Filmmaker José Avelino Gilles Corbett Lourenço has taken the 18th-century novel “The Sorrows of Young Werther” and brought the story to modern times with Young Werther starring Douglas Booth, Alison Pill, Patrick J. Adams, Iris Apatow and Amrit Kaur. Set in Toronto, Young Werther is a complicated romantic comedy, where the title character falls in love with an engaged woman.
Werther (Booth) is travelling from Montreal to Toronto with his hypochondriac best friend Paul (Jaouhar Ben Ayed) to retrieve a family heirloom before heading to Europe. Making a quick detour to a gelato shop, Werther meets Charlotte (Pill) and quickly falls for her. Unfortunately for Werther, Charlotte is engaged to Albert (Adams).
While Albert, a lawyer, is very much presented as a responsible adult, Werther is more juvenile, but knows he’s persuasive and won’t be deterred in his pursuit of Charlotte.
To embody Werther, Booth was given the task of grasping the dialogue of a character that uses 100 words to express a thought that could easily be satisfied with a sentence of just a few words.
“There were certain times I would just have to repeat certain lines,” Booth told Yahoo Canada. “He puts more words into a sentence than you probably need to put in a sentence, and then sometimes you’re having to do that at the same time as waltzing … and things like that.”
“It was a challenge, but it was something that I enjoyed. … This is a guy who loves the sound of his own voice. This is a guy that likes to use all these long sentences and these hard words, and [tries to] come across as intellectual as possible.”
Booth also praised the film’s writer and director, Lourenço, for being a “gentle presence” on set, but also having a “clear and strong understanding of what he wants.”
“I trusted him and then, obviously with Werther, if it crosses certain lines he can become annoying or he can become quite unlikable,” Booth said. “So it’s always that sort of balance of how you weave this complicated character through this narrative, and how you still get the audience to be on his side.”
“So for us, we often said it was like threading a needle through a scene. … My job is just to try and give [José Avelino Gilles Corbett Lourenço] enough options so when he’s in the edit suite, he has lots of stuff to play with, really, but he was a great collaborator, and I’d work with him again in a heartbeat.”
A bit of a different role for Booth, who played Nikki Sixx in The Dirt, Boy George in Worried About the Boy and starred in Carlo Carlei’s version of Romeo & Juliet, Booth highlighted that Young Werther leaned into his desire to keep exploring new and different experiences as an actor.
“I think for me, the most exciting thing as an actor is to try and play a whole different set of of roles,” he said. “I like to just surprise myself.”
“I remember Richard Madden, an actor I worked with when I played Boy George when I was 17, I remember at the wrap party was like, ‘Douglas, just always do the parts you think you’re not good enough to do.’ So it’s always about just taking on challenges, whether it be Boy George, or doing a Western and playing this washed up old bounty hunter, or playing Nikki Sixx, or Dan Leno … in Limehouse Golem, or this. I just try and push myself, challenge myself, but also trying to just do the best work that you get offered at the time, to try to make the best of the landscape out there, and just try and make the best choices that you can in your career.”
While much of the story of Young Werther is centred around the relationship between the title character and Charlotte, there’s a particularly appealing exploration of friendship, initially established by Werther and Paul.
Lourenço shared that when his brother, who is a producer on the film, first read the script for Young Werther, he responded by saying, “Werther is who you wish you were, but Paul is who you are.”
“As much as it’s a romance, … it’s very much a film about friendship as well, between Werther and Charlotte, but also between Werther and Albert, between Werther and Paul, … there’s the different ways that friendships impact your life,” Lourenço said.
“[Werther and Pual] are just so funny together and when you have a friend … like Paul, you can sort of be your worst self around them, you just have the license to be wholly you, like warts and all, in a way that you don’t present to the object of your affection.”
For Torontonians who are used to seeing the city featured in films and TV as a replacement for places like New York and Chicago, Lourenço really leaned into making Toronto feel like a part of the story, including featuring a popular local ice cream shop, Bar Ape.
“I love Bar Ape so much and I truly do think it is the best gelato,” Lourenço said. “That’s my spot.”
“It’s part of just a broader thing of wanting to celebrate Toronto on film. … I’ve lived in Toronto for just over 20 years now, it’s very much the home that I’ve chosen, and I love the city, and I love the experiences I’ve had here. … It’s lovely to not have it be a stand-in for some other city.”
While Booth hadn’t spent much time in Toronto before filming Young Werther, he maybe got a little too enthusiastic about about the Bar Ape gelato bars.
“The good news is that I love Bar Ape. I love all their ice creams. They are delicious,” Booth said. “Ice cream’s also one of my favourite foods. So that was good.”
“The trouble with that was, I was even eating the ice cream in the rehearsals. And then I think by the end of the day I’d eaten 45 ice creams, … and I went back to my trailer and I genuinely lost my sight. … I was like, I can’t see. I actually, I called for the medic. I was like, I feel completely crazy, but it was so good I couldn’t stop.”
For Patrick J. Adams, the Toronto-born actor, who famously filmed Suits in the city, shared that he appreciated Lourenço’s approach to highlighting Toronto in Young Werther.
“I’ve shot quite a bit in Toronto, but usually we’re trying to make the city look like somewhere else and I love when something just embraces the city,” Adams said. “Toronto’s a major city. It should be a hub of storytelling, and especially films coming out of Canada.”
“I think they shot it beautifully too. José clearly has a love for the city and I think he expressed it beautifully.”
Young Werther is now available in theatres, on digital and on demand in the U.S., coming to theatres in Canada in January
