Alex Sharp is not the type to stay in one place for long. In the days leading up to our interview, the actor travels from London to Austin to Los Angeles, where he now sits in a sunlit hotel room. Despite the packed promotional schedule for Netflix’s 3 Body Problem, in which he stars, Sharp appears several minutes early on our scheduled Zoom call.
“It’s mayhem,” he says. “Fun mayhem.”
This flurry of planes, premieres, and press junkets is not strange for Sharp, who has kept busy for the past decade. After completing his studies at Juilliard in 2014, the British actor won a Tony Award for his performance in Simon Stephens’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. He transitioned to screen acting with an impressive string of independent and studio films. In 2017, he starred across Lily Collins as an anorexic ballet dancer in the intensely controversial To the Bone. He embodied anti-war activist Rennie Davis in Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7, which earned a Best Picture Oscar nomination. In the wonky comedy The Hustle, he clowned around with Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson. Sharp shared the screen with Bill Nighy in Living (2022), written by Kazuo Ishiguro, one of his favorite authors. Still, 3 Body Problem, out this week, promises to be his biggest project yet.
Liu Cixin’s Three Body-Problem, published in serial form in 2006 and as a stand-alone novel in 2008, defies the conventions of alien apocalypse fiction. As in the subsequent installments of the so-called “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” trilogy, Cixin weaves a narrative that jumps between disparate periods and plots. Questions of China’s violent recent history intercept with quandaries about humanity’s shared future. When an English translation was published in 2014, fans included President Obama and Mark Zuckerberg. Today, the trilogy is translated into 26 languages.
From this rich and daunting source material, an eight-episode epic comes to Netflix on March 21, thanks to David Benioff, D. B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo. Weiss and Benioff created the wildly popular Game of Thrones, and Woo’s writing credits include HBO’s Southern Gothic vampire fantasia, True Blood, and AMC’s short lived but acclaimed anthology, The Terror. The resulting entertainment boasts all the visual spectacle, technical mastery, and narrative daring that its creators are famed for.
“I didn’t know what to expect,” Sharp says of meeting Benioff, Weiss, and Woo. “I knew that they’d made the biggest TV show that’s ever existed, and I was just really blown away by how accessible they were and how thoughtful they were as well.”
Sharp plays Will Downing, an everyman who is in love with Jin Cheng (Jess Hong) at the same time that he is falling ill with deadly pancreatic cancer. “I had kind of had this very intimate, quiet story about a guy who loves this woman, but who’s terminally ill. It was sort of like an indie movie snuck into and spread out over an otherworldly, galactic TV show.”
Developing the character required intense psychological and physical preparation.“It was quite a personal thing for me,” says Sharp, who lost a good deal of weight for the role. “It was something I had witnessed. The weight loss was out of respect for the people who are actually going through that, to try and represent that in a realistic way. The psychology of it was also very connected. So it’s more like a mindset or an energy.”
The deeper research—to enter the mind of someone aware of his imminent mortality—led Sharp to unexpected places. “I worked quite extensively with a few different death doulas, which was not a profession I’d heard of.” Sharp sought out these non-medical professionals, whom he calls “the angels of society,” and became increasingly familiar with death. “It was incredibly profound and helpful.” Sharp says.
In daily life, Sharp buzzes with a nervous, infectious energy, entirely unlike his tragic character. Even through the clumsy mediation of Zoom, Sharp’s large, blue eyes emote wildly. One moment, they pool with sincerity. The next, they sparkle with mirth. Rather than the chiseled mug of a matinee idol, Sharp possesses the roguish appeal of a young Paul McCarney or Pierre Clémenti. Soft spoken but quick, he evokes an earnest school boy or an irreverent rock star.
When asked about the massive audience the show will likely reach, Sharp grimaces. “I can’t think about it too much or my brain will melt. I never think about the audience as a hundred million people or something like that. I’m thinking about two people sitting on a couch.” He is grateful, however, that television and film can be consumed by more people for less money than theater can. “Art is to be shared. For me, that’s the point of it.”
Shortly after Sharp and I conclude our interview, his publicist emails to ask if I might be able to make a bit more time—there were a few topics we didn’t get to: his dream collaborators (Lukas Dhont and Oliver Hermanus), his enduring acting inspirations (“Viola Davis, whom I love, and Philip Seymour Hoffman in Doubt; Philip Seymour Hoffman in everything”), what leads him to a project (“the quality of the writing, always”), his relationship to reviews (“dicey”). When we speak on the phone for another hour, I learn that Sharp is even more of a renaissance man than I realized.
“I was quite burned out,” Sharp says of wrapping 3 Body Problem. “After a project, I always go on a wild adventure to just separate myself and be mentally healthy.” Previous adventures had included a 2,000 mile off-road Jeep journey. “I spent all my money on the Jeep, so I couldn’t stay in hotels,” he says. “So I slept in the back with the puppy I had just got.” During another period of time he designed and built a house for his late father, then in the throes of Alzheimer’s disease, next to his own in upstate New York. He speaks of the laborious, emotional process with reverence. “It kind of bankrupted me but it ended up being the most artistically fulfilling thing I had done in years.”
Alex Sharp with a bag he made and designedPhoto: Kimberly Yvette Goodnight
This time, however, he went to Florence spent four months learning how to make women’s luxury handbags. The workshops proved meditative and fulfilling. He befriended Gert-Johan Coetzee, the South African designer. The two spent the summer reveling in Italian craftsmanship and sharing “lots of Prosecco.”
When I ask if Sharp foresees turning purses into a professional pursuit, I expect him to demure. Instead, he says, “I’ve started to look into that seriously.”
He tells me he has a finished prototype, of which he’s very proud, and has sent the model to various manufacturers to test their ability to reproduce it. The bag itself is a handsome, architectural object. “I took the blueprint of a man’s briefcase and changed the dimensions of it to make something bureaucratic and uniform into something quite feminine but with that structured feeling of quality.”
When dressing himself, Sharp—who worked in several suit shops before pursuing acting —views fashion differently than many of his peers. In 2024, leading men often strut the red carpet in runway versions of their characters. In his exhaustive Dune: Part Two promotion, Timothée Chalamet wore futuristic getups, from leather jumpsuits to metal breastplates. A bronzed and blond Ryan Gosling paraded for months in pastel suits ahead of his Oscar-nominated performance as Ken. At the Los Angeles premiere of Saltburn, Jacob Elordi wore a three-piece Burberry suit worthy of his patrician character while Barry Keoghan, who played his working class companion, sported an open vest and rolled up sleeves. The strategy is a winning one as the sartorial references to the films stir up coverage. On the promotional circuit, Sharp tries “to use clothes as a way to make space from the character.”
He admires many young designers, including Maximilian Davis of Ferragamo. His hero, however, is Giorgio Armani, the 89-year-old legend who rose from a modest soldier and later shop clerk to build an empire that includes clothing, accessories, furniture, restaurants, and hotels. It is not difficult to see why Sharp, with his boundless interest in all things creative, identifies with Mr. Armani.
“Armani is such a titan,” Sharp says. “He sold his Volkswagen to start the company and then pioneered red carpet dressing. I find it moving how pure it remains, how involved he remains.”
