Just when you thought you had a handle on HBO's WWII miniseries The Pacific, along came Rami Malek to mess with your expectations. As the war-ravaged Merriell "Snafu" Shelton, Malek is haunting and morally ambiguous, with a Cajun drawl that's creepy one moment and heartbreaking the next. It isn't just the character, though; Malek seems to operate on an entirely different wavelength from the other actors, with an interest in discovering unique cadences and behavior that has helped to make his past roles as a suicide bomber on this season of 24 and a gay teen in The War at Home just as memorable.
As The Pacific draws to a close, Movieline spoke to the 28-year-old actor about how difficult the miniseries has been to shake, and what's next for him in the Tom Hanks-directed Larry Crowne.
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Along with Banksy's self-distributed Exit to the Gift Shop, City Island's ongoing box office run is one of the more inspirational indie success stories of the year to date. The excellent ensemble comedy about a dysfunctional, secretive family living on the titular island just off the Bronx expanded over the weekend, crossing the $2 million threshold that few (if any) observers expected it might reach. Among the beneficiaries: Steven Strait, who stars as Tony, a convict in whom prison guard Vince (Andy Garcia) takes an unusual interest on the cusp of his parole.
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Maybe it's coincidence that Ezra Miller had two films premiere over the weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival, where City Island -- his film currently playing in theaters -- won the audience award in 2009. But it's no accident, either. Since his 2008 screen debut in the harrowing prep-school drama Afterschool, the 17-year-old actor has built a reputation behind the scenes for fearlessness, intensity, comic chops, and holding his own against alpha-castmates like Andy Garcia, Liev Schreiber and Helen Hunt. And coming soon: Tilda Swinton.
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How famous is Alex O'Loughlin? Ask him and he'll assure you that he isn't, but ask the marketers who put his name above the title on ads for the Jennifer Lopez romcom The Back-Up Plan and they may whistle a different tune. The truth is that O'Loughlin is the sort of actor who's been on the verge of stardom for a while now, a charismatic, handsome Australian with the sort of dedicated female fanbase that comes when you play a sexy vampire in your first American project, the television series Moonlight. That series was canceled, as was O'Loughlin's last show Three Rivers, but CBS has high hopes that an O'Laughlin-led Hawaii Five-O revival will be a fixture of its fall schedule.
On the eve of The Back-Up Plan's release this Friday, O'Loughlin called up Movieline to discuss the way Jennifer Lopez informs his notion of celebrity, the amount of faith CBS executives have had in him, and how he still smarts (just a little!) from losing the role of James Bond.
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The trajectory of Emma Stone's young career is a steep one, spiking from her screen debut as Jonah Hill's dream girl in Superbad (2007) to her iron-willed Wichita in last year's Zombieland -- both films that opened No. 1 at the box office. A couple of Stone's films in between -- The House Bunny and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past didn't fare too poorly either. So the 21-year-old's new film Paper Man arrives next week as a bit of a surprise (and not just because of its half-decade in development hell): A quirky, conscientious indie dramedy about writer Richard Dunn (Jeff Daniels) and the superhero imaginary friend (Ryan Reynolds) who exasperatedly shepherds him through the mid-life crisis blocking more than just Richard's second novel. Stone plays Abby, a sardonic teenage loner with a suspicious pal of her own (Kieran Culkin) and an instant kind of psychic appeal to the struggling author. It may not be her biggest film role to date, but in the folds of her small-town inertia and the haunted past rolling across her face like cloud shadows, it's inarguably her most dynamic.
In addition to teasing the raunchy work her costars Hugh Jackman and Kate Winslet performed in Untitled Comedy, Stone recently spoke with Movieline about falling in love with her role, hypothermia, catharsis, and why she's not as intense an actor as you might think.
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Watch out, Chris and Liam Hemsworth: there's another pair of Australian brothers on the rise. Nash and Joel Edgerton have a long background in entertainment -- 35-year-old Joel acted in the Star Wars prequels as Owen Lars and starred in the recent Sundance hit Animal Kingdom, while 37-year-old Nash has done stunt work for some of the biggest blockbusters ever made -- but with their new film The Square, they're poised to break out Stateside. Nash directed the neo-noir, which finds a hapless adulterer scheming with an arsonist (played by Joel, who also wrote the screenplay) to pull off a con on his mistress's husband. This being a crime drama, things do not go as planned.
The brothers rang up Movieline today to discuss their collaboration, and they also dished on a ton of upcoming projects they're involved with, including Sofia Coppola's Somewhere, the Nick Nolte/Tom Hardy fighting drama Warrior, and Universal's upcoming prequel to The Thing.
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Liam Hemsworth may have landed a starring role opposite Miley Cyrus in The Last Song at age 19, but that doesn't mean that his young career hasn't had its fair share of false starts. The Australian native thought he got his big break when he was cast in Sylvester Stallone's upcoming The Expendables, but being cut from the film made him nearly throw in the towel. Next, Kenneth Branagh flirted with the idea of handing him the title role in the big-budget Marvel adaptation Thor, but instead chose his older brother Chris. Still, The Last Song soon came along -- as did a high-profile romance with Cyrus -- and now Hemsworth is the hot property Hollywood's always intended him to be.
Just as he was being cast in a new 3D adaptation of Arabian Nights, Hemsworth sat down with Movieline to discuss what exactly went down with The Expendables, why he think his brother beat him out for Thor, and the racy, naked role he had before he made his way to America.
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You wouldn't know from the first 10 minutes of Greenberg that it is -- or ever could be -- a Ben Stiller film. Blame it on Greta Gerwig, the 25-year-old indie muse making her mainstream debut in Noah Baumbach's nervy comedy. Starring as Florence, a young woman slogging through post-collegiate malaise as a personal assistant to a wealthy L.A. family, Gerwig embodies a sort of ethereal ennui before meeting her spiritual (and possibly romantic) match in Stiller's narcissistic-creep title character. The veteran actor may usurp the story in the end, but from the start -- a walk in the Hills, a drive through Hollywood, the routine of deference, servitude and resilience -- Gerwig hand-tailors the narrative with a lilting sincerity arguably never before seen in a Baumbach film. Attribute what you will to the touch of Baumbach's wife and story collaborator Jennifer Jason Leigh, but it's Gerwig's optimism and resolve that take the day. "You like me a lot more than you think you do," she tells Greenberg late in the film, daring to suggest that even when it's all about him, it's really about her. Which, of course, it is.
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As the lead in HBO's megabudget miniseries The Pacific, Badge Dale finally gets to rise to the front of an ensemble. The 31-year-old actor first appeared as the ill-fated Simon in the 1990 adaptation of Lord of the Flies, then resumed acting as an adult, landing a high-profile arc as Jack Bauer's partner during the third season of 24. Since then, he's been busy with a multitude of projects: In addition to his role as Robert Leckie in The Pacific, he'll appear in Robert Redford's The Conspirator and topline AMC's next drama, Rubicon.
Dale called Movieline last week to chat about all three upcoming projects, but before we began our conversation, I had a little bit of bad news for him.
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In her role as Joseph Gordon-Levitt's little sister in (500) Days of Summer, the joke was that Chloë Moretz is wise beyond her years. We'd all better get used to it. The 13-year-old actress has lined up a series of challenging, mature parts over the next several months: She'll first be seen as the ultraviolent Hit Girl in Matthew Vaughn's Kick-Ass, then star as a child vampire in Let Me In (a remake of the recent Swedish sleeper Let the Right One In). In between, a more G-rated audience might catch Moretz in Diary of a Wimpy Kid, though the actress herself is no pushover.
As Moretz prepares for the release of the already controversial Kick-Ass, she talked to Movieline about her suddenly high-gear career.
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In the new film She's Out of My League, actress Alice Eve's looks are evaluated on a ten-point scale, and they almost break the system. Certainly, Eve is a blond bombshell in the Christie Brinkley mold, but there's more to her than just that; for starters, the 28-year-old actress has a lovely British accent in real life (and among Brits attempting to emulate a sun-kissed blonde aesthetic, she's unique in her ability to not resemble an orange gorgon). She plays American in League, and she'll play Irish in the upcoming Sex and the City 2, where her pretty nanny has the potential to play spoiler in Charlotte's marriage.
So how does Eve feel about her coronation as one of the most beautiful starlets in Hollywood? Conflicted, as she told Movieline.
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Few ginger-headed actors have a last name that sounds as apt as Eddie Redmayne's. The 28-year-old's red hair and exotic features made him a perfect fit for his first big role as Julianne Moore's son in Savage Grace, but at first blush, there's nothing about the slender Brit that would suggest his presence in the Southern-fried cast of The Yellow Handkerchief. Yet, as the geeky, grating Gordy opposite William Hurt and Kristen Stewart, Redmayne lends the quiet drama a jolt of welcome unpredictability.
Movieline sat down with the actor last week after a long day where Redmayne had to sit patiently beside Stewart as she answered question after question about Twilight and Robert Pattinson. Needless to say, he was eager to move on to other subjects.
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In the John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy, 19-year-old Aaron Johnson plays Lennon as an artist on the brink of potential and stardom. Were you to look at Johnson's slate of upcoming movies, you'd be tempted to call that typecasting. First, Johnson will be seen toplining the ultraviolent comic book adaptation Kick-Ass in April, then he'll follow that up with the U.S. debut of Nowhere Boy (currently undated by the Weinstein Co.) and Chatroom, from J-horror director Hideo Nakata (The Ring).
In Park City last month, Movieline sat down with Johnson on the eve of Nowhere Boy's Sundance premiere to discuss the perils of playing a pop culture icon, the essential advice he got from Nowhere Boy's director Sam Taylor-Wood (now Johnson's fiancee and pregnant with his child), and the superhero franchise he couldn't imagine stepping into after doing Kick-Ass.
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Brandon T. Jackson's showy supporting role as Alpa Chino in Tropic Thunder two years ago took Hollywood by surprise -- the young actor wasn't a real-life rapper or an Apatow troupe member, so who exactly was he? Turn out Jackson is a Chris Tucker-idolizing comedian from a religious family in Detroit, and he'll only increase his profile this week with the release of Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, where he plays best friend Grover to the titular Percy.
During a very busy Percy Jackson press tour that's found him criss-crossing the country, the 25-year-old actor made a quick call to Movieline to discuss action figures, green screen, and the one thing about comedy that he'd like to stop doing.
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Hesher may have scored one of the biggest distribution deals at Sundance on the weight of names like Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Natalie Portman, but it's Devin Brochu's breakout turn that makes the drama's biggest impression. Playing T.J., the disaffected youth at the film's center, 13-year-old Brochu takes a serious licking -- he endures everything from eating urinal cakes to being threatened with hedge clippers to getting tossed around by heavy machinery. That he manages through it all to render such an astoundingly mature performances is a testament to his talent. We caught up with Devin minutes after taking questions from an enthusiastic Sundance screening, and were relieved to find a sweet, well-adjusted and thoughtful kid on the cusp of something big.
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