Danny Strong cannot remember a time when he didn’t want to be an actor. His mom was a telephone operator working the after school shift. So Strong was a latchkey kid who spent many hours alone after school. And he liked to dream big. “This would never happen today, but I would come home, be by myself and watch TV all day,” he says. “I remember at eight-years-old seeing all these shows and thinking I could do better — that I should be on television and would be really good.”
Danny Strong and Nicholas Hoult as J.D. Salinger in Danny Strong’s Rebel In The Rye.
Even when he was in elementary school his strong resolve and fearlessness inspired him to write agents. “I’d send letters with my picture to William Morris and the Harry Gold Agency,” says Strong. “Then every day after school I would come home and wait for a letter to come back. It never did.”
By the time he was 11, he cherished visits to his local Manhattan Beach video store where he could banter with a fellow film-obsessed clerk who worked there, a guy named Quentin Tarantino. “I spent so much time talking to him they nicknamed me “Little Quentin.” I’d come in and they’d say ‘Little Quentin’s here,’” he shares. “I’d sit for an hour or more and talk to him about movies. I loved it.” Tarantino recommended films that typically an 11-year-old normally doesn’t watch, like Hitchcock films and Year of the Dragon. “But I watched and loved them,” says Strong. “He was influential in my movie-going taste.”
Cut to the 2013 Golden Globe Awards. Tarantino won Best Screenplay for Django Unchained. Strong, who wrote and produced the epic TV drama Game Change, won too. “We were at a Golden Globe party together both holding our Golden Globes,” recalls Strong. “Quentin told the story to everyone at the party. He said, ‘you people don’t get it! This is Little Quentin!’ He has been nothing but totally supportive.”
Since those video store visits Strong’s multifaceted career has thrived in seismic ways. He is an actor (Billions, Mad Men, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gilmore Girls), writer (Recount, Game Change, Lee Daniels’ The Butler, the final two Hunger Games films) and co-creator, executive producer and writer for the TV series Empire. And now he adds director to his resume.
This month Strong makes his directorial debut with the J.D. Salinger autobiographical film Rebel In The Rye from IFC Films. Based on Kenneth Slawenski’s book, J. D. Salinger: A Life, the movie burrows into the world of a young J.D. Salinger — his early struggles as a writer longing to be heard and the brutal trauma of being a soldier in combat during World War II, landing at Utah Beach on D-Day.
The film, which stars Nicholas Hoult as J.D. Salinger, also provides context as to why this great scribe, a man who helped shape modern literature, became such an enigmatic genius. The Rebel In The Rye cast also includes Kevin Spacey, Sarah Paulson, Victor Garber, Hope Davis, Brian d'Arcy James, Eric Bogosian and Zoey Deutch.
Strong, who stumbled upon Slawenski’s biography in a bookstore instantly had a deep connection to Salinger’s story. “He was a young ambitious writer in New York City who was pounding the pavement and desperately trying to sell stories. It reminded me not only of myself but of all my writer friends,” explains Strong. “World War II transformed him into a master storyteller and writer. It was so profound and beautiful that Catcher in the Rye had been written by a veteran who had seen the horrors of war. What hooked me was the idea that art could be birthed through trauma.”
Before Strong got regular work as an actor, it took years of struggle, but he remained unstoppable. He shared some of his best success tips with Forbes.com. Click here to read them all.
Danny Strong