The Star eCentral: Movie Buzz
The Star eCentral: Movie Buzz |
| Posted: Lance Reddick talks about working his way up to White House Down. THOUGH he always felt something was pushing him towards acting, Lance Reddick ignored it. His dad was an attorney, and Reddick was on his way to becoming a classical music composer. Then something went awry. "I always knew I had a thing when it came to acting but never took it seriously. I just thought people who wanted to be actors were silly," he says in the sunny patio restaurant of a hotel in Pasadena, California. It may have been silly, but Reddick has managed to parlay that tom-foolery into a full blown career with memorable performances in TV shows like Oz, Fringe, Lost and The Wire and his new movie, White House Down. For a guy who was too shy to even consider performing, he somehow beat the odds. He studied music composition at the prestigious Eastman School of Music, the piano his instrument. "Because my parents wanted to give me what they didn't have, I grew up around a bunch of affluent white kids," says Reddick. "So everybody's parents were lawyers and doctors, bankers and architects. I didn't really get it. Now I do." He developed his first taste for music at an Episcopal elementary school when he started singing with the choir. "A lot of black people grow up singing gospel music. I grew up singing Gregorian chants and 16th century motets," he grins. Still, he left Eastman before he graduated. "I realised I was in denial and I really wanted to be a rock star," he says. "So, I got married straight out of school, moved to Boston because my wife at the time was from there. Two years later my daughter was born. And I found myself working three jobs, seven days a week." He still wasn't sure what he wanted to do. But an excruciating back injury changed all that. "I was lifting a big bundle of newspapers, but it wasn't the lifting itself, it was the exhaustion. I'd come from a double shift of waiting tables to a double shift of delivering newspapers and I delivered the Wall Street Journal in downtown Boston ... I just cranked it up for about 24 hours, and I was just exhausted and something went," he says. "At the time I was used to working on adrenaline and I worked out every day – even with all I had going on. So when I was in pain or exhausted I just ignored it and kept going." Two weeks later he awoke unable to get out of bed. Fourteen days of bed rest forced him to re-evaluate his life. "It sounds crazy but I thought, 'Well, I know the recording studio I'm working with is taking me for a ride. It's time for me to admit that to myself. So let me start from scratch. I can sing and I can act. So let me try to act ...' I went on a couple of musical theatre auditions and realised that wasn't me, so I started going on straight auditions and getting cast and getting cast and getting cast." Though at one time he was co-starring in three shows at once, it wasn't always so easy. Married with a daughter, 24, and a son, 19, he and his first wife split in 1997. (He has since remarried). "She made three times the money I did," he recalls. "God rest her soul, she passed away a couple years ago, but she was a brilliant artist, really talented. We didn't make it, but she was a great lady," he sighs. "Six months after she left, I got The Siege and I was ducking the landlord. And I had the kids every other week, so I was borrowing money to buy groceries. I got The Siege, then I got I Dreamed Of Africa, then went to the Guthrie and got to play Marc Antony (in Julius Caesar.) I came back home to New York and didn't work for six months. For somebody who's always doing a side job or has a trust fund or savings, it's one thing. But I didn't ... The only reason I didn't quit was I didn't have any alternatives. What was I going to do, wait tables? The only way to get out of the situation I was in was to make it." – McClatchy-Tribune Information Services White House Down, starring Channing Tatum and Lance Reddick, opens in cinemas nationwide today. Read Star2's interview with Tatum this Sunday. |
| Posted: Emma Watson is keen to step away from her past at Hogwarts – but not to jump on to the celebrity rollercoaster. IF the Harry Potter franchise was one of the most overwhelming cinematic phenomena of recent history, the films' plucky Hermione, Emma Watson, shows no sign of being swamped by her past. The actor's latest foray beyond Hogwarts sees her as part of a young ensemble cast for Sofia Coppola's latest work, The Bling Ring, which opened the Cannes Film Festival's Un Certain Regard section back in May. Speaking before the premiere, Watson said: "Harry Potter feels like such a long time ago; so much has happened in the last three or four years, but obviously it's still very present, it's still being played in people's living rooms. I'm not trying to run away from it ... but it's that I've had such an amazing three or four years having a chance to transform into new roles and work with new creative people." Watson, who also took a role in 2011's My Week With Marilyn and will appear in Darren Aronofsky's biblical epic Noah, added that she had relished the chance to work in a freer fashion: "I am used to really having to stick to my lines because people know them by heart, so it was lovely just to be able to ad lib or improvise." Coppola's film is based on the true story of a group of suburban Los Angeles teenagers, some from privileged backgrounds, who stole luxury goods from the houses of the rich and famous out of a desire to possess their wardrobes and lifestyles. Watson researched her role, she said, by watching reality TV shows such as Keeping Up With The Kardashians and The Hills. She said: "It wasn't so much about the stealing, it was more that they wanted to pretend for two hours that they were Paris Hilton. That they were living that lifestyle for real." Among their most prominent targets was Hilton – whose front door key they found under her doormat. Between October 2008 and November 2009, the group stole more than US$3mil (RM9.4mil) worth of items, including "a stash of Rolexes" from British actor Orlando Bloom, according to an account by one of the real "bling ring", Nick Prugo. The teenagers used Google Maps to identify escape and entry points and social media to know when the celebrities were away from home. They also boasted of their new possessions on Facebook. The real Hilton makes a brief appearance in a film that piles on the ironies: her home was used as a location, so we see her jewels and designer clothing; the Louis XIV-style armchairs heaped with cushions screenprinted with her face; and her "nightclub room" complete with its own poledancing pole. Having a film made about their exploits might be regarded as the final victory for the real-life "bling ring" – but according to Coppola, that was far from her intention. "I changed the names of the characters because I didn't want to make them more famous," she said, adding that it was "not a documentary" and she was "not too concerned with the reactions" of the people on whom the story is based. Coppola was born into celebrity as the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola; Watson had it thrust upon her as a child. But Watson distinguished herself from the celebrities touched on in the film. "There are celebrities that create a brand and create a business and a whole job, a whole life, out of other people's interest in their lives, and then there are celebrities or people who have a craft or a trade," she said. "As long as people understand the difference, then it's okay," she said. Coppola added that what had drawn her to the story was that "it could not have happened 10 years ago" and depended on the rise of social media and a celebrity-news cycle. "There's so much information, and a lack of privacy: these kids knew so much about the people that they felt they (really) knew them. They knew what they were having for breakfast." – Guardian News & Media |
| Posted: It's been hard to avoid Andrea Riseborough on the big screen this year. The 31-year-old British actress, who first gained notice in this country in Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky and Madonna's W.E., has had four films released in the space of two months – Oblivion, Welcome To The Punch, Disconnect and the thriller Shadow Dancer. "Every job is a milestone," Riseborough says, fresh from the New York set of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's all-star comedy, Birdman. "That first chance to work with Mike Leigh, or just taking a day of work in a Roger Michell movie (Venus), joining Birdman to work with Inarritu, I'm adding up the milestones, the steps along the path. An actor's career is always a work in progress, nothing that you should ever let yourself get caught up in as it's happening." Riseborough, having cut her teeth working with the improvisational Leigh, is a writer as well as actress. But when documentary filmmaker James Marsh pitched her the fictional feature Shadow Dancer, which has her playing a damaged, dedicated IRA member in 1990s Belfast whom British agent Clive Owen sets out to "turn", the writer in her became an eraser. "I was unclear about who Collette was, because in the original script, she talks an awful lot. Too much, I thought. "I had a grasp of the situation she was in but not the person that she was. I think I took the role just to figure out who she was. If I didn't commit to the film, I'd never do the research and I'd never figure her out." Her research made her realise "she should speak less and less and do more with her eyes. In that part of the world, even now, people are very economical with their words. They lived in a very dangerous and paranoid place for a very long time. Her silences give her an authenticity. People didn't talk. Talking could get you killed." With cop thrillers, science fiction, period-piece dramas and contemporary dramas on her resume and a quartet of projects at various stages of completion, one credit that stands out is Birdman, a comedy about a washed-up screen superhero who stages a Broadway show to make his comeback. Emma Stone, Zach Galifianakis and ex-screen superheroes Edward Norton and Michael Keaton also star. Can Riseborough hold her own in a comedy? "Oh, I've been doing comedy since I was, what, nine? I did Magicians (2007). Well, that didn't work as well as it should have, but it was supposed to be a comedy." – McClatchy-Tribune Information Services |
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