen? Despite our insistence on apprehending and rectifying these behaviors in reality, why do we feel, desperately, more than anything, gripped by characters and plotlines that represent the most vulnerable parts of ourselves—like with Billy Dunne, or with Laz? How have we arrived at describing human fault as “toxic”? 

“Listen, when you lie to yourself to such an extent that you then start believing the lie,” Claflin reasons, “that’s a toxic behavior. It’s a sort of inability to be authentic and honest, for fear of hurting people’s feelings in the moment, including your own,” he says. It’s an uncomfortable sentiment, one that he feels intimately acquainted with, and one that he’s identifying in himself as he raises two young children.

“I feel like the world has sort of lost its way quite drastically. The media, generally speaking, has me feeling like I’m living in a thriller regularly,” he laughs. His children, 7 and 9, aren’t oversaturated by media (Claflin jests that parenthood has made him question media rating systems: “There are films that are PG, [and I catch myself thinking] ‘How is this PG?’ he laughs). 

On a more serious note, Claflin has been reckoning with the desperate loss of authenticity in the institution of media—whether it may be entertainment media or news. Though he acknowledges his own role as a player and active participant in the industry of storytelling, Claflin feels it necessary to level with his role as an actor: “I love my job. It’s a huge passion of mine, but we’re not saving lives. We’re entertaining people,” he asserts. It’s a question he says he gets asked quite frequently—How should one engage with your show? What do you hope people take away from the work? 

“Well, I hope they’re entertained,” he smiles. 

Claflin seems to mean it in earnest: this is the greatest paradox of our collective desire to consume. The stories we see on our screens can be allegorical, they can give rise to questions about the deeper meaning of life and relationships, they can encourage within us a desire to examine our own lives, our own moral failures and endeavors to understand each other—but, at the heart of it all, we want to be entertained by these truths. Our own moral failures, embodied onscreen by one British actor, can be our paths to happiness—at least for a couple of hours. 

Sam Claflin holds both realities with equal weight. After all, as Richard Lazarus once theorized, “We have one mind, and it contains both thought and feeling…There is nothing more human than our reason and our emotions.”

Photographed by Dean Isidro at Atelier Management

Styled by Charlie Ward at See Management

Written by Annie Bush

Grooming: Ryann Carter at Opus Beauty

Cinematography: Alex Dekelbaum 

Flaunt Film Editor: Roberto De Jesus