How strange was it to shave your head for this role?
“It wasn’t necessarily weird. I really like jumping into a character that’s so extreme, an extreme opposite from the last character I played.”
So what’s the story of Death Sentence?
“Well, Kevin Bacon and Kelly Preston have this sort of very happy, lovely family. Two sons, one has great potential of becoming something and a hockey future. And, anyways, they kind of come across the wrong place at the wrong time and this incident happens where Kevin’s son is affected. So therefore they go to court and they can see it’s going to become an extensive trial. [Kevin’s] the only witness. He picked the only place in any town anywhere that doesn’t have video cameras. The knife miraculously disappears. Like, ‘It’s only on you. We can get this guy put away for a few years, but then what?’ So basically it’s up to Kevin to say if this is the guy or if not. If it’s not the guy, he gets let free and when he gets let free, what happens from here?”
And you’re the guy who could get put away?
“It’s actually my little brother. But then what happens from there then affects my character and ignites my character, his motivations throughout this whole story.”
And this is the first time audiences will see you playing the bad guy, isn’t it?
“I haven’t been the bad guy ever. I’ve been basically the vulnerable character that shows his weak side a few times. I’ve had some films where I’ve had some moments of courage, but other than that I haven’t played the villain and a vigilante.”
So was that something you were looking for when the script for Death Sentence showed up?
“It’s actually interesting about this project because I had read the script about a year before it actually even got green-lit. The character was written as like 28-30 or like 29-30 and because of that, I kind of just put the script back down. I was like, ‘You know what? If they make me go in and read for this, they’re going to say I’m too young.’ So I just put it away and after a while when I was just looking for a darker script. I knew I was just about to start Georgia Rule and I was looking for something to really sort of contrast that right afterwards. I said, ‘Remember that film Death Sentence? Do you think we can meet with James Wan on that?’ They said, ‘No, I think the role belongs to someone else.’ Or there is an offer out to somebody else. Finally after we finished Georgia Rule, without even knowing I had made that phone call reaching out to them, they just called with an offer to me.
I thought it was just such a weird sort of irony and it kind of followed in the way that I had received my first three roles, you know? It was kind of one of those things where it will come to you if it’s supposed to. This one followed in those tracks like it was meant to happen so I was happily jumping on it. Everything happened just great after the first three films that were meant to happen so, you know, I needed to do this one.”
Did they change the character, re-tool it to make it younger for you?
“No. I mean, I tried my best to just get myself older. I’d come off a film where I was supposed to be young kid. I’d done Georgia Rule with Garry Marshall and I’d had long hair. I played a Mormon virgin and I couldn’t go on to this with any of that. We really had to pull just a whole sort of revivification in a way. Like, I’d say it revived because I’m reviving myself from a person I’m completely not in that one, but also going to this whole different role.
We immediately had to shave the head down and I haven’t even shaved my head in my life. I didn’t look so mean when I had like dried, chafed skin on the top of my scalp for the first two weeks. I just looked like, ‘Who’s the bald guy who looks a little sick!’ And I’d done a lot of studies. I knew this guy had to be the leader of this group and a lot of these guys in my gang were flirting with 40 years-old, so how was I going to control them? We go out and I’d throw a few glasses here and there in a bar where it’s completely not expected and they suddenly start having a little respect. Like, ‘This guy, he is a little crazy,’ and I just kind of held onto that.”
How was working with director James Wan?
“It was really the reason I’d done this because in order for me to do this film, because I was looking at a film for me which would have been my first lead, a starring role from page 1 to 120, and the reason why I took this film was because I got on the phone with him and he told me immediately what he wanted to do with the character, and the depths that he wanted to go. And at the very end of the film, [he wanted] to make his last scene very poetic which is a scene between him and Kevin. It was just music to my ears what he’d said about this scene, which I can’t really throw a spoiler. But I was just like, ‘You know out of all that this guy goes through in the script and to have it end like that is yeah, all right. I’ll do that. I’ll do that arc. I’ll do that guy really trying to be a leader and a man, but really when it comes down to it is just a boy that was getting himself way over his head.’”
