Dustin Ingram on Meet Monica Velour, Making Out With Kim Cattrall and Auditioning for McLovin

After years on the hypercompetitive audition circuit (including one near-miss as McLovin in Superbad), 21-year-old actor Dustin Ingram finds himself breaking through this week as a leading man in the indie Meet Monica Velour. The film features Ingram as Tobe, a young film geek with a little more unusual interest than, say, Star Wars: Tobe instead obsesses over 1970s porn star Monica Velour (Kim Cattrall).

When Tobe finally encounters his idol, well past her prime, he meets someone he did not expect to meet -- a single mother worn down by life. Movieline spoke to Ingram about his big Velour break, futile tryouts for everything from Spuperbad to The Social Network and the tension on set between Brian Dennehy and apparently everyone but Ingram.

When looking at your IMDB page today, I noticed that you are up 463 percent.

Are you serious?

Yes.

Four-hundred and sixty-three percent?

That does seem like a lot.

Wow. My dad is big on the IMDB. He loves visiting it all the time.

Is that who's doing it?

[Laughs] Yeah, right. It's the STARmeter, right?

Yes.

My God. I mean... Do I get paid for that? If I reach a certain goal, do I get a cool card?

How did you nerd Tobe up without making him a caricature?

Everything came from either -- whether it be physical or the way that he talks or how he reacts -- it all came from either experiences that I had or things that I've done or from people that I know closely. So I guess the best way to say it is... um... My God, this is where my two years of home school comes in, and I can't put a sentence together. Everything is grounded in reality, in my life, that I put into him. So, I don't really know. It wasn't really a conscious thing.

He actually reminds me of a guy I knew in junior high...

That's what I get a lot of! And I think that's the biggest compliment in the world. If it reminds you of a real person, that's the best comment I could get. But [writer-director] Keith [Bearden] said to me, "Don't worry about making him interesting." He said, "You have a lot going on inside, you're a complex guy with a lot of emotions running through you. If you just let that ride on Tobe's point of view, it will be interesting." So... [looks over at a plate of uneaten food] God, I think it's the food that's distracting me because I haven't eaten...

I feel bad, I'm keeping you from your food.

No! I'm sorry. I'm so not good at these.

What's was it like working with a nude Brian Dennehy?

[Laughs] Luckily, I was not on that side of things. I remember the first time we shot it -- because we did multiple takes, God bless them all -- [the crew] were all behind him. I remember the first time he did it, I just saw the whites of everybody's eyes get really big and then they would recoil. But, other than that, I'm sure nude Brian Dennehy is the same as the Brian Dennehy I knew and met and worked with. He's great; he reminds me of my real grandpa. He would sit in the van with me after shooting and he would just talk with me. I would ask him questions and we would talk for hours. And he really, really devoted a lot of time to me, which was fantastic. He's great. He didn't get along so well with most other people, but him and I had some strange connection.

What happened with the other people?

Keith says that Brian Dennehy has two modes: "He's either sleeping or not listening to me." You know, Brian knows what he wants. He would ask, "What lens are you using?" And he had it perfect every time; he knew exactly where everything fell. He just knows what he's doing. So! When you combine that with a first-time writer-director, you know there's going to be a little push and pull and there definitely was. But eventually Keith got what he wanted and Brian's great in it.

It sounds like you just had to embrace the Dennehy.

"The Dennehy" is what we called him! We never called him Brian, everybody, behind his back, always called him "The Dennehy." You did; you just had to embrace him. And he wanted to make things very Shakespeare and very deep. And Keith would just kind of say, "Brian, listen, I'm just going to do it my way." I'm waiting for the special-edition action figure of naked Brian Dennehy. It's 90 percent scrotum, though, the action figure.

What is your action figure going to look like?

My version, I think, is a number-two pencil just repackaged in a Meet Monica Velour themed package.

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