Mario Cantone lends his voice to the character Mikey Abromowitz, a stressed out sandpiper, in Sony Pictures Animation's family comedy movie, Surf's Up. The film is told mockumentary style, closely following the adventures of an up-and-coming young penguin named Cody (voiced by Shia LaBeouf) who loves to surf. Cantone's Mikey is an over-worked employee of a big-time surfing promoter.
Did they show you a conceptual drawing of what your character would look like when you were first approached to be part of this movie?
“Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. They sat me down at the Four Seasons in LA and they said, ‘This is the character we want you do. He’s a talent scout. He’s a sandpiper, which is very nervous bird and he’s stressed out and he works for this kind of Don King-like promoter which James Woods plays.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that sounds great to me.’ Then I got to work with James Woods. I got to be in the room with him and improvise with him, which was really fun.”
Was it intimidating or just fun?
“I think it was a little intimidating. It’s hard to get in a word edgewise with him sometimes, but he plays my boss so it was good. He was a blast. I could really listen. I think he’s Hollywood history. I could listen to his Hollywood stories forever.”
Did he swear a lot during the improvisations?
“He swore a little bit. I did, too. The two of us were a little blue. He did a little bit. Yeah, he bashed me a bit. It was fun. We had a good time. That’s the unique thing about this movie. We got to improvise. We got to work together, you know? You can hear it when you see the film. You get to hear the overlap.”
Is Mikey based on somebody that you know or people that you’ve met?
“It wasn’t a stretch, believe me. It’s based on… I think they based it on Jerry Schmitz who the head of press and marketing here, who I adore. He’s a great guy, so he’s kind of like Jerry a little bit. They call him Mikey in it and I, in fact I think he did some of the scratch tests before they hired me. Yeah, so, but it was fun. I love this. I’m so glad I can sell this without bullshitting you because it’s really, really good.”
Have you seen Surf’s Up with an audience of kids?
“I haven’t seen it with children because I’m afraid of them. After having a children’s show for 5 years called Steampipe Alley out of New York I had enough. It’s funny, a lot of people do these movies for their children, you know? They’re like, ‘I want my children to be able to…’ I don’t have kids, I don’t want kids, not that I don’t care about kids but really could care less. Really, so I do it for me.
The classics like Bambi and Pinocchio and Lady and the [Tramp], I love that stuff. It took me a long time to get used to the CGI stuff. That did happen. It’s too cold. When I saw Toy Story I was like, ‘Well, the kids look like toys, too. This is all plastic,’ but then finally I think it softened up. I was saying in this other interview animation, ‘Every animated movie has a style.’ If you look at Pinocchio it’s got a watercolor kind of wash to it. If you look at Sleeping Beauty it’s very angular. If you look at Bambi, it’s very pastel. Dalmatians, it’s very sketchy. That’s the beauty of an animated film. They have a style. In some of these CGI ones the backgrounds of the suburban neighborhood look like a suburban neighborhood. It’s too real. The grass looks like grass. There’s no flair to it. There’s no style to it, and I think that’s s**t and that has to stop. It does. I don’t like it. I like it to have a look. This movie has a look to it and it just has to have a lot of heart, you know? I love animation, I really do. But I don’t do it for the children.”
So is your bird character gay?
“I don’t know. Scientifically, seagulls are gay. Do you know that? Did you know the majority of seagulls are gay? So a sandpiper is pretty close to a seagull. He’s pretty flamboyant, this bird, and the only thing that’s missing is a musical number. I wanted a musical number. I said, ‘Why didn’t you give me a musical number?’ I said I want a musical number in the sequel.”
He used to recruit for musical theater, right?
“He used to recruit for musical theater itself. Is he gay? I’m like, ‘Do you live in a cave?’”
So has there been behind the scenes talk of a Surf’s Up sequel?
“There is talk of it and I’d better have a musical number in it. That’s all I know. I was telling Kelly Slater that I was like, ‘The fact that you’re involved with this you obviously think this movie represents surfing in a way that is respectful. And it’s valid and it’s important, and you see the tragedy of it and the triumphs of it and the hurt and the pain and the joy. It’s all there.’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’ …He saw the script and the pictures [and] he was just very excited about it, and they really stay true to [surfing]. I don’t even know surfing. It’s not that I don’t like it. I’m like, ‘Whatever,’ but this really showed me what surfing was and what it meant. It’s very theatrical. Surfing is a show. It’s a show. It’s theater. It really is so it’s not too far away from what I do.”
Did you do a lot of ad-libbing?
“Most of it.”
Is there anything that you did that you wish made it into the film that didn’t?
“Yeah, there was a thing they wished they could put in it. There was a little Julia Child thing that I do when I was making the party up. I started talking about (in Julia Child voice) baked stuffing a sandpiper bird, which has a lot of bones in it. You have to braise it because if you braise it the meat will fall off the bone. If you roast it like a pheasant, you’re pulling like rubber (end Julia Child voice). I did a whole thing like that and they loved it and they were going to use it at one point, and then they didn’t use it. There was a few other things they didn’t use that I thought were really funny, but there’s more to come. I think this movie might be a big franchise if it does as well as it should. There should be sequels and the series and blah, blah, blah. I told them no one else is playing Mikey.”
