An afternoon with Will Price, on New York, the people who change us, and the curious Case of being alive.
Words, Photography & Styling by Dio Anthony Grooming by Erin Anderson, Wearing DIOR
I've always been interested in people who are interested in people. The ones who can turn a seemingly ordinary conversation into something you'll find yourself thinking about days later. You meet them every so often, sometimes by chance, and sometimes because your work has afforded you the opportunity. Will Price strikes me as one of those people. The kind you might find yourself sitting beside on a plane, only to spend the entire flight in conversation, forgetting altogether about the book you packed for the trip.
I had met Will a week earlier, during a photoshoot in New York. He was easygoing, good-natured, and remarkably present. I don't think I saw him pick up his phone once. It's a small observation, but the longer I spend interviewing people, the more I find myself noticing these things. Will gives you his attention, and there's something rather lovely about that.
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A week later, we meet again, this time through the peculiar invention that is Zoom. He's wearing a green Rowing Blazers crewneck, occasionally sipping coffee from his East Village sublet, where his friend Ben is visiting. Nothing about the afternoon feels particularly orchestrated. We talk about New York, movies, reading, teachers, and the curious business of finding one's place in the world. Will is thoughtful and entirely unfiltered in the way he speaks, sometimes traveling the halls of his brain in search of the right words, revisiting a thought before he's finished expressing it. I like that about him.
He's also an actor, and a very good one.
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In Noah Segan's The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, Price stars opposite John Turturro, whose Harry Lehman is an aging pickpocket trying to survive in a city that has changed around him. Price plays Dylan, a wealthy young man whose unfortunate encounter with Harry sets the story in motion. It's a New York movie, through and through, interested in its people and the lives that unfold on opposite sides of the same street. Price's character is something of an interruption. He's dressed exceptionally memorable, speaks with a curious self-importance, and seems determined to make everyone around him aware of things they probably already know.
"He's trying to be intimidating, but is not," Will tells me, amused by the way audiences have responded to the character. He and Segan had discussed performances by Ray Liotta in Something Wild and Gary Oldman in Léon: The Professional, actors who weren't afraid to take considerable swings with their characters. Will wanted Dylan to feel like a disruption.
I tell him I particularly loved the clothes. The oversized coat, the shoes, the whole carefully assembled thing. He explains that he and costume designer Cailey Breneman exchanged references, sometimes finding inspiration in strangers on the street. There were photographs from Timothée Chalamet's A Complete Unknown press tour, too. They eventually landed on a vintage Balenciaga coat. The idea, Will says, was to make something feel iconic without appearing to try too hard.
Full Look: Dior Men’s Fall/Winter 2026/2027
Full Look: Dior Men’s Fall/Winter 2026/2027
But we don't spend very long discussing the film. There's an entire person in front of me I'd rather get to know.
The film begins with a line borrowed from LCD Soundsystem: "New York, I love you, but you're bringing me down." It's a sentiment familiar to anyone who has spent enough time here. I ask Will about his own New York existence, and he remembers a particular June afternoon, shortly after his twenty-fifth birthday.
He was in the park with his friends and his then-girlfriend when he received the call that he'd booked Luca Guadagnino's After the Hunt. It was the first time in his career that he'd landed something he felt was truly competitive, and the opportunity to work with a filmmaker he'd long admired. His girlfriend asked him what he wanted to do to celebrate.
"I just wanna walk around," he told her.
And that's what they did. They walked around New York, went to Balthazar for lunch, and he bought himself an expensive pair of sunglasses. A perfectly lovely day, made more memorable by the sensation that his life was changing.
"I was so glad I was in New York because I wanted to feel like a part of the world," he remembers.
Of course, New York has a funny way of making you feel like part of the world even when you'd rather be left out of it. Will understands this, too. The city offers very little opportunity to withdraw from other people's lives. Your happiest afternoon might coincide with someone else's worst.
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He introduces me to a word: palimpsest. An old manuscript whose original writing has been erased to make room for something new, although traces of what came before may remain. Will likes thinking about New York this way. Its buildings change purposes, its streets hold generations of experiences, and its inhabitants go about their days, largely unaware of the histories unfolding around them.
"The person next to me could be having the worst day of their life and I could be having the greatest," he says. "And we're literally five feet from each other."
I find myself thinking about the 167th Street subway station in the Bronx, a place I've visited since childhood, where my aunt lives nearby. Watching it appear in the film was an unexpected pleasure. I've seen the same station in movies from decades ago, its name unchanged, the world around it transformed. Will understands the fascination. His own experience of New York seems to be informed by the countless people who have lived here before him, and the millions living here now.
He's originally from the Midwest, a distinction that becomes increasingly important as our conversation continues. He worries about the cultural divide between places like New York and Los Angeles and the rest of the country. What good is a movie, he wonders, if it only reaches people who are already looking for it? He's interested in what happens when a work of art finds someone who might never have thought to seek it out.
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Will attended an arts boarding school, a detail I find endlessly fascinating, if only because it sounds like the premise of a film I'd happily watch. I ask him about his teachers. Surely there must have been someone from those years who made a lasting impression.
He tells me about Mrs. Gaede, his sophomore English teacher, a woman with a raspy voice and a reputation for being exceptionally good at her job. At the time, Will considered himself a strong English student. He loved reading, wrote well, and approached the subject with the confidence of someone who knew he was good at it.
Then came Jane Eyre.
He wasn't particularly interested in the novel and hadn't really read it, although he'd managed to get by on class discussions, a few chapters, the film adaptation, and some research online. When an important essay came around, he tackled it, and his father helped him revise it for clarity and punctuation. Will turned it in, presumably expecting a respectable grade.
Mrs. Gaede failed him.
He was furious. His parents rarely interfered with his schooling, but Will was so convinced he'd been wronged that his father agreed to meet with her. The two sat down for tea. When his father emerged, Will was expecting some vindication.
Instead, his father told him, "I agree with her."
What Mrs. Gaede had recognized was not simply that the essay was inadequate, but that Will hadn't done the work. His writing might have been clever enough to conceal it from someone else. Not from her.
Years later, he remembers the experience with gratitude.
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"I think because of those teachers, I'm the person I am," he tells me. The lesson was simple enough: if you're going to engage with something, have an informed point of view. Don't try to substitute the appearance of understanding for the real thing.
I think about my own teachers, and the curious ways their words can accompany us long after we've left their classrooms. An arts teacher of mine, Mrs. Novak, once said something about practice that I've never forgotten. I can still remember her standing on a stool when she said it. I wonder how many things we carry around without realizing where we first picked them up.
Will still reads, of course. He recently finished Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and has Emma Cline on his reading list. He likes audiobooks for nonfiction but prefers to read fiction on the page. We discuss podcasts, too. He's fond of Talk Easy, Sam Fragoso's long-form interview series, and enjoys How Long Gone and The Big Picture. There's something particularly endearing about listening to an actor speak enthusiastically about the people who interview actors.
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He remembers growing up reading long profiles in GQ, the kind that allowed an artist's life to unfold over several pages. They gave him access to people he admired, even from a part of the country far removed from the centers of the entertainment industry.
"I don't necessarily have an interest in celebrity," he explains, "but I have an interest in people that are doing things at a high level."
It's a distinction I appreciate. I sometimes wonder whether the world needs another celebrity interview. There are so many of them, and so few seem interested in what makes a person worth knowing outside of their professional accomplishments. But then you meet someone whose mind takes you somewhere unexpected, and the whole exercise feels worthwhile again.
Will seems to believe in the importance of that exchange.
"I think people show up for people," he says, reflecting on the role of artists in a world increasingly preoccupied with artificial intelligence. "And I think we invest in the idea of the person making the thing."
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His own career has begun to take shape rather quickly. After college came Goosebumps, followed by opportunities to work with filmmakers including Guadagnino. I ask whether he considers himself fortunate, perhaps even one of those charmed people whose paths appear relatively free of obstacles.
He doesn't dismiss the question. He knows he's been lucky, and credits the people who have helped him along the way. But he also remembers the disappointments, including a recent opportunity that didn't work out.
He talks about the danger of believing you've arrived anywhere.
When he booked Goosebumps, his first job out of college, he imagined himself embarking on a medieval quest. The job hadn't brought him to his destination. It had simply given him a horse. Now he had something to begin the journey with.
It's a wonderfully peculiar analogy, and very Will.
His relationship to his work is similarly unresolved. When I ask whether there's a performance he's particularly proud of, one he can look back on without wanting to change a thing, he considers the question before answering.
"I don't think so."
He's proud of the things he's done, but he's always conscious of what might have been different. He mentions something Sam Rockwell once said about seeing missed opportunities when watching his own performances. Will understands that feeling. An artist is constantly changing, and the person who made something years ago isn't necessarily the person looking back at it today.
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We eventually arrive at a question that's been occupying my own thoughts lately: are our dreams necessarily our callings?
Will laughs at the idea that following our dreams is always the obvious answer. If he'd followed his purest childhood ambitions, he says, he might be playing in the NFL or NBA. He thinks there's something beautiful about encouraging young people to pursue what they love, although he's also seen people struggle with the discovery that their greatest abilities and strongest desires don't always point in the same direction.
He doesn't pretend to know how to resolve it.
"I don't have an answer," he admits.
I appreciate that. Perhaps more than I would have appreciated a perfectly constructed response. Will isn't particularly interested in offering certainty for its own sake. He takes his time, changes direction, revisits an idea. There is something authentic about watching a person think without knowing exactly where they're going to land.
Eventually, he offers something that feels close to an answer.
"If you attempt and you earnestly pursue anything, you're gonna get better," he says. If there's nobility in what you're trying to accomplish, then perhaps the pursuit itself is reason enough to continue.
Blazer: Dior, T-shirt and Jeans: Talent’s own
Later, I ask him whether anyone has said something recently that changed the way he thinks. He pauses, remembering a message he received the previous summer, and begins searching for it. He'd written it down and wants to get the wording exactly right.
After a little looking, he finds it.
"Don't be impatient, don't try to please, look at life."
The message had come from someone in a text. He still thinks about it.
"Don't try to please. That's a big one," he says. "I think it's the real enemy of anything interesting."
It's an observation that seems particularly fitting for someone whose livelihood depends, at least partly, on other people's approval.
We talk some more about character, and what the smallest habits can reveal about a person. Will thinks the way someone treats restaurant staff says a great deal. He doesn't like people who are rude to someone simply doing their job. He prefers to be direct and human with the people he encounters.
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Then, quite unexpectedly, he adds another rule: never sit on someone's bed in pants you've worn on the subway.
We both laugh. He's serious about it, too.
By this point, we've been talking for nearly an hour. His friend Ben has appeared, we've wandered through books and movies and New York apartments, and I find myself reluctant to end the conversation.
I ask Will one last question. Not about the future, or what comes next for his career, but about the present. What matters to him today?
It happens to be the day The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is opening. He's trying to stay away from Instagram and enjoy it. Earlier, he'd visited a coffee shop he'd frequented years ago, back when he had very little professional work to speak of. The barista recognized him and mentioned she'd seen the trailer for his movie at the theater.
He knows it's a small thing. Perhaps even a superficial one, he says. But it meant something to him.
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I think back to that afternoon in New York when he'd received the call about After the Hunt, and how all he wanted to do was walk around the city. There's something rather sweet about the distance between those two moments. The same city, the same young man, and an entirely different set of circumstances. Somewhere along the way, his life has changed enough that the person handing him his coffee has seen his face on a movie screen.
And yet, here he is, still thinking about the books he hasn't read, the things he might have done differently, the people who helped him along the way, and whether there's a better way to spend one's life.
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I began our conversation by telling Will that I sometimes worry Zoom has taken a little of the magic out of interviewing. After years of doing this, I miss the spontaneity of sitting across from someone, of allowing a conversation to unfold without the intrusion of a screen.
By the time we say goodbye, I've nearly forgotten we're on one.
Will tells me it felt like an actual conversation. I tell him that's exactly what I'd hoped for.
I remember something from our first meeting, a week before this conversation. During the photoshoot, Will asked me whether we'd met before. He had the feeling that we had. I was certain we hadn't. I have a pretty good memory for people, and an even better one for faces. Surely I would have remembered him.
I've thought about that little exchange since. There's something curious about meeting a person for the first time and feeling the familiarity of an old friend. Perhaps we'd passed each other somewhere in New York, years ago, on one of those afternoons when the city seems to belong to everyone and no one. Or maybe, in some alternate universe, in a Sliding Doors version of our lives, we really had met before. Maybe we'd even sat next to each other on a plane and talked the whole way through. Maybe.
Full look: Talent’s own
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