I’d certainly like to think so. Obviously, that’s such an instinctual moment of choice, I would like to think that I would for my family in a second. But, at the same time, it would be nice to think that we’re all good enough human beings that you would for anyone. But whether that is a truthful statement or not, you kind of need to be in the moment to deal with it.
Didn’t you have to tote Katie around a lot up and down stairs? How did that go?
What comes together as a 10 second clip in the movie was four different nights of shooting because they were different locations: the stairway, inside the bar, down the street, in her dorm room. The walk and talk, all the dialogue was one take. Walking the full block was miserable on both of us because her stomach was killing her because she’d be dead weight on my shoulder. She can’t breathe and [she was] bouncing up and down. The scene calls for the pace to be quick. He’s getting her out of there and he’s angry at what she’s doing, jealous and all these other things, and so to do that 24 or 25 times has got to be…you know. I think we faked it well, but I don’t know how much we liked each other at the end of the night. I was looking at her like, “What are you having for lunch because it had better not be much.”
Speaking of working out, do you still play basketball a lot?
Occasionally. I try not to when I’m shooting because I’m the kind of guy that will walk in the next day and show Forest my eight stitches above my eye and that won’t go over well. It’s hard for me to turn off the competitive juices. They somehow creep back up when there’s two minutes left in a game and I’ve been good all game and all of a sudden something happens.
Do you play in a league?
Yeah, actually the NBA runs a league, the NBA Entertainment League, which is for people in front of the camera or behind the music, anything in the industry. It gives us all a chance to live our dreams of being a professional athlete. Everyone in this town, with their ego, thinks they’re Michael Jordan anyway. But it’s on the clock. We wear NBA uniforms. It’s officiated. It’s really well-run. It is fun.
Are you competitive about acting also?
[Pointing to bottled water on the table] I’ll race you to see how fast you can drink that bottle of water. I’m pretty much competitive about anything. By nature, it’s a competitive business but I’ve also been that guy, I’ll walk out of an audition and see the six guys waiting and say, “Hey, we didn’t do the second scene. It’s only the first and the third.” I don’t wish bad will on anyone. We’re all after the same thing and whatever happens, happens. If they like what I did in the room and my energy and my thing, then that’s great. But I’m not going to intentionally sabotage anyone - or at least I haven’t yet.
Is it a different experience to do a film like this that is supposed to me more commercial than some of your other work?
I don’t know if it’s a different discipline. Certainly it was a different genre from what I’ve done lately. But, I don’t think I had to come about it a different way. The minute you find yourself thinking, “Oh, this is maybe a big mainstream studio movie,” then that defeats the creative purpose and kind of what drew you to the movie in the first place.
Do you find yourself fighting that sort of Boy Scout typecast or is that gone?
Fighting’s not the right word, I don’t think. I think that I’m realistic in how I’m going to be cast. I know the right things and, on the same token, I didn’t think I’d get a movie like “Prey for Rock and Roll” where I got to play the drinking, smoking, tattooed, ex-con. But, the truth is, I’m not always cast like that. So any actor is going to sit here and tell you that, “Hey, it’s nice to be cast outside the box and do experimental things and things that you normally wouldn’t be thought of for right off the bat.” At the same time, regardless of the level of where actors are, you have to deliver how they want to see you, I guess. We want to see Julia Roberts be Julia Roberts. So you have to deliver that.
