Get into Dodge

Nick Stahl puts new Twist on popular Dickens character
CANOE.CA

By JANE STEVENSON

The transition from fighting alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in a big Hollywood action flick, to street hustling and shooting heroin in a small Canadian independent film posed no problem for actor Nick Stahl.

A good role is a good role.

“I feel like the roles that I play are separate from the commercial aspects of movies,” said Stahl, 24, during an interview at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

“And that’s why to me, the budget of a movie has always been sort of secondary, I guess. Really, I just look for good stories and good characters, because that’s what I feel I can do.”

The Texas-born, L.A.-based Stahl, best known for playing John Connor in 2003’s Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines and the tragic murder victim in 2001’s In The Bedroom, currently stars in Twist, a modern retelling of Oliver Twist, which opened yesterday.

Stahl plays Dodge, a.k.a. The Artful Dodger, a Toronto rent-boy and junkie who takes the innocent runaway Oliver (newcomer Joshua Close) under his wing.

“I read the book when I was a kid, and so I remembered the character, and there were certain elements from the book that remained true in this adaptation,” Stahl said.

“Just his sense of sort of being the ultimate kind of hustler, the ultimate shifty character guy that keeps moving. Once the script was done it was like a new story to me and I made it my own as much as I could.”

Stahl and Montreal-born director/writer Jacob Tierney — real-life best friends who met in L.A., where they were housemates for three years — observed male prostitutes in Toronto.

But they never spoke to them or asked any questions. Stahl also didn’t go “method” and live on the streets or stop showering.

“Like the prostitution and the drugs, I didn’t feel like that was what the movie was,” he said. “It’s no big deal to him, to the character. The prostitution, the selling sex as a commodity, it’s become a small thing. Sex is not an intimate thing to the character. There’s nothing special about it or sexy. So to try to get to the root of that was really what I wanted to do — the reasons why that happened.”

Stahl, who’ll admit to reading what is written about him in the press, says he tries to not place too much importance on reviews. But getting positive feedback is often necessary to keep going.

“Sometimes you need affirmation, maybe, that you’re in the right business or you’re doing kind of the right thing, ’cause sometimes it’s hard to know or be objective,” he said.