EXCLUSIVE: Steve Zahn gulps down a swig of Evian and takes a moment to list what’s on his plate: There’s Hulu’s sports comedy Chad Powers, out today; he’s in the UK shooting Season 4 of Apple TV+ series Silo into December. And, wait, he’s got to fly to Brisbane, Australia, for two days of reshoots for Sony’s Christmas Day release Anaconda and then hurry back to London to resume work on Silo.
In between all of this, the actor made time to stop by a film festival screening in Lexington, Kentucky, of director Rick Gomez’s She Dances, a charmingly poignant independent film that features Zahn and his daughter Audrey Zahn. He co-wrote it with Gomez, his good friend, producing partner and, as it happens, a co-star in Silo.
Undoubtedly, Zahn’s as enthusiastic about acting as he was when I first met him nearly 30 years ago when he was over in London promoting Tom Hanks’ directorial debut, That Thing You Do! I already knew his work, having caught a performance of Jonathan Marc Sherman’s 1993 off-Broadway play Sophistry in which Zahn appeared with Calista Flockhart, Anthony Rapp, Austin Pendleton and Ethan Hawke, who was to become one of his closest friends and also is in She Dances.
Looking me straight in the eye, Zahn states: “It’s that I like this job. I just love doing it. I love being a part of the circus.”
In Chad Powers, Zahn plays Jake Hudson, coach of the fictional team that Glen Powell’s title character goes to try out with.
Powers is really a one-time star quarterback Russ Holliday who bowed out of the game in disgrace following an incident where his oversized ego over-engaged with a fan. Using his Hollywood makeup father’s prosthetics, Holliday transforms himself into hayseed-like Chad Powers.
The show’s based on a real-life stunt pulled off by Eli Manning on his ESPN+ show Eli’s Places three years ago, when, as a joke, he got prosthetics and did a tryout for Penn State University’s football team using the Chad Powers alias. Only the head coach knew it was Manning. Have a look at how that played out:
Whereas in the show, Zahn’s Coach Hudson has no clue as to Powers’ real identity.
Basically, Zahn says, Michael Waldron, the showrunner and writer with Powell, approached them and said, “We want to take that character and make a show out of it.” “And so Eli and Peyton were like, ‘Great. We want to produce it along with Hulu and Disney.’”
We, the audience watching on Hulu and Disney+, know the ruse, and the fact that Zahn’s character is oblivious to it makes it funnier. The look of incredulity on Zahn’s face, as Hudson, in dealing with the absurdity of Chad Powers is priceless.
Zahn says the coach not knowing worked in his favor “because then you can back off of stuff because the audience is ahead of you. … And you don’t have to hit anything over the head. And in fact, that would kill it.”
He admits that he was worried for an instant because a show “like this” could easily “go astray” because of the different comedic tempos that are going on. “You’ve got to really back off and just play the reality,” Zahn insists.
RELATED: Glen Powell Recalls Filming ‘Chad Powers’ With Real NFL Alums “Sprinting At Me With Everything They Got”
I come to Chad Powers as a Brit raised on the humor of Alan Bennett, Alan Ayckbourn, Morecambe and Wise, Benny Hill, Barbara Windsor, Hattie Jacques, Monty Python and all the rest, so I recognized, and found myself appreciating, Zahn’s comic timing, and his restraint.
“But playing the truth is always best,” Zahn says as he spoke of receiving one of his “greatest lessons as an actor” from director Andrei Șerban, when he staged a production of Moliére’s The Miser for the American Repertory Theater in 1989 with Zahn playing Cléante in a company that included Cherry Jones.
Working with Șerban was his baptism into theater, Zahn recalls. “And it was a preview, and I was on stage and I did my thing. I got huge laughs, and I came off stage and he said: ‘What you’re doing right now is exactly what I hate.’ And then he walked away and I was up all night, and it was a horrible night. I didn’t know what he meant. And then I came in the next day and it was the opening night, and he could see I was distraught. And he said: ‘Steve, when you lie, lie.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, wait a second. Yeah, man, I’m hitting everything.’ And he’s like, ‘No, play the truth.’ And he’s so right. And I’ll always remember that.”
Zahn played football in high school. He played corner and returned punts and kicks. The actor’s remained a “huge football fan, especially college. I love college football. Like, Saturday’s the day I watch football all day,” he says, pointing to a laptop set on a kitchen worktop.
He supports the Kentucky Wildcats, and because he grew up supporting them, he still follows the Minnesota Vikings.
In prep for Chad Powers, he went in and shadowed Mark Stoops, head coach of the Wildcats.
What guidance did he offer? I ask. “Oh my God, he answered every question that I threw at him,” he marvels.
“Like, ‘Hey ,is there a strategy with screaming at the refs? Do you know those guys? Are they friends? Is that theater? Is it part theater?’ And he was like, ‘No. You have to calculate when to do it, when not to do it.’”
Zahn gives me a primer on how college football works these days now that college players get paid. “That’s a new thing,” he says as he expounds on how the changes work. “Now you’ve got guys who are making a lot of money, 18-year-olds,” he says with a look of concern.
OK, enough of this foreign American football. The kicker is: Does he follow any British football?
Sitting up in his chair, he replies that he’s addicted to BBC Sports show Match of the Day, but he’s keen to attend a live game.
We veer into dangerous territory when he announces that he’d fancy watching Chelsea play. With dizzying speed, I quickly shout out that he should go and see an Arsenal game instead.
“Did you just call me an asshole?,” he inquires in mock jest.
“Oh, Arsenal,” he repeats when I put him right.
He talks of taking deep dives into YouTube documentaries, recounting the old days when brawls between rival supporters was the norm. “I just thought that was really fascinating” to understand what football was like in the UK in the 1970s and ’80s.
We both bewail what’s happened to football on both sides of the Atlantic.
He remembers as a kid going to see the Minnesota Vikings and he was able to approach players doing their summer training.
And he could approach his heroes and ask for their autographs. For 10 straight years he secured autographs from the likes of star quarterback Fran Tarkenton, running back Chuck Foreman, wide receiver Ahmad Rashad, defensive tackle Alan Page and many others.
“But a lot of those guys had other jobs back then in the ’70s. They had a hardware store or something and then they played football. Now you can’t even get near them,” they’ve become — here as well — over idealized.
“And that’s great, but also like…,” he says, rolling his eyes.
Zahn Googles Hall of Famer Tarkenton, who played in three Super Bowls, to see how much money he made over his playing career — “and it was like half a million dollars.”
That’s a monthly paycheck for some players now.
It’s that kind of money coupled with arrogance that makes Powell’s Russ Holliday such an asshole.
“It’s a great character,” Zahn says. “I was really worried at first … But it works. It all works. And it doesn’t waste its time explaining too much, which I love. Because we get right into it and you go like, ‘OK, I believe all that. For some reason I believe that.’ And it’s because it’s acted well. And Glen is remarkable in this show. I think I am blown away. Talk about a big swing. He stepped up into the batter’s box and he just swung for the fences. … Home run. Grand slam.”
I hear on the grapevine that there’s already chatter about a possible Season 2 of Chad Powers shooting next year.
She Dances caught me off guard. It has a sense of grace that I wasn’t expecting. It’s about a father who takes his daughter, played by Audrey Zahn, and her friend, played by Mackenzie Ziegler, on a road trip to a dance competition.
I ask Zahn about the film’s genesis. He explains that during Covid he took Audrey to her national advance dance competition “and it was just me, and my wife couldn’t go. And it was magical. It was great.”
During the trip, Zahn kept calling Gomez extolling the costumes and the wacky splendor of the whole event.
Gomez thought there might be a story there. “And we started kind of kicking it around,” Zahn says.
A mutual friend, movie producer Jason Reed (Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes), called out of the blue –remember, this is during Covid — “and he was like, ‘Guys, do you have a story? Do you have something that’s not cynical and that’s like, pure?’”
They pitched Reed the dance competition story and wrote a 60-page outline. “And he was like, ‘Keep going.’ And then our goal was to make a cinematic independent American movie for families. The films we grew up on were like, Breaking Away, Mask, Diner, and they were just simple stories about people. And if you watch ’em now, you go like, ‘Wow, man!’”
As Zahn’s talking about these movies made by the likes of Peter Yates (Breaking Away), Peter Bogdanovich (Mask) and Barry Levinson (Diner), I rerun them in my head. “There’s something just beautiful about taking a breath. And we didn’t reinvent anything. We just basically did that,” he says, momentarily lost in thought of movies past.
His words “taking a breath” resonate because I often feel that we’re starved of movies where you can just sit in a theater without being assaulted by flying monsters and heaven only knows what else. Listen, I often adore those giant studio blockbusters, but ever so once in a while, I want to do as Zahn says — just sit and take a breath and watch an easy movie.
People have, perhaps, adhered to She Dances because, Zahn suggests, “All of a sudden it’s not watching YouTube shorts, and it’s not cynical.”
Audrey has been dancing since the age of 3. “I’ve lived that world,” says Zahn.
“She’s a very accomplished dancer,” as he notes that she choreographed Hawke’s movie Wildcat.
She also just finished filming thriller series Imperfect Women for Apple TV+.
Zahn laughs and says that for She Dances, “we did this secret thing that no one does anymore. It’s called rehearsal. We kind of rehearsed it like a play and we were kind of in rehearsals for two weeks, off and on, people coming in and out.”
They set up pre-production in Midway, Kentucky, with a population of 1,600, where Zahn resides with his wife, the bestselling author Robyn Peterman.
Back in Midway, it was a communal affair, with cast and crew walking or riding bikes to work. Rehearsal was made part of the budget. “We were adamant about that because we didn’t have time. It was a 21-day shoot, so everybody was on the same page. Everybody knew what they were doing,” he says.
I confess that I’m not at all up to date with Silo, the Apple TV+ post apocalyptic drama that he’s in the UK to shoot.
He joined in Season 2 as the character Solo, and they’re now filming Season 4.
“So I’m kind of this guy who’s really brilliant, but he’s like 11,” he says, and when showrunner Graham Yost and star Rebecca Ferguson Zoomed and pitched it, “I was like, ‘Are you kidding? This sounds amazing. I’ll do this in a second.’”
In recent weeks he and the cast have been filming exterior scenes around an old copper mine in Wales.
When we were arranging this interview, I had suggested that we meet in Soho — until, that is, it emerged that Zahn and I live within a 15-minute walk of each other in east London. The deal was that I’d visit him at his swish, open-plan rental. Arriving early, I mill about his street and spot him emptying a food waste container.
“I love it here,” he says as we swap notes about local food markets, the famous Columbia Road flower market in Bethnal Green and other favorite haunts to hang out in the east like The Marksman pub and restaurant in Hackney.
I direct him to G Kelly, the pie & mash establishment on the Roman Road that serves steak pies with a special sauce known as liquor, and jellied eels. That’ll mark you as a proper East Ender, I say.
Zahn prefers the area to swankier parts of town like Notting Hill. “I love it, but it’s not my speed at all,” he says of the trendy area forever linked with Roger Mitchell’s Notting Hill starring Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant.
(Gotta tell you, by the way, that Roberts is extraordinarily good in Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, a movie that I’m fascinated by.)
RELATED: ‘After The Hunt’ Red Carpet Premiere Photos: Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Chloë Sevigny & More — Venice Film Festival
Blimey, Zahn’s such a seasoned East Ender that he was telling me stuff about my hood that I didn’t know about. Like how many bombs were dropped in my square during World War II.
It’s so crazy because we’ve probably rubbed shoulders without realizing while he’s been doing his regular four-mile runs in the park while I’ve been walking our two dogs. “That park where I run is my sanctuary,” he declares. “My back is killing me, but I just have to do it. I just get to reach that point where you’re like, ‘Oh, remember the old days?’ Like, ‘Oh, I’m going to a wedding in two weeks. I’m going to lose 10 pounds,’ and you could do it. Now. It’s like, ‘Oh f*ck, man,’” he sighs.
And he enjoys running in London parks “because I get to see people. All I see in Kentucky is cows and horses when I run, and the neighbor and the mailman, and that’s it.”
As we both tuck into fresh croissants, he says: ”I got to eat good and I got to work out. I got to lift. I got to run just to look normal. So, yeah, I’m at that stage right now. I try to keep in shape.”
Back in Kentucky, Zahn has horses and goats “and it’s all horses around me. I’m in the middle of a thousand-acre horse farm,” he explains.
The late Queen Elizabeth II used to visit her prize horses “right down the road,” he says.
He has a memory of being ever so slightly in her late majesty’s presence when there was a hold-up on the interstate and cars in front wouldn’t let him and his friends pass. “I’m like, ‘This is ridiculous!’ I started writing down a license plate number and everything. And then we finally get to the exit and there’s a ton of cars, and we all in a moment understood. We’re like, ‘Wow! It’s the Queen.’”
Her majesty “was right in Midway, went right through my little town, 1,600 people. My neighbor across the street … he’s got pictures of the Queen on their farm in the ’80s, coming to see her horses. She loved it there,” he says.
“So we have an affinity for her in Kentucky just because she would come visit and she loved it there.”
Zahn used to raise quarterhorses and ride a lot, but now he has retired thoroughbreds.
I ask what he does with them. “Point and laugh at ’em,” he jokes. “They’ve worked their asses off for six years — running, racing, getting hurt. They’re great because they’ve been through everything. So they’re bulletproof, and they’re really great kind of companions and buddies. I just take care of them.”
It seems a good counterpoint to a Hollywood lifestyle. “Yeah, but I’ve always been outside it,” he responds. “So I don’t really know that lifestyle. I’ve never really been a part of that. I mean, maybe when I was younger and stuff, and when shooting in L.A. when you used to make movies in L.A., the old days.”
Even so, he admits that Hollywood was never really for him. “I love New York. I was a theater guy,” he says of his early acting years. He met Peterman on the 1991 national tour of Bye Bye Birdie starring Ann Reinking and Tommy Tune, and they’ve “been together forever” since.
They bought a cabin in the Poconos with “all this money” they made from the tour, but they couldn’t afford a place in town as well so they moved to the mountains. ”So we’ve always been outside, always been unique in that way.”
Somehow, I have a vision of Zahn that’s set in stone. It’s of him in That Thing You Do! as a daffy wannabe rock star, and in a flash he’s playing dad roles and he’s the coach in Chad Powers.
“It is weird,” Zahn agrees. “It just kind of represents chapters in your life. And yet I don’t think of myself as an older guy.”
He remarks that he was sitting in the car when he was shooting in Wales and it was cold and raining. Then it was a 5½-hour drive back to East London. He was in the car with Rick Gomez. “We were just talking about like, ‘Wow, I’m 57,’ and we were looking up Jack Nicholson. How old was he when he did The Departed? And we’re older. We were like, we’re older than the whole cast of The Godfather, we’re older than those guys now. It’s just very interesting how time … and you know what I mean?”
“It’s like, I don’t think of myself as this veteran,” he muses, “but I guess I am.”
He laughs and reflects that that’s “the beauty of acting or beauty of being a character actor is that as you age, you just get to move into different categories, which is really kind of fun.”
He’s getting a kick out of playing in a sports comedy show. He feels like a little kid, he confesses. “I get to be a coach, man. And if it’s a hit, which I hope, then people call me Coach, man! I’ll be walking around, ‘Hey Coach.’ If I go to a college football game, it’s just going to be fun. I’ll get those fringe benefits of like, ‘Oh no, come to the box.’
“It’s kind of the great thing about being an actor,” he says with childlike glee.
“In Anaconda, which I just did, I just play this idiot. We all play idiots,” he says referring to the movie’s stars Paul Rudd and Jack Black.
“It’s just so much fun. The premise being we go down to shoot an independent version of Anaconda, and I’m the all-round crew guy. I shoot it, sound. I’m your grip. Everything.”
Gazillions have watched the trailer for the Sony Christmas Day movie.
RELATED: ‘Anaconda’ Trailer: Jack Black And Paul Rudd Star In Meta Horror Reboot
“It’s insane,” he says, revealing that he’s about to fly to Brisbane for two days of reshoots on Anaconda.
Then he’s back in the UK to resume shooting his scenes for Silo and preparing for visits from his family for Thanksgiving.
Before I leave, I tell him of my days as a crime reporter and about the murder I covered just down the road…
Source link
اترك تعليقاً