Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here, presenting my conversation with one of the busiest actors working in film today. Since the final episode of "Six Feet Under" (the one and only television episode that ever made me shed a tear) aired in August 2005, Freddy Rodriguez (who played the often put-upon Federico) has been working like a fiend, primarily as part of ensemble drama or in supporting parts in such films as DREAMER, HAVOC, LADY IN THE WATER, and POSEIDON. This week, we get to see the Chicago-born-and-raised Rodriguez in his first lead role, opposite Christian Bale in the long-on-the-shelf urban nightmare HARSH TIMES. And very shortly, I think a lot of you are going to be surprised how substantially he stands out among a cast of superstars in BOBBY. But most importantly (at least for many AICN readers), Rodriguez is one of the leads in the upcoming Robert Rodriguez "Planet Terror" segment of next year's GRINDHOUSE. Yes, he gets to kill many a zombie. We hit on all of this in our discussion, just one Chicago guy to another…
Capone: I heard on the way here that you were going to visit your old high school today, Lincoln Park High School.
Freddy Rodriguez: Yeah, that's what I hear. It's something for TV, I think.
C: Do you get back to Chicago much? Do you still have family here?
FR: Oh yeah. My entire base is here, my parents, my brothers, nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles. I just bought a place here in an attempt to reconnect with my roots. I was born and bred here. I left here when I was 19 to do A WALK IN THE CLOUDS and DEAD PRESIDENTS, and then came back for about seven months, and then left permanently when I was 20. So I've been gone a good 11 years.
C: In the last year and a half, your exposure level has been through the roof. Pretty much starting with the final episode of "Six Feet Under" right up until the two movies you've got coming out now. Have you gotten to the place where you can be a little more selective about the roles you take?
FR: Even before, I've always tried to be selective. I've always tried to make my choices based on quality, integrity, who's involved, who's directing. But now those options will be greater, whereas before there were few and far between, and I really had to fight for them. So I've always tried to work that way, even with the films that came out this year like POSEIDON or LADY IN THE WATER, which did okay. But my decisions to do those films was based on that criteria, to work with Wolfgang Petersen or M. Night Shyamalan, or even a film I did last year called HAVOC, which did nothing. But if you look at the credits, the person who wrote it was Stephen Gaghan, who wrote TRAFFIC and won an Oscar for it, and Barbara Kopple directed it, a two-time Oscar winner. Sometimes I'll do stuff and someone will ask, "Why did you do it?" but if you do your research a little more, you'll see why I did it.
C: HAVOC is one of the most seriously underrated films I saw last year. It played at the Chicago Film Festival, so I actually saw it in a theatre, even though most people consider that a straight-to-DVD release. I could not figure out why it never got a real theatrical release, if only for the nudity, not to mention the killer underbelly story. And I'd never seen you play a part like that before. But with HARSH TIMES, this is really the first time we get to see you in a leading role. In a lot of ways, your character represents the audience, as our eyes and ears to same scary shit that Christian Bale's Jim does. At least your character is taken aback by what he witnesses. Do you think your character harbors a certain amount of envy for Jim's reckless, no responsibilities lifestyle? Whereas your character is tied down more with his long-term girlfriend.
FR: That's an interesting observation, that he's envious. He's the type of guy who wants to have his cake and eat it to. And he justifies that in his own head, by saying, "It's okay." When it really isn't. You get to a certain age and a certain point in your life and in your relationship, and you have to choose. And he's just selfish. He doesn't want to choose; he wants both. Not that envies Jim, but he did, he'd just leave Eva [Longoria's] character and do what Jim does, but he wants both. He wants to live Jim's life and have this relationship with this girl, and there lies the conflict.
C: I don't think anyone on the planet would argue with you not leaving Eva Longoria. Put this in some sort of chronology for us. You shot this film a while ago, right?
FR: Two years ago, yes.
C: So at that point had you finished shooting "Six Feet Under"?
FR: No. It was interesting; I was doing "Six Feet Under" at the exact same time. I was doing "Six Feet" on Thursdays and Fridays, and I was doing that film Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Seven days a week, 16 hours a day, and we repeated that for the duration of the film.
C: That's a hell of a work schedule. Had Eva even hit it big with "Desperate Housewives" yet?
FR: It during the first season or right after, I believe. But it was before the explosion of her notoriety in the last couple of years. It was cool at the time because that's what we had in common. She was beginning her journey on her show, and I was ending mine on "Six Feet Under."
C: I don't want to focus too much on "Six Feet Under," but I will say, I don't think I've cried in a movie since I saw E.T. go home, and I've certainly never cried watching a television show. But damnit, the last five minutes of "Six Feet Under" had my crying like a little girl. I had to apologize to my wife. It was really quite embarrassing. Tell me about seeing that ending for the first time. What was your reaction?
FR: It was very difficult to watch. Where was I? I was doing LADY IN THE WATER at the time, so I was in Philadelphia. I was in the hotel with my wife, and I saw that episode, and it was extremely difficult and all choked up. But to you, it represented the end of a show. It represented that to me too, but it also represented the end of a chapter in my life, in my career, that elevated my career to the point where people like you will recognize my work. That show changed my life completely, and now it's done. That episode was the proof that it was done, so to me it took a much deeper and more personal meaning than the average observer, the average admirer of the show.
C: Do you miss that career stability, that once-a-year gig that you can rely on?
FR: Yeah! It's great, because I have kids, and that sort of 9-to-5 schedule worked great for me. I could be home more spend more time with the kids and my wife. Now, in the film world, you obviously travel more. But the flip side to that, the payoff, is that you get to work in a much more prestigious arena than television is, the different directors you get to work with and the different characters you get to play.
C: With HARSH TIMES, the thing that struck me from the first scene is the language. It's a real specific dialect. Not just the words, but the cadence in the speech. I lost track of how many times you and Christian Bale said the word "dude."
FR: That's California. A lot of that stuff stuck with me too. After that film, I found myself saying, "dude…" And then I realized that I didn't really talk like that, but you can't help it. It seeps into the fiber of who you are, and you just sort of become this thing.
C: Was that all in the script?
FR: Yeah, sort of. This is all sort of loosely based on [writer-director] David Ayer's life and friends that he grew up with, and I got to meet some of those guys and that's exactly how they talk. So we were just trying to be true to the material and the people it was about.
C: Ayer has obviously made a name for himself writing these very aggressive, male-oriented films, but untested as a director. What was it about him that made you confident that he could handle things as a director?
FR: When you read David Ayer's scripts, you see how visual he is. When a writer is as visual as he is, you can tell how it's going to be shot, how it's going to look just by the words on the page. With that, I trusted him. Also, I'm a big fan of TRAINING DAY, and the same unique voice I heard in that, I heard in this. When I finally got to work with him I was impressed because he didn't try to wing it. Sometimes first-time directors love to wing it, and he didn’t do that. He did his research before coming out to do the film. He really knew what he was doing before making the film.
C: Did you and Christian Bale have a chance before shooting to form the kind of bond necessary to make your characters' friendship more believable? It's the heart of the film and it's very convincing.
FR: A little bit. We hung out a couple of weeks before we started shooting. But a lot of that just happened organically from us just spending 15 hours a day in a car together.
C: What project was he coming out of when you worked with him?
FR: It was pre-BATMAN's release. He had just filmed BATMAN.
C: How would you rate Ayer as a director?
FR: He was great. Anybody that does as much research as he does, and comes on set to direct. I dislike working with directors who don't direct, who don't say anything to you and worry more about the shot and how it's going to look than the performances. He was really invested in his characters and knew them inside out and was willing to show that on the set, no matter what he was doing.
C: Was your character more based on David?
FR: My character is based on a friend of David's. Christian's character is more based on David.
C: Really?! That's scares me.
FR: Maybe his alter ego. David is an ex-military guy. He was the only white guy in a predominantly black and Latino neighborhood in Los Angeles. He was that guy.
C: As a Latino actor, how did it feel to you to hear Christian Bale put on that Mexican accent. That really threw me; I don't think I've ever heard that done before.
FR: I thought he pulled it off. And let me tell you something about David: he speaks better Spanish than I do, and he's a white guy. He assimilated into the neighborhood when he lived that and embraced the culture, spoke the language, ate the food, just like the character of Jim.
C: I thought we'd be spending most of our time talking about HARSH TIMES, but I just saw BOBBY a couple days ago. I found myself talking about your character in particular with some people I'd seen it with. So much of the time and the place of that period is embodied by your character [of José, a Mexican kitchen worker at the Ambassador Hotel, where Robert Kennedy was shot to death]. The running theme of your character is that he wants to go to this baseball game because he thinks it will go down in history for number of consecutive shutout by a particular pitcher, and he ends up not going and become a part of history that he wanted no part of. Is this a real person? Obviously there was a kitchen worker with Kennedy when he died, but are you playing the real person?
FR: There's a famous photo of a busboy holding his head after he was shot. José is loosely inspired by the real person. It's not based on his life and his accounts of that day. [Writer-director] Emilio Estevez saw the photo, and said "I want him to be a thread in the film, so what would be his back story?" And he came up with baseball stuff to have the correlation with the beginning of Kennedy's speech at the hotel where he mention the game.
C: That's got to be a heavy emotional weight to take on the role of that particular person in history.
FR: It's a big responsibility, it is. When I first looked at that photo, I knew it was a big responsibility playing that guy. But when you take a look at the photo again, you say to yourself, these are the last moments of this man's life and of all the people he could have had next to him at the moment of chaos, when people are getting shot and bullets are flying through the air, the one person who had the bravery and the nobility and the courage to put his own safety on the line was this busboy. Don't you find that strange? You figure it would be someone from his camp or someone who worked on his campaign. But it was this busboy who wasn't afraid to kneel down and cradle him, put his knee under his head, and talk to him. So once we figured that out, we just created the common emotional thread of the character's choices. He had a big heart, nobility, a solidness from the minute you meet him.
C: It is obviously an ensemble piece, but when it gets to that image of just you and him, you realize that the entire film has been leading to that moment, that connection. Not to take away from the great scenes you have with Laurence Fishburne. Those are funny, prophetic, moving. How was it to work with him?
FR: Laurence Fishburne is one of our legends. He brings a certain weight to his work. He was extremely gracious and giving and he respected you a great deal.
C: What do you think about the things his character says about race relations in the scene where the kitchen staff is eating together? How the brown man should cow-tow to the white man, so he doesn't seem threatening, and how any civil rights changes should come from the white man so he thinks he thought of it first. How did that sit with you?
FR: That was his philosophy, that's what he thought. I don't think the film is saying it's necessarily right, but that was his way of dealing with inequality, his way of getting around it. And because Jacob Vargas' character [as a fellow Mexican kitchen worker] was such a pessimist, he was sharing his philosophy with Jacob in the hopes of getting rid of some of the pessimism and giving him some light in his life.
C: As much as I think people are looking forward to HARSH TIMES and BOBBY, a lot of our readership is focusing on is "Planet Terror" in GRINDHOUSE, working for Robert Rodriguez. Give us some insight, a little taste of what you do. You're in the trailer, and it looks like you're some sort of law enforcement character.
FR: He's an ex-military guy; he's a badass. He's the first action hero I've ever played in my life. Robert Rodriguez usually has the quintessential action heroes in all of his films, and that's pretty much what I am in this film.
C: I have no idea what the division of duties is in terms of the characters in "Planet Terror." Are you the lead guy?
FR: Oh yeah. I'm the lead guy. I guess it's an ensemble, but I'm the hero, the guy who saves the day. We're fighting zombies. I get to slice some zombies in the neck, stab them, shot them.
C: Is this going to be like a lot of Rodriguez's other recent films, real greenscreen heavy, or does he go for the more natural look of the films that inspired the GRINDHOUSE project?
FR: No no. Very little greenscreen, much more organic.
Our plug was abruptly pulled at this point, so I didn't really get a chance to wrap things more tidily, but I think you get the point.
Just to keep you guys up to date, I've got a few pretty great interviews in the pipeline, including ones with Richard Linklater; Darren Aronofsky; Crispin Glover (coming to Chicago next weekend for a couple showing of WHAT IS IT?); the directors of what might be the best documentary of the year; and a talk with one of the biggest movie stars on the planet. Stay cool.
Capone capone@aintitcoolmail.com
