We trundle down a hill so steep you have to fight against gravity, while Melton periodically lurches forwards from Neya’s Goliath pull. “I was thinking about our conversation the other day,” he says, the one about Beef. In a few days, he’s planning to meet Lulu Wang, who’s set to direct him and Lucy Liu in an adaptation of Katie Kitamura’s Audition. One of his takeaways from the novel – which is about the myriad ways we perform, not only in the acting sense but in the roles we play in life – is that “performance is identified by the viewer,” he theorises. “The space in between my work as an actor and the audience is where the identification comes.” Which is all to say that whatever Melton’s work could represent for someone can’t be dictated by him. Art is subjective, after all. Contact, not catharsis.
We snake through the neighbourhood, past houses cast in shadow in the low-hanging sun, until one catches his eye. “Look at this,” he says, observing the light’s handiwork. Half of the wall is painted white in an attempt to cover the stone, which has eroded in long, spindly lines spreading in all directions, like the branches of a leafless tree in the thick of winter. “You frame that, you stick it in a museum.”
When the road levels out, we make our way to a hole-in-the-wall burger joint called The Win-Dow. We agree to split a double cheeseburger and chips, and take a seat on some plastic stools that are scattered around. Neya eyes our dinner like it’s prey.
“Watch this,” Melton says, turning to his dog. “Sit. Whisper.”
An eager Neya lets out a loud, rough bark.
“Whisper,” he commands again, barely audible. She obediently turns down the volume and is rewarded with a chip.
“She’ll wait, too,” he continues, and gives the command for Neya to sit still. “She’ll be there for 15 minutes. One time I forgot. I made her wait, and then I was watching something and I noticed there was a puddle of drool, and I was like, ‘What the fuck?’” He offers her another chip apologetically.
For a long time, home always changed, yet always appeared the same. Melton was born in Juneau, the capital of Alaska, to a Korean mother and an American father who served in the armed forces and was deployed in Iraq. His family, including his two younger sisters, hopped from military base to military base, across the country, overseas and back again: Tennessee (one year), Kentucky (one year), Georgia (one year), Korea (five years), Texas (two years), Germany (four years), Kansas (five years). “And every summer, when we lived overseas, we went to Juneau, Alaska, until the age of 14,” Melton recalls. “So that was my representation of America: rock beaches, bald eagles, bears. Pulling over on the street to fill up our empty plastic bottles with waterfall water.”
