In Vitro: Ashley Zukerman on the familiarity of his villain character

When Ashley Zukerman says he “always looks for the bad in people”, he’s not confessing to being a misanthrope.

It’s that he finds pure-hearted heroes uninteresting to play on screen. If you look back through the Australian actor’s career, there are lots of characters who were neither outright hero nor moustache-twirling villain.

There’s Succession’s Nate Sofrelli, the wily political operative who was having an affair with Sarah Snook’s Shiv Roy, Manhattan’s Dr Charlie Isaacs, a physicist whose ambition and hubris leads to questionable choices, and, most recently, Apple Cider Vinegar’s Clive, the wilfully ignorant partner to con woman Belle Gibson.

“If we need a character to be a hero, it’s probably not going to be a great character,” Zukerman tells The Nightly. “Everyone needs their gristle. There are no pure villains.”

This time, the not-pure villain is Jack, a cattle farmer in independent Australian sci-fi thriller In Vitro, directed by Will Howarth and Tom Mckeith.

Filmed near the New South Wales town of Cooma, In Vitro is set in the not-too-distant future. Jack (Zukerman) and Layla (Talia Zucker) live on a remote farm which experiments with cloning cattle to offset the environmental degradation that has, among other things, greatly reduced animal stock.

Jack is a scientist and from the get-go, there is something off about everything on the farm, and the dynamic between him and Layla. You just know that he’s not a good guy.

But he is an interesting one, and trying to figure him out is part of Zukerman’s job. “We can do empathy without absolution. That’s OK. We can try to understand someone without saying what they’re doing is OK. I mean, the guy is creepy and f—ked up, and he’s entirely ordinary.

“Ultimately, he’s a guy that wanted more for himself, and he doesn’t know how to deal with being unloved and not adored. He has no capability of dealing with that. He doesn’t really care about other people, so he never goes further into relationships, he always just destroys them, which is what happens in life.”

The term “toxic masculinity” is so now common. Some might argue it’s overused but really it’s because there are now teeming examples, both actual and fictional, in public discourse about entitled male behaviour that sometimes stems from an inability to honestly deal with their emotional vulnerabilities.

Just this past week, there is the real-life inquest into the death of Lilie James, a young Sydney teacher killed by a colleague at St Andrews Cathedral School, who murdered her after she rejected him romantically.

On screen, the British series Adolescence has been sparking conversations about the pernicious influence of the manosphere on impressionable teen minds.

That’s the ongoing wider conversation with which In Vitro grapples, even though it’s not always straightforward where you think the story is going.

But Jack, you know this guy. He’s chillingly familiar, and that was the intention, to lean into how “normal” he seemed.

“We’re finally having that level of conversation where you go, ‘The wife beater is not always just this arrogant, outwardly aggressive person’.

“Maybe not even necessarily alpha or overly masculine. What we set out to do is to paint a more nuanced or inclusive picture on what these men might look like.

“There is something so ordinary about him that’s he not the guy you think but it all comes from that same instinct.”

Jack’s need for control also intersects with his work as a biotech scientist. In that, Zukerman sees Jack as standing in for certain people in charge of solving the climate crisis through blind faith in tech.

It’s partly why he was drawn to In Vitro. He says, “It articulated some things, it answered some questions for me. There are things I’m worried about in the world and (the film) seems to offer unique insights or threads ideas together that I hadn’t connected yet.

“I’m sure many of us are kept up (at night) by the climate crisis and the film, when I first read it, (argues) that by eliminating the humanity around solutions to our problems is probably not the best approach.

“By brute forcing it through tech is probably also not going to give us the answer. We may have short-term gains, but it doesn’t seem like the long-term answer, and that has been the strategy that got us to where we are.

“We put our hope in the hands of tech and then put our heads in the sand. Tesla is not going to save the world. I liked that Jack seemed like a small version of these people that are tech-focused and (for whom) humanity is academic.

“The film argued that very beautifully and made it about a couple.”

In Vitro is in cinemas on March 27