HEIGHT OF HIS POWERS
It’s not so much his height but the way he carries it, gracefully and a little delicately, as if he’s learned to move carefully through space. And it turns out that Kodi Smit-McPhee – who is probably the most exciting young actor to come out of this awards season – actually has. He’s had to.
He suffers from a condition called ankylosing spondylitis, an autoimmune disease that irreversibly affects the spine and joints. It means that Smit-McPhee, who is 188 centimetres, slender as a reed, and dressed in a soft mohair Song for the Mute jacket on the morning I meet him, lives with pain, sometimes a lot of it. “It’s something I’ve tried not to talk about,” Smit-McPhee says over cappuccino in Manhattan. “Because I didn’t think it represented me well.” Such are the anxieties of an actor who started young (acting professionally at eight in Australia, then getting his Hollywood break, at 12, opposite Viggo Mortensen in the dystopian thriller ) and at
