Charlie McDermott On Hot Tub Time Machine and Playing The Middle's Rebellious Teen

When you were going to that many auditions and you were that young, did you find that you were constantly going up for roles against the same people? Did you have a nemesis?

I've had a few. I was always up against Logan Lerman [Jack & Bobby, 3:10 to Yuma] for a lot of stuff and he was always beating me out because he's from L.A. and he's been here a lot longer. He's a really good actor and we have a very similar look and I would sometimes get a little jealous about all the parts he was getting. And then I did a photo shoot with him last spring and I ran into him when I was in Canada -- he was shooting Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief while I was shooting Hot Tub -- and I realized that he is really cool. [Laughs] I don't really have any nemeses anymore. It's hard to dislike anyone when they are really cool and nice to you. Now that I'm also working myself, the bitterness is gone.

I bet. I read this crazy story about your preparation for Disappearances [a film set in rural Vermont during the Prohibition days] -- that your dad blindfolded you, drove you into the middle of the woods and left you there to find your way home, as a way to get into character. Is that true?

[Laughs] Yeah, that's true. The producers did not want me for that movie and I was trying to get that part so badly. So I stopped using electronics and I was doing farm work for about six months. A funny story about that is that I came across this New York Times review of Disappearances and this critic said something along the lines of my character being the only unbelievable character in the film and the reviewer said that he didn't believe that I had worked a day in my life. I thought that was really ironic because first of all, I lived in the country, I wasn't living in L.A. at the time. I had never been to the city at that point I was cutting down trees in the backyard and I wasn't using electronics. I did everything. It was pretty much like I was not living in the modern day so that was completely false. That was the only review that ever irked me. Reviews never really bother me but I was really insulted by that.

Anyway, my dad suggested it because there are a couple parts of the movie where my character is lost in the woods and I was having trouble with that audition scene. So he suggested, "If you want, we could leave you in the woods at night." I said yes, but then a couple weeks went by and I was terrified of doing it, so I didn't bring it up again. I was watching TV in my family room or something and my dad said, "We're going out to ice cream" and I said okay. I walked to the garage and he put a blindfold on me, I got in the car and he drove around for about a half an hour before walking me into the woods and leaving me there. It was terrifying but it helped and it did what it needed to do and I got the part really soon after that.

You did a fantastic job on Frozen River. How hard was it to get into the mindset for that film -- your character is in high school, with an absent father and pretty grim prospects for his future.

We shot that so fast. I had just moved to L.A. about two months before we did that movie. The woman who played my mom in Disappearances [Heather Rae] was the producer on Frozen River and they had no money for casting and were two weeks away from shooting and still did not have a son, so she asked if I wanted to do it. It was pilot season out here and my manager kind of said, "If you want to do it, go for it, but it's a really low-budget indie. I don't know what could come of that." But it was only a three week shoot and I hadn't worked since I'd moved out to L.A., so I thought that I might as well just take it.

One day I met everyone and the very next day we were shooting. There was no rehearsal. I didn't meet Melissa Leo beforehand or anything. When we got there, it was just so cold and disgusting and grimy. The house where we were shooting was someone's actual house. They didn't do anything to make it look that way. So it wasn't hard to get into that mindset. A lot of movies are built on a set so you're working in a space that is kind of artificial but that house was legitimately run down and gross. It was a very difficult movie to do but the house, the atmosphere was all there. It felt very real.

So what else do you have coming up, aside from The Middle and Hot Tub Time Machine?

Well, I'm trying to work with the guys who did Sex Drive again [Sean Anders and John Morris] and I've got a film called Prep School. It's a drama, like the Dead Poets Society for this generation. It takes place in a boarding school in the 1970s. I start that in April. They're looking to release it in the next fall or winter time frame but I can't wait to get started.

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