The Verge: Ryan O'Nan

How does a relatively unknown actor get cast opposite America Ferrera, Wilmer Valderrama, and Melissa Leo as the lead in Ryan Piers Williams' drama The Dry Land? As Ryan O'Nan told Movieline, it's all thanks to one very fortuitous poker game.

To play James, a returning soldier whose traumatic war experience causes him to lash out in ways he can't control, O'Nan put in the sort of research you'd usually expect from a filmmaker, not an actor. Fitting, then, that O'Nan is about to go behind the camera himself.

Tell me how you got cast in this film.

[Laughs] The story on that is that I was on the set of this film that was my first lead in a film, called Watching TV with the Red Chinese. The camera was broken or something and there was a lot of downtime, and I noticed this PA who was a real quiet guy who I hadn't talked to, and I was like, "This is my opportunity. I'm gonna talk to that PA." And it turned out that he was a vet who had come back from three tours in iraq, and we just had this amazing conversation. I had never met anybody who had actually come back from Iraq, never had a single conversation with a veteran coming back. It just opened my eyes in so many ways, since I'm the same age as a lot of these guys that are over there.

So later that night, I came from set and I was actually late for this poker game that a mutual friend of me, Ryan, and America was throwing, this wonderful theater director in New York. The only seat available when I walked in was right next to America, and I was like, "Oh God. What am I going to say to America?" All those things were going through my mind when I sat down, and she instantly started talking to me and she knew everything about me, which was so weird. I was like, "How can you possibly know all this?" But it turns out that Ryan and America are really good friends with Jeanne McCarthy, who cast the film, and I guess she recommended me for this role months and months before. They hadn't approached me.

So you had no idea about it.

No, no idea, I hadn't heard about the project or anything. I ended up having this amazing conversation with Ryan over poker -- both of us lost, unfortunately.

I was going to say, maybe you should have let him win.

I would never! [Laughs] But yeah, me and Ryan continued to have a conversation the next day, and he offered me the role. First off, I was blown away by the script -- I loved it so much, there was so much integrity and it didn't have a political agenda of any kind. It was really the story of one guy and his journey, not trying to be some universal soldier's experience. Also, I'm really attracted to strong characters that are attempting to do the right thing but fragmented in some way, and that's James.

It feels in some ways like a companion piece to The Hurt Locker.

No, it definitely is. Part two! So from there, a little while later, America decided that she would play the role of Sarah.

So you were actually the first person cast?

I was. Ryan and I worked on this together for a while, speaking to soldiers and going around and doing a huge amount of research for a year prior to shooting. One of my closest friends in the world is in Afghanistan right now, he's a Green Beret, but he hadn't gone there prior to that. So once I got this film and we were doing all this research, I had so many different conversations with him about his expectations and how he felt. The fact that I was seeing and meeting and talking to a lot of guys who had come back with some serious issues when he hadn't even gone yet...I mean, there were guys hiding out from the Army and didn't want to go back and had changed their names, there were guys who really believed in it, there was a huge spectrum of points of view. That was great for me, because I could come into the film with no slant and just figure out who James is.

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