John C. Reilly: 'The Older I Get, the Less Interested I Am in Seeing My Movies'

When it came time for Mark and Jay Duplass to choose a leading man for Cyrus, their first studio film, it had to be John C. Reilly. The 45-year-old actor has spent much of his career taking what's on the page and embroidering it with improvisation and inspiration, and that's the exact approach the Duplasses have spent their last few movies refining. Whether he's riffing wildly in Talladega Nights or taking a much more controlled approach (as he does in Lynne Ramsay's upcoming We Need To Talk About Kevin), Reilly has the ability to make even the craziest lines and behavior of his characters seem utterly natural.

Last week, I met up with him at the Four Seasons in Los Angeles to talk about Cyrus, tease Kevin, and discuss his ever-shifting attitude toward his own work.

I just saw Tilda Swinton downstairs. Have the two of you wrapped We Need to Talk About Kevin?

Yeah, I just finished that one.

Was it a rough experience? It's pretty dark subject matter -- you play a father whose son commits a mass shooting.

It's sad-making, but it wasn't a rough experience. I had a great time with Tilda Swinton, and Lynne Ramsay is one of the best directors in the world.

I just wish we got more films from her.

Yeah, she took a couple years off. She got caught in a development hellhole for a while there, but she's really going to turn some heads with this movie, I think.

You're well-known for your ability to improvise. Still, was Cyrus a whole new ballpark for you?

I've done a lot of improvisation in a lot of different movies, and usually it's at the front or the tail end of a scene in a comedy where you keep switching out the joke to surprise the other actors. In this one, [the Duplass brothers] really opened the floodgates. There are many instances where the tone of the scene changed from what was in the script, and they said every day, "Look, if the story takes a radical turn one way or the other, we're open to following it wherever it goes." That's really liberating for an actor, and you really feel like anything is possible. There are certain times as an actor when you feel like a puppet, and this was not one of those cases. I felt like I was a co-author of the movie with the filmmakers.

Did you treat the script like a blueprint?

It was a fleshed-out script. The studio was not going to give them this money unless they had a real game plan going in. It's just that once we started to embody these characters, Jay and Mark were more interested in what we were going to do with these characters than what they had already done with the characters in the script, before we even started. That's just the way they like to work.

So how did you shape your character?

They wrote this part with me in mind, they said, and they told me, "If you don't want to do this movie, we're not gonna do it either. We'll just do something else, because it's not just that we wrote this character for you -- we wrote it only for you." So yeah, I was able to influence the character completely, to the point where I couldn't even tell you which pieces of information about the character were my contribution. I was just trying to live and breathe as this guy as we went along, with the encouragement of Mark and Jay.

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