I kind of got thrown into acting really quickly. I was modeling in New York and I had a theatrical film and television agent, just because it was kind of like the thing that they told me to do. I booked a job so quick I guess I didn’t really have time to decide if I wanted to be an actor.
What was that job?
It was a pilot for the WB. It was my third month in the modeling business, not even in the acting business. It was my first audition for acting. They flew me to LA and they asked me over there, “Is this your real name?” I was like, “Yeah.” They said, “Why didn’t you change it?” “I didn’t have time to change it.” It happened so quick and then I was automatically hooked. I was drawn to it.
I guess it took me a while to start to respect the craft. At that time, the teen thing was really, really big with the “Dawson’s Creek” and all that, at that moment. It wasn’t so hard to get on a show if you had any kind of character or look or whatever. I kind of flew by on that for about the first year. Then I really started to respect it. I was like, “I don’t want to do it just because I have the look. I don’t want to fly by.” The more I worked, the more I learned. The more I learned, the more I was intrigued because unlike most jobs or school or anything else typical in life, this is something that you can never master. This is something that you can never conquer and it’s something that will never get old. I’m so A.D.D. that that’s perfect for me.
Where did “24” come in to all this?
I was shooting “24” while I was shooting “New York Minute.” I was actually traveling back and forth every other week. I’d do a week in LA and then I’d do a week in Toronto or New York on this film. It was such a great payoff because “24” was so deep and interesting and intense. This was the complete opposite. It was very relaxed, a lot of smiles, heroic… It was really fun to be able to do both.
Both of those projects follow a storyline that occurs in one day. Was that tough? Did you get tired of wearing the same thing?
I really got tired of wearing the same thing. It was like nerve-wracking because “24” wanted to dye my hair a little blonder to be more edgy. I knew that once I did that, I’d be stuck with it for this movie as well. I remember I went in and got a bad dye job. It looked like really blonde and yellow and it was like clumpy. “24” was like, “We love it.” That sucked because now all of a sudden I have to use it on the movie, too (laughing). That was like the worst. But it was cool because over the course of three months it would grow and they’d cut some of it out. It kept getting more natural. I had to talk both hair people into – well, I played them off of each other. I’m like “24” says I can’t change it now. And I told the “New York Minute” people the same thing. So I naturally got to cut more of the color out as I went along.
Do you want to continue to go back and forth doing TV and movies?
You know what’s neat? Now TV has opened up such an opportunity to do movies. It’s like in the 80s, I guess, if you were on a TV show, you were kind of stuck. But now thanks to Ashton Kutcher and guys like that, doing a TV show kind of opens you up to getting good movie roles. If I could do a good series that didn’t limit my character and then do movies during the hiatus, that would be great. But ultimately, I would just like to stick to movies because of the fact that you get to play one character for three months and really dive into it and explore that guy. You also get to move. When you do a movie, you also get to move to another city that you’ve probably never been to. Like in “Radio,” we were in Walterboro, South Carolina. I became a resident of Walterboro for three months and it was a blast. That was someplace I would have never [have visited] but now I’ll want to take my kids to and see how it’s grown.
PAGE 3: Riley Smith on the Teen Movie Genre and Edgy Characters
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