Inside Boyhood child star's post-Hollywood life as a FIREMAN 'in the middle of nowhere'... and what could coax him back into the spotlight

Ellar Coltrane, who achieved a brief blaze of celebrity as the child star of Boyhood and then vanished from the spotlight, has pulled back the curtain on his new life.

Richard Linklater's experimental film followed the upbringing of Coltrane's character Mason, whose parents were played by Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke.

The picture was shot at intervals from 2002 through 2013, allowing the cast to age naturally with their characters, with Coltrane filming from ages seven to 19.

Upon the film's release in 2014, Coltrane was showered with acclaim but found fame to be an overwhelming experience he 'didn't' particularly 'enjoy,' via Variety.

He turned his back on Hollywood and retreated to 'the middle of nowhere' in New Mexico, where he volunteers as a fireman and has entered training as a paramedic.

Now aged 30, he has revealed his out-of-the-way method of scratching his lingering artistic itch - and what sort of project might prompt his return to showbiz.

'I live in the middle of nowhere, and I’m pretty far away from film,' Coltrane shared in his new interview. 'Really, in my life I’ve moved on.'

The Austin native explained that he performs 'manual labor, and I’m a volunteer firefighter, and I’m working on my EMT license right now.'

However he does dabble in small-time cinema, having 'integrated' himself in the 'independent film community' of El Paso, Texas, which he raved was 'wonderful.'

Coltrane recently played Lee Harvey Oswald in a small picture shot in Mexico City called El Fantasma, in addition to which he has 'acted in a couple of short films.'

Gushing about the El Paso arts scene, he said: 'I’m really inspired by the energy there and what my friends are up to. It reminds me of Austin 20 years ago.'

He himself emerged from an artistic family in Austin, born to a musician father and a mother who conducted horse therapy for autism.

When he was six - three years before his parents divorced - he was cast as the lead in Boyhood, with the director's daughter Lorelei Linklater playing his sister.

Coltrane revealed that the shooting of the picture ran alongside his real-life upbringing in a 'pretty tumultuous household.'

As a result, the scenes involving his character's abusive alcoholic stepfather (Marco Perella) 'didn’t seem shocking at all to me. That was just kind of how adults were.'

However he did feel affected by a particularly explosive scene in which Perella's character throws a plate at the dinner table whilst drunk.

'I remember that moment, with the dinner plate and just how viscerally scary that was. Even though I knew it was acting, and everybody laughs in between takes. There was a lot that was done, probably for our benefit, for the kids to try to break up the tension, and I think we didn’t do very many takes of that,' said Coltrane.

Coltrane, who expressed a preference for gender-neutral pronouns in 2021 before later returning to 'he/him,' described himself during his filming years as an 'odd kid' who 'didn’t have a lot of friends my own age, even in my personal life, just being homeschooled and being raised by the arts community in Austin.'

He eventually grew into a 'really wild teenager' who at one point, at the age of 17, arrived for work on the Boyhood 'very high on marijuana,' which made him 'extremely anxious and self-conscious, and that scene is terrible. Needless to say that scene did not make it into the final cut. I never did that again.' 

Although he never had misgivings about being a child actor during the 'wonderful' shoot of the movie, he did feel discomfiture about the publicity he was subjected to when the film finally released shortly before his 20th birthday.

Coltrane explained that 'when I became famous and was going around doing a million Q&A’s and parties, I didn’t enjoy that part so much.'

In the wake of the movie's debut, Coltrane's family life also entered the limelight when the Daily Mail revealed his grandmother was a hippie living off-grid in a parked, rusting school bus in rural Texas with two cats, five dogs and 17 chickens.

She claimed at the time that she had heard her grandson was 'happy, happy, happy' being famous, although she confessed they had not spoken in three years.

In his new interview, Coltrane took the view that he 'did pretty well' coping with notoriety 'and coming out the other side not too damaged, but it’s a lot.' 

He reflected: 'A big saving grace for me, in that context of being a child actor, and later interacting with the Harry Potter kids and other people who starred in a long-term project or started a career around the same time, for them there was something released to the world also in childhood.'

Coltrane was grateful he 'didn't have to experience that,' in the sense that he was an adult by the time Boyhood released and exposed him to public scrutiny.

'It allowed me to avoid being a child star, which is really difficult for a lot of people. I have a lot of compassion for people who really struggle with fame early in life.'

Linklater recently remarked that Coltrane 'grew up to be this sensitive poet guy. He’s a poet living in New Mexico now,' via the Hollywood Reporter.

'The film was going to go where he went, to a large degree. It was kind of a mix of autobiography for me, but then also developmentally for him.'

Although Coltrane has traded in showbiz for a private life in the Southwest, he shared that he has been 'missing being on set' after 'interacting with film people again' at an event he attended last month for the Austin Film Society, where he participated in a Boyhood panel with Hawke, Arquette and Linklater.

'I do very well collaborating with a director who has a passion project. When I can get into that head space with an artist and work closely with them to figure out how I can express what they’re trying to express, I think I can do really good work,' he noted.

'But just showing up on a big set with a million producers as an actor, I don’t know how to do that. I was never really trained as an actor. I was trained by Richard and Ethan as a collaborator and part of the machine of the film,' he observed. 

'So I’m hoping for more small, independent passion projects that I can be a part of, because I have a lot to offer,' Coltrane pitched himself.