Permanent Midnight: Michael C. Hall, a Mullet, and Throwback '80s Violence Make for One Badass Movie

Michael C. Hall and director Jim Mickle discuss their violent '80s throwback "Cold in July."

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Permanent Midnight is a weekly Complex Pop Culture column where senior staff writer, and resident genre fiction fanatic, Matt Barone will put the spotlight on the best new indie horror/sci-fi/weirdo cinema, twisted novels, and other below-the-radar oddities.

Michael C. Hall knows an immensely talented filmmaker when he sees one.

Once word broke that the Emmy-nominated actor’s tenure on Showtime’s eight-seasons-deep series Dexter was ending last year, he no doubt could have given any director in Hollywood a call and broke bread. Regardless of your opinions about Dexter’s final seasons, there’s no denying that Hall, playing the morally guided serial killer Dexter Morgan, consistently gave towering performances, anchoring the uneven show with a dexterous mix of muted vulnerability and primal explosiveness. And since Dexter was about to wrap up, Hall’s considerable talents were available for any and all interested producers and directors to acquire.

For his first post-Dexter role, though, Hall didn’t go for the big bucks or major-studio prestige. He went indie, but not just your typical lo-fi independent film—he aligned himself with one of the best young horror filmmakers out there.

Prior to teaming up with Michael C. Hall, Jim Mickle was already many horror bloggers and critics' new favorite auteur. His films have something extra to them, an almost Terence-Malick-like air of elegance and restraint that’s atypical for the scare genre. Mickle, along with his regular writing partner, Nick Damici, debuted in 2006 with Mulberry Street, a riff on the classic George A. Romero zombie movie construct about people getting bitten by infected rodents and turning into flesh-eating rat people—made on the cheap but sharp in wit and energy, it’s a cut above most DIY horror fare. Mickle’s skills improved dramatically, however, with Stake Land, a post-apocalyptic vampire western that’s as violent and disturbing as it is mature and artistic. Steadily improving with each new film, Mickle’s best work yet premiered late last year: We Are What We Are, a superior remake of an underrated 2011 Mexican film about a family of cannibals, transplanted to rural Upstate New York in Mickle’s version and infused with religious undertones.

Throughout Hollywood, Mickle’s name was abuzz, but everyone who’d meet with the Pennsylvania native, who’s in his mid-30s, couldn’t get past his horror leanings. As the film industry is prone to do, they pigeonholed him as nothing more than a fright film maker. Michael C. Hall, though, saw something special in Jim Mickle, and the man formerly recognized as Dexter Morgan responded to a project that’s been Mickle’s passion target for almost seven years now: Cold in July (in limited theaters on available on VOD today), an adaptation of acclaimed genre fiction writer Joe R. Lansdale’s gritty, pulpy 1989 crime novel. After randomly meeting Mickle at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2013, Hall enthusiastically signed on to make Cold in July his first A.D. (After Dexter) look.

The result is one of the most entertaining films you’re likely to see anytime soon. Fueled by a John-Carpenter-esque score, Cold in July is pure throwback bliss, channeling the man’s-man action films of the 1980s and twisting along with its unpredictable and corpse-riddled plot. Without giving anything away, here’s a brief set-up: Hall plays Richard Dane, a small-town East Texas husband and father who runs a rinky-dink picture frame shop; one night, an intruder breaks into his home, prompting the Richard to grab a handgun and, by accident, shoot the guy dead. He becomes a local hero, but his moment of glory doesn’t last long. The deceased intruder’s father, Ben Russell (Sam Shepard), is fresh out of prison and looking for bloody vengeance. From there, Cold in July’s narrative never goes where you expect it to, see-sawing between genres (from thriller to comedy, back to thriller again and touching upon horror, and so on) and giving Hall, Shepard, and a hilariously free-wheeling Don Johnson plenty of rich material.

Having been a Jim Mickle fan since Mulberry Street, I must say, I didn’t see Cold in July’s genre-subverting excellence coming. It’s nothing like his previous movies, but, at the same time, it’s of a similar breed, never shying away from its brutality and including one of the most horrific images I’ve seen in a long time (presented via a grainy VHS transfer, no less, which makes it all the more unsettling). It’s a remarkable piece of midnight-dark entertainment.

I recently had the chance to speak with both Jim Mickle and Michael C. Hall all about it; you’ll find both one-on-one interviews after the jump. And, hopefully, they’ll inspire you to take a break from those Memorial Day Weekend barbecues and pool parties to experience Cold in July firsthand.

RELATED: Catch Rec: We Are What We Are, the Best American Horror Movie of 2013 (So Far)

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Permanent Midnight: Michael C. Hall, a Mullet, and Throwback '80s Violence Make for One Badass Movie

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Permanent Midnight is a weekly Complex Pop Culture column where senior staff writer, and resident genre fiction fanatic, Matt Barone will put the spotlight on the best new indie horror/sci-fi/weirdo cinema, twisted novels, and other below-the-radar oddities.

Michael C. Hall knows an immensely talented filmmaker when he sees one.

Once word broke that the Emmy-nominated actor’s tenure on Showtime’s eight-seasons-deep series Dexter was ending last year, he no doubt could have given any director in Hollywood a call and broke bread. Regardless of your opinions about Dexter’s final seasons, there’s no denying that Hall, playing the morally guided serial killer Dexter Morgan, consistently gave towering performances, anchoring the uneven show with a dexterous mix of muted vulnerability and primal explosiveness. And since Dexter was about to wrap up, Hall’s considerable talents were available for any and all interested producers and directors to acquire.

For his first post-Dexter role, though, Hall didn’t go for the big bucks or major-studio prestige. He went indie, but not just your typical lo-fi independent film—he aligned himself with one of the best young horror filmmakers out there.

Prior to teaming up with Michael C. Hall, Jim Mickle was already many horror bloggers and critics' new favorite auteur. His films have something extra to them, an almost Terence-Malick-like air of elegance and restraint that’s atypical for the scare genre. Mickle, along with his regular writing partner, Nick Damici, debuted in 2006 with Mulberry Street, a riff on the classic George A. Romero zombie movie construct about people getting bitten by infected rodents and turning into flesh-eating rat people—made on the cheap but sharp in wit and energy, it’s a cut above most DIY horror fare. Mickle’s skills improved dramatically, however, with Stake Land, a post-apocalyptic vampire western that’s as violent and disturbing as it is mature and artistic. Steadily improving with each new film, Mickle’s best work yet premiered late last year: We Are What We Are, a superior remake of an underrated 2011 Mexican film about a family of cannibals, transplanted to rural Upstate New York in Mickle’s version and infused with religious undertones.

Throughout Hollywood, Mickle’s name was abuzz, but everyone who’d meet with the Pennsylvania native, who’s in his mid-30s, couldn’t get past his horror leanings. As the film industry is prone to do, they pigeonholed him as nothing more than a fright film maker. Michael C. Hall, though, saw something special in Jim Mickle, and the man formerly recognized as Dexter Morgan responded to a project that’s been Mickle’s passion target for almost seven years now: Cold in July (in limited theaters on available on VOD today), an adaptation of acclaimed genre fiction writer Joe R. Lansdale’s gritty, pulpy 1989 crime novel. After randomly meeting Mickle at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2013, Hall enthusiastically signed on to make Cold in July his first A.D. (After Dexter) look.

The result is one of the most entertaining films you’re likely to see anytime soon. Fueled by a John-Carpenter-esque score, Cold in July is pure throwback bliss, channeling the man’s-man action films of the 1980s and twisting along with its unpredictable and corpse-riddled plot. Without giving anything away, here’s a brief set-up: Hall plays Richard Dane, a small-town East Texas husband and father who runs a rinky-dink picture frame shop; one night, an intruder breaks into his home, prompting the Richard to grab a handgun and, by accident, shoot the guy dead. He becomes a local hero, but his moment of glory doesn’t last long. The deceased intruder’s father, Ben Russell (Sam Shepard), is fresh out of prison and looking for bloody vengeance. From there, Cold in July’s narrative never goes where you expect it to, see-sawing between genres (from thriller to comedy, back to thriller again and touching upon horror, and so on) and giving Hall, Shepard, and a hilariously free-wheeling Don Johnson plenty of rich material.

Having been a Jim Mickle fan since Mulberry Street, I must say, I didn’t see Cold in July’s genre-subverting excellence coming. It’s nothing like his previous movies, but, at the same time, it’s of a similar breed, never shying away from its brutality and including one of the most horrific images I’ve seen in a long time (presented via a grainy VHS transfer, no less, which makes it all the more unsettling). It’s a remarkable piece of midnight-dark entertainment.

I recently had the chance to speak with both Jim Mickle and Michael C. Hall all about it; you’ll find both one-on-one interviews after the jump. And, hopefully, they’ll inspire you to take a break from those Memorial Day Weekend barbecues and pool parties to experience Cold in July firsthand.

RELATED: Catch Rec: We Are What We Are, the Best American Horror Movie of 2013 (So Far)

Greatly Crushing Expectations: A Conversation With Jim Mickle

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I’m a big fan of your previous films, so I mean this as a compliment. Once Cold in July ended, I thought, wow, that was a Jim Mickle film? There’s a different kind of energy to it from your other films. Was that a big part of the material’s appeal?
Yeah, totally. Strangely enough, it was already part of the canon before Stake Land and We Are What We Are. We wanted it to be the second film. We made Mulberry Street and wanted to roll right into Cold in July. We optioned it and wrote the script, but it’s taken so long to do it that it’s only happening now. But that’s what cool about it—being that we’re doing it now, there are elements of our other stuff in the film.

There are elements of Stake Land, with its neo-Western feel, and, in a weird way, coming off of We Are What We Are, we said, “Let’s embrace the fact that Cold in July is so different from the other stuff, and embrace the fact that We Are What We Are was an elegant, artistic, female-empowerment story stretched over this cannibal mythology. “Let’s take this thing and run even further in the other direction,” and make this trashy, ‘80s story of guys and sweat and gun powder and gasoline.

Had we made Cold in July immediately after Mulberry Street, I don’t think the movie would be as interesting, maybe, or as different as it is now. We made it within the context of the other films.

I’m an avid reader of the various horror short story anthologies out there, and Joe R. Lansdale’s an author who regularly appears in all of them. Have you always been a fan of his work, or was Cold in July the one that set it all off?
I’m the same way—I read a ton of stuff, especially anything within the genre. I was a big Bruce Campbell and Evil Dead fan growing up, so when Bubba Ho-Tep (2002) did its rounds, there was a screening in New York. I was maybe just out of college, and I went to see Bubba Ho-Tep when Joe Lansdale did the Q&A, since he wrote the original novella. I was instantly like, “Who is this guy who came out with this crazy story that’s also damn good?” From there, I started reading a lot of his short stories and novels.

We made Mulberry Street, and after we finished that up, it was more an attempt for us to get out of the “urban” thing. We’d just spent a year making a movie set in a Manhattan neighborhood, and I was like, “I want to get away from the New York.” I went back to Joe’s stuff because it’s always a wildly different world you get carried away in. Cold in July was one of the those books in that stack that I fell in love with instantly.

In other interviews you’ve likened the experience of trying to get Cold in July made as “an unhealthy romantic relationship.” What was it that kept you in that relationship, even though it was unhealthy and heartbreaking?
[Laughs.] That’s interesting, I like how you’ve expanded upon that metaphor. It was probably the same thing that goes into bad relationships someone has with a boyfriend or girlfriend. There was a moment before We Are What We Are where I was like, “I don’t know if I still want to do this movie because I really want to do it, or if I want to do it because we haven’t been able to do it and it’s this white whale sort of challenge?”

Before Sundance last year, I was scared because I went back and read the draft that we hadn’t touched in about a year, and I didn’t like the draft. I liked elements of it, but I remember coming to Linda [Moran], my girlfriend who’s also a producer on the film, and saying, “I don’t even remember what I liked about this. We’ve gotten so far from it, we’ve changed so many elements of it to try to satisfy different financiers along the way, that now it doesn’t really feel like the book. I don’t remember why we made these changes. I don’t know if I want to make this because it’s what we’re supposed to do and it’s always been there, or if this is actually an interesting movie?”

At that point, it’d been seven years and movies had changed. The idea of movies had changed; I didn’t know if Cold in July was even interesting anymore. So it was this whole interesting, self-deprecating process. While I was editing We Are What We Are, Linda went away with Nick Damici and they ended up cracking the script together. They pared it down and went back closer to the book. It finally felt like the book. I remember she asked me to read it over a weekend, and I was struggling with the edit of We Are What We Are, so I was like, “I don’t want to read this fucking script! I’m so tired of this!” [Laughs.] And then I read it and fell back in love with it the same way I had when I first read the book.

There’s this weird trap in the film industry where up-and-coming filmmakers can easily get a horror movie made, as a means to getting their feet in the door, but then they’re pigeonholed into just being horror filmmakers and can’t break free of that.
Yeah, totally, and that was very much this movie. My original goal was for this to be second movie, so we’d get to make a horror movie like Mulberry Street and then we’d get to do all these other things we’re interested in, and that’s even more the case because it’s two people, Nick and I, so you have both of our interests. He has interest in westerns and I have interest in more comedic stuff, so we have all these different things that we want to do.

I always thought it’d be great to do Mulberry Street and then come right after that with this sort of neo-noir/western thing to establish that we can do different things. But whenever we’d go somewhere, be asked, “What’s next for you?” and tell them we have this Joe Lansdale adaptation that’s kind of A History of Violence meets No Country for Old Men, you could see their eyes just glaze over. And then we’d say, “Well, we also have this zombie apocalypse idea,” and they’d be all, “Oh, my god! Yeah! Great, when do we start shooting!” [Laughs.]

It’s really frustrating. After we did Stake Land, we thought, OK, great, that kept us working and now we’ll be able to jump back into Cold in July. And then, again, it didn’t click. We wanted to shoot in the summer, and now summer 2011 had passed and we still couldn’t do this, but then We Are What We Are popped up. But then it wasn’t just horror, it was a horror remake. [Laughs.] We wrote that and finished the first draft on a Friday; by the following Monday, we got a call saying it’d been financed. It was insane. How does that happen and yet we have this passion project that nobody’s wanted to touch in five years?

Had we not made Cold in July now, we probably never would have been able to make it. Our option on the book was running out, and I think Joe was getting fed up with his calling him and saying, “Hey, we gotta do another movie in between.”

When producers and financiers see movies like Stake Land and We Are What We Are, which are horror films but ones that are deeper than most other genre films, have great craftsmanship, and receive glowing reviews from critics who otherwise don’t mess with horror, they don’t see that as a justifiable reason to fund your non-horror project? 
Yeah, they just look at the bottom line. It sucks to say. I don’t know, you talk to some people and they do come at it as, “Oh, my god, I really loved your movie because of that, so let’s talk about this.” But that’s not always the case. For instance, there’s something I’m currently very interested in; it’s this cool project, and what I love about it is that it has a lot of big genre elements but then it also has a really sharp core, with great characters and a strong emotional arc to it that you never see in scripts. That’s why I responded to it. I’ve had a lot of conversations with people to try and get this movie, and I’ve actually gotten the note now that I need to stop talking about those elements, and to start talking about how it needs to be a summer movie. [Laughs.]

And I get that aspect of it, since that’s obviously what’s going on in the industry now, but it is funny to be at a point where I’m saying to myself, “Oh, wow, maybe I should reserve those talks for actors and cinematographers, people who care about this stuff.” The people who initially called and said, “You brought an original element to genre stuff,” they don’t really want to talk about that. [Laughs.]

The moment that shook me up the most is the “Batting Practice” snuff film Michael C. Hall and Don Johnson’s characters watch. It comes at a point where Don Johnson’s just shown up and he’s killing it with the comic relief, but then, boom, this snuff film starts playing and the tone shifts back to darkness. It’s more nightmarish than anything I’ve seen in any straight-up horror movie all year. But since Cold in July is a non-horror movie with some horror elements, does that help it get made in any way?
No, and actually that scene has always made people nervous. Early on, I remember hearing that somebody really wanted to finance the movie but they were afraid that moment would be too violent and throw people off. I remember thinking, oh, we can talk about this in horror ways. At that time, “torture porn” was a big thing, and I was like, “Hey, let’s try to use that to our advantage because we have these elements.” And then it was actually really hard. Nobody wanted to touch that scene. There was even a thought that we wouldn’t get an R rating. I was like, “Jesus, this isn’t the first time something of that nature has been in a film. Deal with it.” [Laughs.]

I already wanted to play that scene a certain way. What’s important about that moment is that it plays off those guys’ faces, and that was already written into the script. So I had to almost overplay that moment in the script, and write, “Don’t worry, this won’t all the sudden become a Saw movie. This is playing on these guys’ faces.”

It was hard to figure out, and looking back on it, that stuff works really well. The see-sawing of tones was found in the edit. The book has its elements, and I don’t remember how it see-sawed there rhythmically, as opposed to the film. The first cut of the film was three hours, and it was a lot of really fun and good scenes. But it wasn’t totally there yet, so we had to shape that and find how much comedy you could get away with to undercut that. And vice versa, to see how long you could stay in it once you’ve gone to something darker. When’s right for Don to come back in? Sometimes Don’s best gags are ones where you don’t want to laugh, so you have to wrestle with that. It was a really cool challenge to figure all of that out.

This must have been a fun film for you to finally let loose. Stake Land and We Are What We Are are mostly restrained, quieter films, but Cold in July is a blast of sick energy. How much fun was it to take the gloves off this time?
It was so much fun, and that goes back to what I was saying earlier. Had we made this movie when we originally wanted to, I think it would have been more buttoned-up. We Are What We Are was the hardest movie because it was, I think, so restrained and held-back in a way, so there was a lot of discipline on it. As I see this, I’m in an office looking at a Martha Marcy May Marlene poster on the wall, and I love that movie. When I first saw that movie, I said to myself, “How did they have the courage or the confidence to, as first-time filmmakers, hold back information?” So for We Are What We Are, it was important that we take a similar approach and not pile the genre elements like we had in our previous films. Which made it really hard to make and keep our compass as we were doing it.

Part of Cold in July was that, when I first read the book, it felt like those awesome ‘80s John Carpenter movies when I watched them for the first time in my bedroom on VHS back in the ‘80s. It felt like somebody had watched all of those movies, had a weird fever dream, and then sprayed it out onto the page, which is kind of what Joe did. So I wanted the movie to feel like that. It was a lot of fun to maintain that energy while making the movie. Michael [C. Hall] could call me up and say, “What if I have a mullet?” And I’d say, “Yes, that’s exactly what you have.” [Laughs.] Let’s embrace all these ideas and have fun with them, and let our hair down—literally, in his case.

When somebody of Michael C. Hall’s caliber signs on to star in a movie like this, does that make every other step of getting it made easier for you? 
Yeah, for sure. But at the same time, when I first heard that, I thought the movie was dying in a way. It was in a rut when Michael came on-board. That was when I’d read one of those drafts I didn’t like anymore. All of these things were falling apart. We’d heard Michael was interested, but we’d also heard that he was gearing up for Dexter’s final season, so it was this whole nebulous thing. And then we randomly met him at Sundance last year, and that’s when I thought, whoa, maybe this is for real.

At that point, Nick had done this new draft that I loved. I landed in Cannes about a year ago today and had a meeting with a financier, and then I had a Skype call with Michael the next morning. It all snowballed so quickly. Once Michael was on, the script finally got from Sam Shepard’s agent to Sam, whereas we had sent the first draft to Sam seven years before and he had never even looked at it. And once Sam looked at it, all the sudden Don was interested. It was this very cool snowball thing, where Michael gave the film a weight, I think, that it had always been lacking.

Prior to Michael, were there ever any people interested in the role or the project like that?
There was always interest, but it was always interest from people nobody wanted to finance, and that was the hardest part. It was this game of trying to get three people who a financed would feel safe with. A financier wants to come in all movies, but especially a movie like this, feeling like it’s a sure thing. They want to stack it as much as they can, so we were always hearing stuff like, “Mark Wahlberg, Nicolas Cage, and John Travolta.” [Laughs.]

We’d hear that sort of stuff all the time, but that wasn’t the movie I wanted to make, and I don’t think anyone wants to see that movie. It was always this really tough struggle of hearing that interesting people read the script and wanted to make it with us but also knowing that the movie would never get made with them. Michael was the first time where it all came together, where it was somebody that I really liked, he’d read the script and liked it, and people would also finance that movie. It was this dream, stars-aligning sort of thing.

Part of what makes the film’s big finale so badass is that you’re watching Michael C. Hall, Don Johnson, and Sam Shepard wrecking shit up with heavy weaponry. I’d imagine those other financiers read the script and thought, “Man, it’d be awesome to have Mark Wahlberg, Nic Cage, and John Travolta together wrecking shit up with heavy weaponry.”
[Laughs.] Totally, and I could have probably gotten a $40 million budget had I decided to make that movie, but it would have changed it. I think there’s something with this cast we have that’s unexpected—you don’t initially see it. It was hard to find something unexpected like that. Anybody from Michael’s generation who’s at all bankable is a Marvel superhero already, and it also felt important to not have that.

Darkly Ditching Dexter: A Conversation With Michael C. Hall

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I’ve read that you started shooting Cold in July only three days after you finished Dexter’s final episode. What made you want to get right into this film?
Ideally it would have made sense to take a break, but the filming schedule changed. I don’t think it was three days, though—I think it was closer to a week. But, regardless, there wasn’t much time in between. I haven’t really stopped since Dexter ended. It’s felt really good to do other things and remind myself that there’s a world beyond playing that one part.

Richard Dane and Dexter Morgan are totally different from one another, mostly in how timid and inexperienced Richard is when it comes to violence and manning up. Was that something that especially attracted you to Cold in July?
Definitely. There’s obviously the common theme of murder in both. [Laughs.] But aside from that, it’s so different, in as much as he’s a regular guy. He’s not remarkably capable and certainly not inclined of desirous for needing to kill people. He doesn’t even mean to kill the guy at the beginning of the film. With Dexter ending, it was a nice, therapeutic, cleansing experienced to go play someone who has absolute remorse and conflict over having killed someone.

There’s an interesting duality between the characters, too, that shows two differing reactions to committing murder. Richard is extremely uncomfortable as a result, whereas Dexter thrives on it.
I think Richard Dane is someone who has misgivings about his rightful place in the world, as a man, as a father, as a masculine entity. [Laughs.] And while this crazy thing isn’t exactly welcome, there is a part of what happens that he can’t turn his back on. He doesn’t want to be a patsy. He doesn’t want something else to happen to him—he wants to happen to it. Even though he’s in very uncharted territory that’s very foreign to him, he needs to see this through.

As an actor in Hollywood, is it hard to find characters as vulnerable and everyman as Richard Dane? 
Yeah, I think so. That was a part of what got me so excited about the possibility of doing this film. Remarkable things happen around him, and to him as a result, but he’s not a spectacular person. He’s an everyday guy with an everyday job, with a wife and a kid. He’s just getting by. But he does have some appetites that the circumstances in this movie do exploit.

When he’s telling his wife the lie about a work opportunity that allows him to get away with going to Houston with these two guys, he says, “I’ve been waiting for something big like this,” and it’s within the context of a fib but it’s a very revealing thing for him to say. Despite the part of him that might wish all of this away, there is another part of him equally strong that’s relishing the chance to have an adventure.

In an interview Jim gave at Sundance, he talked about how you once described the character as a guy who just grew a mustache a week ago.
[Laughs.] Yeah, and I say that only half jokingly. He’s a guy who’d say to himself, “Maybe if I grow a mustache, people will start taking me more seriously.” He gets more than he bargained for, though. It’s like the fates are saying, “OK, you’re going to have to earn that mustache, Richard Dane.”

Is it true that it was your idea to have Richard sport a mullet?
[Laughs.] It’s true. Richard’s not cool, and he shouldn’t be. Given the opportunities afforded by the period we were dealing with, there were lots of ways to make him a little less than cool: mismatched ties, high-waisted pants, tucked-in flannel shirts, goofy loafers. The bad mullet and half-a-mustache seemed perfect for that. I was all for it. There’s also something about his look that transforms as he goes through this experience, that’s contextually badass. I wanted him to have a look that was specific, and having a mild mullet haircut went a long way in doing that.

You’re from North Carolina originally—did you know guys like Richard Dane growing up?
Definitely, I was living in a small southern town like that growing up, and both of my parents and lots of my relatives still live in that world. It wasn’t Texas but it was the south and that probably gave me a sense of who this guy was, and how we was. As far as that haircut goes, a lot of people in my junior high school and high school had that haircut, including me. [Laughs.]

Sounds like there are some old photos you don’t want to ever go public.
Yeah, more than one.

One key thing for you and your character is to make it believable that someone like Richard Dane could exist in the same sphere as these two other larger-than-life characters, played by Sam Shepard and Don Johnson. How did you approach your scenes with them in that regard?
Richard is the sort of fulcrum there. I needed to be someone who allows these guys to coexist in the same world. He’s looking for someone to model for him, in the sense of owned masculinity and manhood that he has found elusive. It’s not like an angel and devil on his shoulders, but these two iconic presences of Sam Shepard and Don Johnson and the two characters they play in this movie represent idealized, iconic, and traditional versions of what it means to be a man for Richard.

It was a heady thing for me to be on that set, to even sit in the back of that car with those two guys. It was like I was this younger guy saying, “Come on, guys! Let me go with you!” [Laughs.] It wasn’t that much of a strength. It felt so cool to hang out with Sam Shepard and Don Johnson.

Which must mean that watching the film’s climax, where you and those guys are blasting your way through a bunch of goons with heavy automatic weapons, is the coolest thing ever.
Oh, no doubt. [Laughs.] It was just awesome hanging out with them and laughing together. It was really fun to bro out with these American masculinity icons.

I mentioned to Jim that the hardest-hitting moment, for me, is the “Batting Practice” snuff film sequence, and he talked about how that scene initially scared a lot of supporters away. When you read something like that in a script, is there a part of you that becomes at all apprehensive?
I definitely was stepping on the set with the assurance that Jim had a really clear vision and he would provide a great sense of leadership and safety, in terms of this bananas story we were telling. I like material that doesn’t shy away from the darker edges of human behavior, that’s for sure, as long as it’s earned, and I think it is earned in this case.

Jim and I also talked about how it’s been difficult for him to break out of that “he’s a horror filmmaker” box. As an actor, do you ever see filmmakers in that way?
The combination of meeting him personally, talking to him about the film, and watching some of his previous work was all I needed. The fact that this is a movie he’s wanted to make for such a long time. I had no sense that Jim is a one-trick kind of guy. I think he’s infinitely talented and capable as a filmmaker. I didn’t really have any worries on that front.

Do you see yourself seeking out more everyday guy characters like Richard?
Yeah, but I just take it from job to jog. I’m more interested in mixing it up and not being committed to doing something again and again and again, so that I can take on different types of jobs and characters who have definitive beginnings, middles, and ends, and then put them down and do something else.

I’m not necessarily now focusing on “everyman” parts, but it was certainly a nice change of pace coming off of Dexter. I’d like to believe that there are parts and projects in my future that I can’t even imagine, sitting here right now, and that’s a part of what’s fun about doing this.

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