Limp Bizkit Frontman Fred Durst Is This Summer’s Most Unlikely Indie Film Star

Being an independent film fan is full of surprises, as each slate of festival releases brings a new wave of emerging filmmakers, breakout stars, and established actors playing against type in bold films. But it’s hard to imagine that even the biggest cultural omnivore could have predicted that 2024 would spark a renaissance in Fred Durst’s acting career.

The Limp Bizkit frontman, who helped pioneer the nu metal genre throughout the ’90s by combining hip-hop and rock on albums with poetic titles like “Three Dollar Bill, Y’all,” and “Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water,” has been a sporadic presence in movies for the past quarter century. (His Wikipedia page draws a clear distinction between the “Mainstream Success” and “Start of Film Career” portions of his biography, if that tells you anything.) Aside from a handful of small roles in the 2000s, he’s best known to cinephiles as the director of “The Fanatic,” the infamous 2019 stalker thriller starring John Travolta as an autistic man named Moose that somehow manages to be more offensive than it sounds.

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But this summer, Durst can be seen in two new A24 movies that showcase dramatically different sets of acting chops. And in a turn of events that might surprise anyone only familiar with the man from his 2021 album “Still Sucks,” he gives excellent performances in both.

In “I Saw the TV Glow,” Durst appears in a brief but crucial role as Frank, the stepfather of Justice Smith’s protagonist Owen, obsessed with a young adult TV show called “The Pink Opaque.” Frank hardly says a word in the film — other than “isn’t that a show for girls?” — but his ominous presence casts a shadow over the entire household that prevents Owen from expressing himself or advocating for his own needs. Owen’s need to walk on eggshells around Frank (a fear that is eventually validated) prompts him to rely on a certain YA network show for the entirety of his self-actualization, which sets the events of Jane Schoenbrun’s film in motion.

Schoenbrun’s fondness for ’90s media permeates every frame of the film, from its musical numbers reminiscent of “Twin Peaks” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” to the litany of italicized stars that evoke the cover of The Smashing Pumpkins’ seminal album “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.” In a sense, Durst’s presence can be viewed as yet another intertextual pop culture reference. But even if Durst was cast in the film because his music career made him the perfect prop for a ’90s fever dream, he rises above the novelty casting and gives a foreboding performance that helps imbue Owen’s secret TV binges with life-and-death stakes.

If “I Saw the TV Glow” launched the Durst-issance, then Kyle Mooney’s “Y2K” solidified it. The 1999-set comedy, which reimagines the infamous Y2K computer panic as a robot apocalypse that turned every appliance on the planet into a killing machine dead set on eliminating humans, sees Durst playing a fictional version of himself who teams up with a crowd of high schoolers to survive New Year’s Eve. The film never makes an outright joke about Limp Bizkit being bad, but the exaggerated proclamations about the band’s brilliance from many of the film’s high school-aged characters is a joke in and of itself. Durst happily joins in on the satire, giving a wonderfully self-deprecating performance as a cultural prophet happy to bask in the adoration of every adolescent male who claims that “Limp” changed his life.

Durst was warmly embraced by audiences when he attended SXSW to promote both films (“Y2K” had its world premiere at Austin’s Paramount Theater the night before “I Saw the TV Glow” screened in the same venue), suggesting that he might become the latest ’90s icon to get a reappraised moment in the spotlight. And while it’s entirely possible that Durst’s two film roles don’t lead to any greater opportunities — hell, they might not even come close to making up for “The Fanatic” — they’re clear evidence that the man has a lot more acting talent than his previous output would suggest. The Summer of Durst should be a reminder to indie filmmakers of all stripes that looking outside conventional acting pools can lead to some thrillingly dynamic castings.

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