One Nightstand With Nick Robinson

In One Nightstand, celebrity readers and writers join us at the blond in 11 Howard to discuss some of their favorite books, allowing us to learn about their tastes and lives in the process.

Nick Robinson might have started working at 11 years old, but his childhood was otherwise a lot like the rest of ours. “I loved to read as a kid,” says the 31-year-old actor, who grew up in Seattle. “I read a lot of fantasy. I read the Game of Thrones books. I was really into The Lord of the Rings. Growing up, my dad read me The Hobbit, and so I got into Tolkien. I loved the ‘choose your own adventure’ books.”

Maintaining the habit has become harder with time. “Like a lot of people, as I’ve gotten older and my attention span has gotten shorter and the demands in my life have gotten bigger, I read less than I want to, but I love a good book.”

Robinson slips quietly over the precise demands in question, but they are probably best summarized as a frenetic and busy work schedule. After breaking out as a teenager on the ABC Family sitcom Melissa & Joey, Robinson has deftly moved between blockbusters (Jurassic World), beloved YA adaptations (Love, Simon), and thornier prestige TV (Maid). Earlier this year he also appeared opposite Zoey Deutch in Voicemails for Isabelle, which became a blockbuster hit for Netflix, where it topped charts and drove 84.3 million views in its first seven weeks.

“I think for me and a lot of people in this industry, there’s a tension between art and commerce, and those two things don’t always go together,” he says of his career choices. “And so you're trying to kind of strike the balance and enjoy your life, live your life, also have integrity or not, whatever. There’s no rules. So yeah, it can feel a little icky at times.”

His new film, Charlie Harper, a first-time feature from duo Tom Dean and Mac Eldridge, tells the story of a romantic relationship between two people (Charlie, played by Robinson, and Harper, played by Emilia Jones) who first meet during high school and reckon with electricity and turmoil of first love. The movie, filmed in New Orleans, only took about a month to shoot.

“I think it is strange,” he says of being on set for compressed periods of time. “It's beautiful but it can also be kind of confusing where you’re like, ‘Was that real? Was that not? Did what we had, was that just a function of the story that we were telling, or was that us?’ I mean, there’s sometimes some confusing questions that can come up, but it’s also amazing. It’s like a traveling circus. It’s just like all these people get together to try to do this crazy thing, and then you might see them again, you might not.”

Charlie Harper asks, at its heart, a question about nostalgia: How much should we listen to it, and how valuable is it when we try to determine how to move forward in life? “I am a nostalgic person,” says Robinson of the question. “I have a couple shoe boxes [from old relationships.] I think it’s important. I think you don’t want to get consumed by it. You want to be present, you want to be looking forward, but also it’s nice to remember where you came from.”

In terms of what’s next for Robinson, he just spent several months in London filming a new eight-part Kennedy family drama for Netflix. He plays Joe Kennedy Jr., the original heir and political hopeful of the Kennedy family who died during combat in World War 2. “The level of artistry involved in that show was unlike anything I’d ever been a part of,” he says. “The production designers, the costume designers, the other actors, the writing. It was just at such a high level that I just felt very lucky to be there.”

Robinson went deep on his research for the part, which even reconnected him with his childhood reading habits. “The Kennedy archives [are] an amazing resource, and there is so much there, it was hard to even parse through,” he says. “[The show] was also based on a book called JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century that I read and listened to the audiobook for. But it’s such a well-documented family. It’s like they knew from the beginning that this was going to be important, that what they were going to do was important. So everything is documented and it’s pretty amazing.”

Keep reading to discover four of Robinson’s favorite books.

His first selection is Pastoralia by George Saunders, a collection of surrealist comedic short stories commenting on corporate culture and the state of American life. “I just love George Saunders, period,” he says. “[This book] does capture something about… just the absurdity of capitalism and modern life and how everyone is just grasping around in the dark to try and figure it out.”

There are times when Robinson has felt insecure about his lack of experience in that particular world. “I don’t know anything about corporate America,” he says. “Never answered an email in my life. The older I get, the more that I feel very fortunate to never have had another job. I used to feel, I guess, insecure about it or unsure about not being able to compare my experience with other people in a way that felt relatable or something…but now, I feel like I actually don't think I missed out on much.”

His next pick is Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson. Told from the perspective of an unnamed narrator living with addiction, the book is a series of interconnected short stories that explore life in the American West. “It’s very raw and real and it’s kind of just talking about a side of America that most people don’t normally see or talk about,” he says. “He finds beauty in these really dark situations.”

Robinson said he read the book to prepare for playing Sean in Maid, a young father who struggles with alcoholism. He also previously starred as Charlie, an 18-year-old navigating drug addiction, in the film Being Charlie co-written by Nick and Robert Reiner. “Addiction is a really powerful disease, and there’s a lot of different forms of it. You could be addicted to not just substance, but feelings, to relationships, to other people,” he says. “It is definitely fertile ground for conflict and storytelling.”

His next choice is Where I’m Calling From, the last short story collection published by Raymond Carver while he was still alive. “Raymond Carver [is], I think, one of the best short story writers of all time,” he says. “He just uses really sparse exacting prose that has a lot of subtext.”

Robinson also appreciated what Carver had to say about relationships. “His whole thing is about the lies that Americans tell themselves to just get through the day. The lies we’re telling ourselves constantly to just get along in America,” he says. “He writes a lot about young couples, and there’s just some really powerful stories in there of the lies we tell each other, the lies we tell ourselves, the secrets we keep — and when those secrets come out, what that does to a relationship.”

His final pick is The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt, which follows a pair of assassin brothers traveling to Gold Rush-era San Francisco to take out a target. “This book, I think, is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. I was laughing out loud for the majority of the read, and it was one that I just burned through. I read it in a day and a half,” he says. “It’s really dark. It’s really funny. The dynamic between the brothers is amazing. I just thought it was great. It was just such a fresh take on a Western, on a genre that I think I love.”

Robinson is no stranger to the genre. He recently starred alongside Lena Headey and Gillian Anderson as Elias Teller, an orphan on a frontier cattle ranch in the 1850s Pacific Northwest in Netflix’s The Abandons. “I would love to be a cowboy again,” he says. “If I wasn’t an actor, I would try to be a cowboy. “

Watch the full episode below: