“Did we go to school together?” That’s the standard line Kyle Gallner has come to expect whenever a stranger approaches him.
Most likely the answer is no. But Gallner’s face — a composition of soulful features that can evoke the warmth of a hometown friend or the volatility of a maniac — is familiar after more than 20 years onscreen.
As a teenager, he landed arcs on TV shows like “Smallville” and “Veronica Mars.” Then came “Jennifer’s Body” (playing a sensitive Goth kid who gets eaten alive by Megan Fox), “A Nightmare on Elm Street” (the 2010 remake), “The Haunting in Connecticut,” “Dear White People,” and perhaps his most widely seen role, the police detective Joel in the “Smile” franchise.
But, for the most part, Gallner has managed to fly under the radar. While horror fans have anointed him a “scream king,” some of his most impressive performances have been in offbeat films that have found only small but impassioned audiences, like “Dinner in America,” “Strange Darling” and “The Passenger.”
“There has been some real interesting stuff that’s come my way,” he said over an omelet and tea at a bustling West Hollywood hotel restaurant. “Or, I’ve been willing to take a shot on things that maybe other people wouldn’t want to take a shot on.”
Seeing a single tintype portrait of Gallner was all it took for the “Dinner in America” writer-director Adam Carter Rehmeier to want to cast him as the lead in his 2020 dark comedy “Dinner in America.”
“He looked almost like James Dean,” Rehmeier said in a phone interview. “He had a certain vulnerability to him but also this sort of bad boy thing, and I was obsessed.” As a punk-rock misfit named Simon, Gallner spends the entirety of that film roaming around ’90s suburbia in a half-mullet, seething with rage and vibrating with madcap energy. After premiering at Sundance, the film struggled with a limited theatrical run in 2022. But, thanks to TikTok and a grass-roots push by Gallner to set up fan screenings, it has since found a cult following.
“You sit in on some of those screenings and they’re like little rock concerts. People are yelling lines and laughing,” Gallner said. “It’s really special and really rare.”
Now, Gallner and Rehmeier have reunited on “Carolina Caroline” (in theaters). The delicate, emotional drama follows a pair of con-artist lovers (Gallner, Samara Weaving) as they crisscross America and engage in increasingly high-stakes crimes. It allowed both actors to show what they can do when they break out of the horror fare for which they’ve become known.
“You get put into a box. Ninety-nine percent of the stuff that comes across my desk is going to be a horror movie,” Gallner said. “Adam has really helped in a way where people have been able to see me with a different set of eyes because he lets me do the roles that other people don’t.”
Growing up in West Chester, Penn., where his father owned a company that bought and sold audio visual equipment and his mother was a hairdresser, “I was a little skate rat punk,” Gallner said. “I started drinking in basements at 14 and causing problems and garage hopping.”
Gallner was born with an atrial septal defect and pulmonary stenosis, essentially a hole in his heart and a faulty valve, leading to open-heart surgery when he was 4 years old, and again at 21. It didn’t slow him down.
When his older sister became interested in performing, a 14-year-old Gallner tagged along as the family explored acting opportunities in Philadelphia and New York.
His first movie audition was, he thinks, for the lead in a Disney Channel film, “Miracle in Lane 2,” which eventually went to Frankie Muniz. But that audition led to representation, which led to the start of his professional acting career.
After he graduated high school with an abysmal G.P.A. — “I wasn’t destined for higher education,” he said — he moved to the Los Angeles area and began taking acting classes while simultaneously booking roles.
By his mid-20s, however, his life was in shambles. Following his early TV and film success, his career seemed to be stalling, and he had begun drinking heavily. “I was a disaster,” he said.
At one point, his then-girlfriend, Tara Ferguson, “basically was like, ‘You’re a terrible person. I never want to see you again,’” he recalled. But soon after, Ferguson called to let him know that she was pregnant. Gallner decided to get sober and “shape up,” he said, and the two have now been married for 11 years and have two sons, 11 and 13.
“I was probably on my way to maybe even being dead by 30,” he said. “It turned everything around.”
Over the past decade, Gallner has focused on choosing — and fighting for — interesting parts, regardless of the size of the film. They included playing the Demon in “Strange Darling,” a twisty 2024 thriller that the Times review described as “an impertinent rebuke to genre clichés and our own preprogrammed assumptions.”
Gallner’s performance, which involved wielding a shotgun, snorting drugs and embarking on a dizzying cat-and-mouse chase, “felt very alive and very iconic,” his “Strange Darling” co-star Willa Fitzgerald said in a phone interview. “The consistency with Kyle is that he always just goes for it.”
Sosie Bacon, who starred with Gallner in “Smile” and “Cotton Fever,” a meditative drama about the cycles of drug addiction that premiered at this year’s Tribeca Festival, similarly praised his commitment.
“There is a generousness to Kyle’s performance style that honestly can be sort of hard to come by,” Bacon said in a phone interview. “It’s really amazing when somebody doesn’t have their own agenda of what they want their performance to be but is instead committed to serving the full story.”
Gallner views these roles as the beginning of the “second half” of his career, he said. He recently filmed the horror film “Inground,” about a swimming pool turned nightmare, and he’s attached to a new thriller from the “Strange Darling” director JT Mollner in which he’ll star opposite Brie Larson.
“Horror just became something that fell into my lap, and it’s been really, really good to me,” he said. “I’ll still do genre stuff, but I really would love to dig into other things, as well.”
His dog is named Indiana after Indiana Jones, and Gallner is eager to do action-adventure, sci-fi, fantasy films or other bigger studio projects. “Give me a sword,” he said. “Let’s go.”
Rehmeier, the “Carolina Caroline” director, would also like to see Gallner get more industry recognition.
“I don’t think that there’s anything that he can’t tackle. He’s just that versatile, and he’s a chameleon,” Rehmeier said. “I think he’s underused in Hollywood. He’s proven himself, and he’s perfectly poised to take on leading man roles in bigger films.”
Gallner and his family now live in the same Pennsylvania county in which he grew up. When he’s not away filming, he said, “I’m taking my kids to their lacrosse games, or I’m trying to fix a hole in my pond at home or walking in the woods.”
He’s also getting used to strangers knowing his name.
“It’s happening more now where people come up and go, ‘Are you Kyle Gallner?’” he said. “I’m not getting mobbed or anything like that, but you can see things are shifting.”
