James Le Gros on Good One, shooting with Tarantino, and delivering Zodiac’s best line
From AV Club: By Mitchell Beaupre
Welcome to Random Roles, wherein we talk to actors about the characters who defined their careers. The catch: They don’t know beforehand what roles we’ll ask them to talk about.
The veteran character actor also discusses skydiving for Point Break, being in the best episode of Friends, and playing Raylan Givens before Timothy Olyphant.
The actor: Kelly Reichardt, Gus Van Sant, Todd Haynes, Kathryn Bigelow. All names that appear multiple times in the filmography of James Le Gros, across a career that stretches back to guest spots in the early ‘80s on shows like Punky Brewster and Simon & Simon. An industry stalwart for the past four decades, Le Gros blossomed as a consistently reliable figure during the American independent boom of the ’90s, earning an Independent Spirit Award nomination for his vanity-skewering performance in the showbiz satire Living In Oblivion.
Yet despite his hops from marquee hits like Enemy Of The State to cinephile landmarks such as Zodiac, the actor has been able to shield himself from the spotlight. “I have the kind of fame that makes people think they know me from the gym or that I went to high school with them,” Le Gros tells The A.V. Club.
James Le Gros’ latest, Good One, sees him in a more prominent role as Chris, father of Sam (Lily Collias) and longtime friend of Matt (Danny McCarthy). The three embark on a backpacking trip through the Catskills in India Donaldson’s quiet, humanistic debut, about how a teenage girl starts to see the world in a slightly different light as she discovers more about who these men are.
Stray Bullets (2016)—“Cody” / Foxhole (2021)—“Wilson”
AVC: You mentioned working with Larry Fessenden earlier. You’ve made several films with him and several with his son, Jack. Those are guys in the independent space who aren’t letting lack of budget inhibit their ambition. Foxhole alone is nuts.
JLG: These are guys that really love the cinema. They’re unencumbered by challenge. But they understand fundamental things as well. Good composition doesn’t cost you anything. You just have to figure out what your resource pool is, that’s the big thing about independent cinema in general. And they’re able to do that, and they’re able to figure these things out. Like, Foxhole takes place over three wars, and we just shot that in a tent in Larry’s front yard.
I think of Stray Bullets, which was Jack’s first real movie, and he knew he could make that because of that big front yard he had to work with. There’s one shot in Stray Bullets, where we had a character getting shot from behind. How we did the shot was that we had a squib and then we had a fire extinguisher, that we filled with fake blood, that ran up John Speredakos’ leg. We rehearsed the timing of it, and then we had a leaf blower outside the window that would blow these plastic shards as if the gunshot was coming through the window.
It was all just figuring out the timing so that we were all synchronized to go. I don’t know what the net cost of getting that shot was, but at the most it was like a couple hundred dollars. Probably the most expensive part was the fake blood, because I think Larry personally owned the leaf blower.
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