Sam Claflin’s Year Of Rest & Relaxation

Early last year, Sam Claflin was coming off filming two shows back-to-back, moving house, and trying to find his footing after his first post-divorce breakup — and his For You page seemed to know it. Though he’d never been much of a reader, suddenly his algorithm was serving him an endless scroll of self-help books like Jillian Turecki’s It Begins with You, Marianne Williamson’s A Return to Love, and the many other titles he gamely displays on his Instagram highlights reel.

“I was exhausted. I basically had a breakdown, to put it bluntly, and I kind of hid. I just sort of unraveled,” Claflin, 39, tells me, nearly unprompted. “I started reading a lot, doing therapy, and started my journey into self-discovery.”

Though Claflin apparently requires no warmup, New York, on the heels of the biggest snowstorm the city’s seen in years, could use one. He’s come to town from London to promote the new MGM+ thriller miniseries Vanished, in which he stars as Kaley Cuoco’s globe-trotting humanitarian boyfriend who disappears on a train ride from Paris to the south of France, and the weather has extended his trip by a few days. He’s delighted by the extra time on the ground, particularly after the nine-month hiatus he took last year from work to focus on his mental health. “What's difficult about this industry and about being an actor and about being a people pleaser within this industry is I really care about what people think and I was always looking for reassurance,” he says. “I lost sight of who I was and what made me happy. I was always trying to impress people, please other people, but I wasn't really happy in myself.”

Such soul-searching forced Claflin to challenge his way of thinking, having grown up the third youngest of four sons in Norwich, where the actor says he tried to emulate his two older brothers. “I was sort of forcing myself to be them, but I wasn’t them,” he continues, not having come up for air since our conversation began. “The chameleon style, the people pleasing, that’s where that was initially initiated.” He also learned, from a young age, the art of adopting a very British stiff upper lip. Though his father suffered from diabetes — as well as a heart attack in his early 30s, followed by vision loss when Claflin was still a child — the illness was largely unspoken. “I never saw my dad cry. I never saw my mom cry. But [my kids] have seen me cry and I have an honest conversation with them,” adds the divorced father of two. Claflin’s 8-year-old daughter Margot — who he calls “the wisest” and believes “has definitely been on this planet before” — will even offer her own two cents. “I was crying about something and I was like, ‘I just don't know what I should do.’ She was like, ‘If you want it that much, go and do it. Stop crying.’”

Claflin’s dream in life was always to have children. From the time he was 3 years old, when people would ask him what he wanted to be when he grew up, his answer was: “I want to be a dad.” “When I was a teenager and beyond, if I was at a wedding, I would always go and hang out with the kids,” Claflin says, his signature dimples flashing beneath the beard he’s grown out just enough to kiss his impossibly defined cheekbones. (His jawline alone could appear next to “looksmaxxing” in the dictionary.) “My granddad used to be a clown. He’d go do children's birthdays and do balloon animals. He was always such an inspiration for me and such an entertainer.” As a teenager, he imagined coaching kids’ soccer; he only thought about acting professionally, he says, because he wanted to be a children’s television presenter. “I didn’t want to be a serious actor,” he says.

Yet it was work in big blockbusters that came to Claflin almost immediately. Just a year out of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, he was cast in the 2011 installment of Pirates of the Caribbean.“Obviously it’s not an overly serious movie, but I was really working so hard, but also terrified of having an opinion on anything,” he recalls. “I didn’t want anyone to think that I was unhappy.” In 2012, he co-starred in both Snow White & the Huntsman and The Hunger Games before emerging as a romantic lead in Love, Rosie and Me Before You. (As British GQ once put it, “If your sister fancied a blond character in a movie between 2011 and 2016, there is an approximately 40% chance it was Sam Claflin.”)

Still, Claflin found himself burning to be a dad. He married actor Laura Haddock in 2013 and they set their sights on having kids. “When The Hunger Games finished, me and my wife at the time were trying for a baby so I didn’t want to be away for five months shooting. I wanted to be at home and start my family,” Claflin says. His son, Pip, was born in 2015; Margot followed in 2018.

With parenthood came a desire to take bigger acting risks, and for the next few years Claflin focused on smaller-budget films shooting in and around England like My Cousin Rachel and Journey’s End. “I was speaking to one director quite recently [who asked], ‘So, where have you been?’ I was sort of everywhere for a little while and then I went off the map in Hollywood’s eyes, I guess,” he says. “The truth is, I’m really proud of that decision. I don’t regret any of it.”

Landing the lead as Billy Dunne in Daisy Jones & The Six — the television adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s BookTok-fueled phenomenon, loosely inspired by Fleetwood Mac — put Claflin squarely back on Hollywood’s radar. Then COVID hit, delaying production a year and a half.

Haddock and Claflin separated in 2019, turning lockdown into a crash course in single fatherhood. “I had a 4- and 2-year-old and I was potty training my daughter, homeschooling my son, whilst trying to cook. My gosh, I didn’t have a clue,” he says, pantomiming the chaos from the cramped kitchen table we’re sitting at the back of the Wall Street photo studio. “There were moments where I was crying to myself but we got through that together and being forced to be on my own was the best thing that ever happened to [our] relationship.”

By the time cameras picked up on Daisy Jones, Claflin was ready to bring more of himself to the role. “At the beginning of my career, I was trying to play roles that were different from who I am. I didn’t really like who I was. So I was like, ‘I want to be someone completely different. I want to be unrecognizable,’” he says. “And I think more recently, I’m like, well, I think it’s more authentic for me to kind of tap into my own experiences… how does this resonate with me? Can I bring a truth to this?” Such was the case with Daisy. “I don’t play guitar, I don’t sing, I’m not American, or an alcoholic but there were so many elements of his character that I was like, sh*t, ‘I’ve lived this life, this relationship, this situation,’” he says of the role that earned him his first Golden Globe nomination. “Honestly, it was like therapy. It was so cathartic.” (Claflin has a knack for turning just about any situation into therapy, our time together included.)

That also changed the way he approaches work — prompting him to further mix up the kind of roles he takes. Whether it’s signing on to film Vanished in Marseille with “no expectations of what the job would be,” or diving into the classic action genre in Taylor Sheridan’s upcoming film, F.A.S.T. “I’ve entered a stage in my career where I'm not worried that it's going to go away tomorrow,” he says. “That's a lie because I do have that fear all the time. But I don't worry that if I make a bad movie, I'll never be cast again.”

Newfound freedom and a 40th birthday on the horizon would be a natural time for anyone to wonder what’s next. But Claflin insists he’s trying not to overthink it.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen next. I don’t know what job I’m doing next,” he says. “I’ve always been somebody who organizes things, worries about things, and I didn’t realize I was such an anxious personality.”

Another goal: an attempt to be chill about his romantic life in this next chapter. “I believe in love and I believe in marriage. I've lost love along the way and that's been incredibly painful and difficult, but there's always something new to come and to look forward to,” Claflin adds. Then he pauses, as if recalling the lessons he’s picked up from books like The Untethered Soul, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, and The Gifts of Imperfection. “I'm not chasing it and, in my experience, when you stop chasing, it's when it kind of hits you in the face.”