I don’t fight it at all. You have to embrace who you are. I don’t consider myself the boy-next-door, but I certainly know that many actors are categorized in different leading man versus character actor versus so-and-so looks like so-and-so, or however that system works or whatever category you get put in. You have to embrace it. At the same time in conjunction with that, I know what roles I’m going to get and what roles I’m not.
This was a version of that role that every actor kind of responds to because it’s against type. The core of this character was not the core of me. His experiences in life have nothing to do with mine.
Every actor creates a character a different way, but I always try to find that one thing, in what situation does he respond the way Marc would respond? And ironically enough it was the early rape scene that he re-tells about his sister being raped. I have a sister and if I walked in on her getting raped, I can see myself... As human beings, I think we all have that switch. Some people flip it when they get cut off on the 405. We have different variations and levels of when that’s going to go off. I can see myself, if that happened to my sister at 17 years old, I may have been how I responded as well.
It was such an interesting role because you have a 17 year-old going to prison as a boy who comes out a man, but yet he has an innocence to him because he’s a virgin. He’s had no exposure to any civilization. That’s when men grow up. Women grow up a little sooner than men do, in my opinion, from probably 20-24. Guys don’t really grow up until 24-29, where they start to come into their own, in their own sense of maturity. That happened in a confined isolated place for this guy. So to reintegrate him back into society... He’s floating. Again, as humans, we’ve all been to that place in our lives or our careers where we are out drifting. It's like, "What are we going to do? Where are we going to pinball?" He goes and tries to make a relationship with the one person he thinks he has a shot at doing it with. He falls in love for the first time in the process. These are all new things and not really what you think of when you think of a skinhead ex-con, murdering, tattooed, smoking, drinking guy. Certainly when you see all those elements, when that jumped out of the page to me, I immediately wanted a go at it.
How did they find you for this part?
The standard channels. I wish I had a great story for you, but I really don’t. I read it, I really liked it, the casting director was a fan of mine and said, "You should meet this guy for it even though on first appearance it might not be what you sought for this role." I came in with a take on the character and met with the filmmaker, and read with Gina and they just really responded to what I did. I just kind of got the job in the normal process.
Sometimes actors don’t get along on a set. Sometimes personalities, like in life, collide. If you're forced to work together for six or eight weeks, sometimes you just don’t get along for no reason at all. That so wasn’t the case on this movie. Everybody got along and was doing the movie for the right reasons because it certainly wasn’t a money job for anyone. It was something that all of us responded to on the micro and the macro. We responded to the individual role, and we wanted to be a part of the story being told. It was a very comfortable set to be on.
