No, I can’t say that I have.
There are a lot of women who think you are quite the thing.
Wow. What I like is that I’m not really high profile so that – I don’t want to be too analytical about this – but there’s still a sense that I’m under the radar. So if someone likes my stuff, it’s still not everyone’s yet. If that makes any sense. I shouldn’t say ‘yet’ – just not everyone’s. Like I’m going to blow up tomorrow (laughing). “Tomorrow I’m just going to be on the cover of every magazine.” But I kind of like that, and I like being able to go anywhere that I want, and having select people come up to me and have a connection. That’s really cool. I love that. I get to kind of just run anywhere I want and do anything. And also, in terms of work, observe life and put that into my work, which is really cool. A lot of people don’t have that.
2003 was a pretty high profile year for you.
I think the biggest impact so far, to be honest with you, has been “Old School.” That’s mostly my generation and so people really respond to that and really thought that was really funny.
We’ll see. If you keep putting things out in the universe like I’m doing, it’s going to continue to come back. I remember hanging out with Will Ferrell and people would come up to him and be like, “Weren’t you on ‘M.A.S.H.’? Weren’t you B.J. Honeycutt?” Will’s like in his mid-30s and that doesn’t make any sense. And now, Will walks down the street and people start screaming Frank the Tank or Elf and want to tackle him. It’s interesting how fast that kind of stuff happens. But I just feel really lucky that I’m a working actor, and yet I still have my anonymity to a certain extent. I feel really, really lucky about that.
The cool thing about having the opportunity to do something like “Old School” was that you play the guy who’s leading the anarchy [Piven starred in “P.C.U.” in 1994] and then a few years later, you play the dean of the university. To be lucky enough to have that opportunity shows that I may have a little bit of a range, which doesn’t happen a lot out here.
I don’t know what the variable is. I think we really like to compartmentalize things. “This person is this age.” You walk into a record store and it’s like, “Is it jazz? Is it hip-hop? Is it easy listening? What does he do? Oh, he’s a comedic actor, or a straight actor, or he’s just a leading man.” I think if you’re an actor, I’ve been an actor since I was eight years old and I love to do it, why not do every tone and genre you can, because I love to do it and I can do it. I love to just keep mixing it up. So why not keep doing that?
When you go to a movie, do you seek out specific genres?
I do seek out certain kinds of movies. I love character-driven pieces. I really do. I kind of get bored if there [are] things exploding. I’d like to like it. It would be fun to just go in and enjoy a silly, big popcorn movie like that.
I really like if there’s something about the different characters and [the film] just reveals something about why we are here and stuff. That is really, really great for me. To give you an example, I loved “Monster’s Ball” and the new movie, “Monster,” with Charlize Theron. My friend wrote and directed that and I’m so proud of her. That’s a woman’s story that we only knew about for a moment because we saw her go off in court. “She’s some horrible serial killer and that woman is insane, and she’s the devil. But wait a minute, she has this story.” That film, at its best, was so cool because it can reveal the different sides of someone’s life and why they got to that point.
What’s next for you?
I’m reading scripts and I wrote a script myself. I’m getting ready to hopefully get that together.
To direct or star in?
To direct. Then I just finished something for HBO that Mark Wahlberg produced. A series called “Entourage” about the entourage around a celebrity, based loosely on his life.
ADDITIONAL “CHASING LIBERTY” RESOURCES:
Mandy Moore Interview
Interview with Matthew Goode
"Chasing Liberty" Photo Gallery
"Chasing Liberty” Trailer, Credits and Movie News
