The Cut did an interview with Nick about A Teacher. Read it below.

THE CUT – You probably know Nick Robinson best from the 2018 hit Love Simon, a rom-com in which he plays a closeted high-school kid who grapples with his identity while falling in love with a classmate. After the film, the 25-year-old — who has played teenage characters for a decade — told Ellen DeGeneres that he was done playing younger roles.

But then A Teacher came along with a very different high-school story. Written and directed by Hannah Fidell, the show follows an English teacher (Kate Mara) who begins a sexual relationship with her 17-year-old student, Eric, played by Robinson.

It’s adapted from Fidell’s 2013 film of the same name, but while the original film ends when the relationship ends, the series takes it several steps further, exploring consequences for the abuser and the long-term trauma experienced by the survivor. As such, we see the former Disney star take on much darker material than ever before. The Cut spoke to Robinson about playing a male survivor, all of those queasy sex scenes, and how Me Too made A Teacher possible.

What drew you to this role, especially given that you’d sworn off of teen roles?

I was pretty hesitant, but there were a lot of interesting concepts to be explored through the lens of this relationship. With Eric’s character, specifically, we put a lens on male survivors of sexual abuse, and how there could be a double standard there, as well as the tricky nature of consent. It felt like a complicated and timely story.

You were very good in the role — convincing to the point where I found it upsetting to watch! How did you prepare for it? Were you speaking with survivors? Have you seen something like this play out in your life?

It never happened to me in my life, thankfully. I was in touch with a psychologist who worked a lot with male survivors of sexual trauma. He spoke to me at length about his experience treating these survivors, and the ways that they cope with the abuse, and how that’s oftentimes very different from female survivors.

He was saying that even in the cases of extreme abuse, oftentimes male survivors would not see themselves as a victim in the narrative of the relationship until years later — sometimes a decade or more. Then they would really start to examine the relationship with a more critical lens.

You mentioned Me Too earlier, and the director, Hannah Fidell, says that she didn’t think this show would have been made without it. I think everyone — perhaps men in particular — learned a lot during that time. I’m curious, had you been offered this role pre-Me Too, would you have accepted it? And did you learn anything during the movement that lends itself to a job like this?

I can’t really say what I would have done if this role had come around if Me Too hadn’t happened yet, but I can say that, yes, absolutely, I think I, along with most of my peers in this industry, learned a lot from the Me Too movement.

And I think to a certain extent it informed Eric as a character in the show; there’s a culture around male victims of sexual abuse. There’s a high five and a slap on the back. You see that a little bit when Eric is in college; he uses the relationship as a kind of social currency. But I think more than anything, it brought about a culture that made a show like A Teacher possible, and I think from a studio perspective, it brought about a realization and a reckoning that these stories need to be told.

I keep thinking about that last scene between Eric and Claire when they meet up 10 years after their relationship ends. It’s painful to watch because Eric is not okay — he’s still carrying the baggage of the relationship, whereas Claire has a husband and a family and a seemingly perfect life. When I watched it, I wasn’t sure if it was satisfying. Having grown close to the character, how did you feel about it?

Eric, I guess in particular, couldn’t quite find closure. But at the same time, I think that his confrontation with Claire hopefully brought about a type of closure. And you don’t get to see how these characters are sort of outside the context of this story. I’d like to think that Eric actually lives a pretty happy, normal life. I think when he went back to the school and saw Claire, there were a lot of triggers that I think maybe made the wound fresh. But I think he’s moved on.
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Nick did an interview with ELLE.com about A Teacher. You can read his interview below:

ELLE – FX on Hulu’s unsettling miniseries A Teacher depicts a scenario that’s all too familiar to anyone who’s ever seen a teen drama. An attractive new teacher, Claire (Kate Mara) draws stares from her male students, and in particular from Eric (Nick Robinson). When the two run into each other outside of class, there’s a spark. Claire, stuck in an unhappy marriage and resentful about her own troubled youth, almost immediately starts crossing boundaries with Eric: going to parties with him, confiding in him, and giving him private tutoring sessions. Before long, Claire has seduced Eric—while allowing him to believe he seduced her.

Unlike most pop-cultural depictions of a student-teacher romance, A Teacher has no qualms about depicting the relationship as the predatory crime that it is. After the affair is revealed midway through the season, the show devotes several episodes to exploring the years-long aftermath for Eric, who blames himself for the entire affair for a long time.

Robinson spoke to ELLE.com about the “bait and switch” A Teacher pulls with its central relationship, what he related to in Eric, and what viewers should take from that abrupt final scene.

What were your first impressions of the project?
I didn’t know much about it at all. I met with Hannah early last year for what I thought was a general meeting, and when I got there, Kate Mara was sitting there too. They both started talking to me about A Teacher, so that was my first introduction to it. They did a great job pitching it and it sounded really interesting. I hadn’t read any scripts and I hadn’t seen Hannah’s movie, so it was only after that meeting that I started to put all the pieces together. But from Hannah and Kate’s telling of it, the show sounded intense and complex and intriguing.

The show walks a fine line of depicting a real spark between Claire and Eric without glamorizing what’s happening. As an actor, how conscious were you of that tension, particularly in the early scenes with Kate?
I think the spark is that classic bait and switch. The spark is to get the audience interested—as a viewer, you see two characters have chemistry onscreen and you’re automatically programmed to root for them, you know? That’s no different here—it’s just that over the course of the series, you really get to see why these two people should not be together. I think around episode 3, 4, 5, things really start to take a turn and challenge the audience’s initial reaction to the relationship. I think Hannah and Kate both set out to play into some of the stereotypes associated with a story like this, and then break those down.

Both in high school and at college, Eric is part of this very macho, bro-y culture, which has a clear impact on the way he processes what happened to him. His friends think it’s kind of awesome that he slept with his teacher.
Yeah, Eric is really trying to reconcile the views of his peers, the views of his parents or authority figures, and then his own view of the relationship. It breeds a lot of confusion. I think with Eric going to UT, he wants to play into what seems to be the dominant culture, at least at that frat, and be totally unaffected by this relationship and be lauded and praised for it. But that’s not the reality of what’s happening. It did affect him, and that’s what comes out. “Toxic masculinity” is a relatively new phrase, and I think the show is exploring some of that: the pitfalls of toxic masculinity, or just not being a very reflective person.

Was there anything in particular about Eric’s character that resonated with you?
Well, I went to a private school in Los Angeles for junior and senior year, and I did have a similar experience to Eric when he was in college, in some ways. Not to get too personal, but that was something I identified with: the frat culture, the party culture, the ways those two work hand-in-hand to limit self-introspection. The party scene can just be a cover for not experiencing other harder emotions, you know?

For sure. And Claire doesn’t seem great at self-introspection either—that becomes clear in their final scene.
Yeah, Eric is seeking closure, and hopefully, he found it. I don’t know, though, it’s kind of left slightly ambiguous at the end. I feel like that scenario would just be so frustrating, where she doesn’t see his reality and he doesn’t see hers. Both characters leave that meeting unfulfilled, ultimately. Hopefully, they both leave and go on with their lives, but who knows?