It’s noon in Brooklyn, Edmund Donovan is posing for photos in front of an old-timey soda shop, and the moment is starting to feel very meta. A young USPS driver is parked along the curb, watching the energetic actor at work, and strikes up a conversation: he’s been taking notes for his own burgeoning modeling career.
The intersection of day jobs, creativity and mentorship play out on-screen in Donovan’s film “Late Fame,” in theaters on Friday. The movie costars Willem Dafoe as a poet-turned-postal worker, whose obscure book is idolized years after its publication by a group of young aspiring creatives. Leading the charge is Donovan’s character Meyers, a young twentysomething who’s wistful for a bygone era in New York and recruits the elder poet as a de facto mentor for the group.
Set in modern-day New York, the film was adapted from a 1985 novella written by Arthur Schnitzler, about Vienna’s café society scene. “Late Fame” premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year and went on to screen during the New York Film Festival before it was acquired by Magnolia Pictures.
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“In my 20s, I went to college and then to graduate school — both for acting — and I put a lot of older actors, acting professors and writers on a pedestal,” says Donovan of the story’s resonance. “And I still do to a degree, but less so, because I’ve grown into my own skin and my own point of view and sensibility,” he adds. “You can be inspired by other people, and you can even be taught by other people and mentored, but at a certain point you have to figure things out on your own.”
For Donovan, one of those inspirational figures was Dafoe, and he did walk away having learned something from his costar: the importance of finding the sense of play in each scene.
“He has a really experimental, out-there, playful, almost boyish soul,” says Donovan of Dafoe. “And I think that’s always an important reminder for any actor, even if they’re very young.”
For Donovan, fame is arriving right on time. Currently based in New York, the 35-year-old actor grew up between Connecticut, Massachusetts and the U.K., where he was introduced to acting in a play during grade school.
“And that began what would end up being a pretty solid decision to be an actor from a pretty young age,” says Donovan, who went on to major in theater at Boston University and earned his MFA from the Yale School of Drama in 2017. “ I’m not sure that my ambitions have changed really at all.”
Donovan is back home for the remainder of summer after wrapping filming in Budapest for “The Nightingale,” a long-anticipated movie adaptation of Kristin Hannah’s 2015 historical novel. Donovan appears in the film, primed to be a breakout moment, alongside Elle Fanning and Dakota Fanning.
“It’s the first time I’ve been a part of an adaptation that has such a fan base,” he says. “It’s exciting to be a part of this thing that has a whole passionate group of readers behind it that wanna see the movie made, and be made well. So hopefully we’ll do it justice.”
The film, set during World War II, marks Donovan’s first period project. “The wardrobe, the set, the production design — everything was just so beautiful,” he says. “I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that I was wearing men’s clothing from that time, and the clothing is unbelievable. It makes everyone look so good.”
Off-screen, Donovan has continued to wear elevated menswear, in recent months attending runway shows for brands such as Hermès, Loewe and, most recently, Louis Vuitton during Paris Men’s Fashion Week.
“I’ve lived in Europe more this year than in the States, which is pretty cool,” says Donovan. “ The trouble of traveling to Europe as much as I have, though, is that I just wanna live there.”
For now, he’s enjoying some downtime in New York and looking forward to new audiences seeing “Late Fame.”
“I hope they like it. I hope it’s meaningful to them in the way it was to me,” he says of the full-circle moment. “It went to these festivals I’ve always dreamed of attending, and now it’s going to be in theaters. It’s the dream.”
