Aden Young stars in Ray McKinnon’s “Rectify”. Photo by James Minchin III

Whether it was his Academy Award-winning 2001 short film The Accountant, his ominous performance as Reverend Smith on HBO‘s violent Western series Deadwood or his more recent appearances on Sons of Anarchy and in the Footloose remake, Ray McKinnon has a simple Southern charm that adds depth to anything he works on. This week sees his range of talents being utilized on screens big and small as his New Southern Gothic series Rectify premieres on the Sundance Channel April 22, followed by the theatrical release of Jeff Nichols‘ Mud on April 26. Though McKinnon plays a different role in each project (he’s the creator and writer for Rectify and plays the father of a Huckleberry Finn-like adolescent in Mud), the parallels between the two are hard to ignore.

Rectify revolves around Daniel Holden (Aden Young), a man exonerated of a rape and murder for which he has spent 19 years on death row. Like a cross between Twin Peaks and the West Memphis Three story, Rectify shows Daniel’s struggles to adjust to the modern world after spending most of his life in a cinder block cell that offers no concept of time or reality as most of us know it. (At one point, another character in Rectify even refers to Daniel as Starman, referring to the 1984 John Carpenter film about an alien who crashes to Earth and has a hard time adjusting to his new surroundings.)

“In some ways Being There is an archetypal story that appeals to me, and Daniel is a little bit like Chance the Gardener at times,” said McKinnon at last month’s Atlanta Film Festival premiere for Rectify. “But Chance never changed, that’s part of his story. I’m interested in a lot of social and psychological issues as a curious human being, so I’m interested in sociopaths, are they born or made, is Daniel one or not? I’m interested in narcissism, family dynamics and how systems can convict people who, when you look at the evidence you wonder how that happened, and the group psychology that’s involved, like how a group of people can convince each other that this is the right thing to do. So I wanted to explore that and there are a lot of elements I’m interested in in the world. Like Mad Men, this is, in some ways, an examination of private lives and sometimes we see things in our story that even the characters aren’t aware they’re showing or doing. I like stories like that.”

Daniel (Aden Young) is fascinated by the simplest things in Ray McKinnon’s “Rectify”. Photo by Blake Tyers.

In Mud, McKinnon portrays an aging Southern man whose stubbornness to accept the changes happening around him creates similar problems to the ones Daniel faces in Rectify.

“Senior is an anachronism,” McKinnon said of his character prior to the Atlanta Film Festival screening of Mud. “He’s kind of of another time, but times have changed and he’s not dealing with it very well. His son, who is changing with the times, helps bring him along. He’s a sad character in some ways, but he changes and I see a good life for him and his son in the future. I know [Jeff] as a friend and he claims he wrote this character for me, so there was a lot of pressure. I didn’t want to disappoint him. He’s a very assured director, he knows what he wants and we had a good time together. I always try to enjoy myself and he made me a better actor.”

Though his role in Mud (which stars Matthew McConaughey, Reese Witherspoon, Tye Sheridan and Jacob Lofland) is as a supporting cast member, he represents the mindset of many people along Mud‘s Mississippi River landscape, as well as many of the citizens of Rectify‘s Paulie, Ga.

“[Jeff] claims that he stole the idea [for Mud] from Mark Twain in a very broad way, but it’s a modern film,” says McKinnon. “It’s a story about the 21st century South and the changes that are going on along the Mississippi River and the people who can’t change with it. In some ways it has universal and ageless themes, but it’s also a 21st century story about the South.

Ray McKinnon plays Senior in Jeff Nichols’ “Mud”. Photo by James Bridges.

“We as a bigger society – and certainly the South is a more magnified hyper version sometimes of the bigger society – want order in our world,” he says of Rectify. “We want to believe that if a bad guy does something he’s going to be punished for that. Sometimes the pressure for that from society causes the wrong people to be convicted. It also causes people who believe in that conviction to have a psychological unwillingness to change their belief system, to turn around and say, ‘Maybe I was wrong’ or ‘Maybe I saw this the wrong way.’ You see that throughout both sides of the political aisle where you have a belief system and you’ll be damned if you’re going to believe anything different.”

With both of these projects being released within just a few days of one another, audiences have multiple ways to experience McKinnon’s quirky take on a South that he is very much a part of. And McKinnon couldn’t be more satisfied and proud to see these projects (particularly Rectify, his own creation) coming to fruition.

“Getting older and seeing how fortunate I am to be doing what I love to do I really appreciate things more,” he says “I live more in gratitude and a little less in fear. For some reason, these two projects that I care so much about [are coming out] at the same time, so I’m just planning on enjoying and savoring it. I was fortunate enough to be in Jeff’s movie and doing this show has been beyond my wildest imagination of things to explore. So I feel full in the best way.”

www.sundancechannel.com/series/rectify

www.mud-themovie.com