Nick Stahl Talks About ‘Sleepwalking’

ABOUT.COM – MARCH 12, 2008

By Rebecca Murray
Source: About.com

Nick Stahl stars as a guy just struggling to make it to work each day and keep his head above water in Sleepwalking, directed by William Maher. Charlize Theron co-stars as his sister, Joleen, a single mother who does a lousy job of raising her only child, Tara (played by AnnaSophia Robb). When Joleen’s kicked out of the house she shares with her boyfriend, she drags Tara to her brother’s place and dumps her there.

Most actors claim characters with an edge, a troubled background, or serious demons to battle are the most interesting to play, and while Stahl’s character, James, is a real decent guy, he definitely had a traumatic family life that’s affected his ability to function as an adult.

Stahl claims his character’s troubled home life was something he found intriguing.

“You read the script, and it can read a certain way, and he can come off even as kind of slow or something like that,” explained Stahl. “I never saw him as mentally deficient in any way. He was emotionally deficient. When I first went up to Canada, I even had the costume designer tell me that it reminded her of Lenny from Mice and Men, and I was like, ‘Don’t tell me that,’ because that’s not at all what it was. He was a damaged [man] who was the victim of abuse and had learned to settle for a simple role in his life, not ask for anything, to just settle for something. And that’s the way he’s lived for a long time, and I think until Tara comes into his life does that start to change a little bit for him.”

Screenwriter Zac Stanford and director Maher don’t fill in all the blanks and allow the audience to figure out what motivates each character. The basics are there, but it’s left to the imagination of the audience to determine much of what keeps the adults moving forward on their chosen paths. Even though the script doesn’t spell things out, Stahl didn’t find it necessary to create his own detailed backstory on James. “I didn’t need to do much, and I’ve never been one to have a notebook of day one as my life as James Reedy. It’s just I’ve never really worked that way. I don’t think it helps me that much. I don’t think it makes it that much better for me. And least effort possible for me – that’s my philosophy.”

“I think a lot of it was in the script, definitely. There’s James’ and Joleen’s story,” said Stahl. “We spent some time talking about what their relationship was like and growing up. And I think I heard Charlize mention the other day that – I love the fact in the script that these two characters, these siblings, dealt with trauma in very different ways. They’re just completely different personalities. And part of the contentious relationship that they have is that sibling thing of she sees James get walked on, and to her it’s frustrating and it’s a reminder of the abuse that they’ve gone through. And she doesn’t want to look at that. She’s like an extrovert, aggressive. She’s always moving ahead and not looking back. And James isn’t necessarily looking back, but he’s got this apathy and he doesn’t stand up for himself as much. I think to her that’s a reminder of the damage that [Dennis Hopper as their father’s] done to us.”

Although the circumstances in the film – a mom dumping her kid at her brother’s so she can get a man, which is the only way she thinks she’ll be able to get her life in order – may not be a common story amongst the film’s audience, Stahl did think the characters were all very relatable. “I think everyone can relate somewhat to an unhappy childhood and to adversity growing up and kind of becoming an adult and moving past that and becoming your own person,” said Stahl. “I’ve been so lucky to always have acting, honestly. I knew what I wanted to do at a very young age, and that’s always been inspirational for me, honestly. I mean, when I was young, I sort of had a bad crowd that I ran with, and a couple of them are in jail now and they’re just doing whatever. I always had this. I always had something to pull me out of that, because I don’t know what I would do without it, honestly.”

Stahl’s career is a mix of larger budget movies and independent films, and he says preparing for a film of this size is really not that much different than getting ready to do a Terminator movie or Sin City. “I try to do the same thing that I have always done but just the context is so different,” offered Stahl. “On a bigger movie, you have so much more time and you can get kind of lazy. There’s just so much more luxury around you, and that’s kind of deceptive. It seems like it’s great and then you tend to get off track because you’re filming one scene over three days. We were filming six scenes in a day on this. And sometimes I think some real magic can happen when you have constraints, when you have time constraints or budget. Or, I think sometimes it creates a certain immediacy. Sometimes you get some great things out of the struggle or just even the elements where you’re filming. It’s 50 below, which just works so perfectly for the story. When I read it, it read like a cold story and the town, the industrial feel of where James is from, and it just lent itself so well.

Sleepwalking: An interview with Charlize Theron and Nick Stahl

SPARTAN DAILY – MARCH 13, 2008

By Liza Atamy
Source: Spartan Daily

I, along with three other journalists, had the opportunity to interview actors Charlize Theron and Nick Stahl, who star in the upcoming overture film “Sleepwalking,” which Theron produced as well.

The interview took place at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco on March 3, 2008.

Academy Award winner Theron, who won in 2004 for Best Actress for her role as female serial killer Aileen Wuornos in “Monster,” has portrayed her talent in a wide variety of performances ranging from comedy to action to epic-drama.

Her movie credits also include: “The Devil’s Advocate,” “The Cider House Rules,” “Sweet November” and “The Italian Job.”

Her co-star Nick Stahl can be remembered from the HBO series “Carnivale” and his roles in “Sin City” and “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.”

Theron had a dual responsibility in “Sleepwalking”: producing the film and playing troubled mother Joleen Reedy.

“Screenwriter Zac Stanford submitted the script to my company,” Theron said. “We read it, and it stuck with me. I woke up the next morning and kept thinking about it.”

Theron said there was something about the script that captured her.

“It’s very hard to explain that creative choice when you read material,” she said. “At the end of the day for me, it is an emotional feeling that grabs me.”

Theron said she was very fortunate to have her “dream cast” sign on to the project.

For co-star Nick Stahl, it was the story that captured him.

“When I read it, it was a very simple story and very character-driven,” Stahl said. “Actors look for movies like that where we have the chance to drive the story.”

Stahl said his character, James Reedy, was very “introspective and was a creature of habit with his simple job.”

Stahl’s character has many demons to fight, but the underlying source of his problems and insecurities is his abusive father, who James finally comprehends and must learn to overcome.

“He’s a haunted guy,” Stahl said. “He is haunted by his past and goes back to see his father thinking things might be different.

“He sees for the first time the viciousness of his father by watching his niece go through the same thing his sister went through years ago.”

Stahl said the foundation of James’ and Joleen’s circumstances was the “pre-contentious family they were raised in” and they were “products of an abusive household.”

The viewer comes to understand that the persisting habits of Joleen and the self-conscious nature of James are embedded within them because of the physical and emotional abuse they had endured from their father for years.

“It affects both of their lives as adults and their actions are kind of born out of that,” Stahl said. “I think visiting his father was James’ transformation – breaking that cycle in a way.”

Stahl said his character is viewed as a savior to his niece, Tara, but ultimately ends up being the one who (unintentionally) puts her in harm’s way by taking her to see his father.

“I think (Tara) changed him, and I think he went back to see his dad because she provided him with certain inspiration,” he said. “She has given him an almost certain courage to face his fears and to face his past, and I think in a sense he is seeking redemption.”

Theron’s character, Joleen, had her own demons to face as well. Throwing herself into one unpromising and failing relationship after another, she, too, must come to terms with all of her fears and take responsibility for her daughter.

It was, at times, very hard to believe the careless choices Joleen made for herself and her daughter. One would inevitably think: “Would Theron make the same choices had she been in the same situation?”

“I don’t think she was irresponsible, and I’m not trying to give an excuse for the decisions she’s made,” Theron said. “As an actor, one very important thing to be aware of is the circumstances characters are coming from.

“When you start making choices for your character based on decisions you would make, it becomes unrealistic. I don’t have Joleen’s background and the issues she’s been dealing with. I don’t live in those shoes, so I try to walk away and not judge whether what she does is right or wrong,” she said.

Theron said that in order to stick to the road of truth with the characters she portrays, she avoids reaching for sympathy and instead sets out for empathy.

The film portrays a dark and desolate setting and similar emotions throughout, and it leaves the ending open and somewhat optimistic for viewers to interpret and conclude.

“This is the only reason why I wanted to make the film, because of the human condition it portrays,” Theron said. “I really do believe the one thing we always have is hope, even when we don’t have a penny in our pocket and when things get worse.”

Besides introducing herself to a character and morphing into the character’s mindset she would live with for months, Theron said detaching herself from her character has somewhat of a “mourning” period after filming wraps and there is no work the next day.

“The mourning is somewhat inclusive of leaving not just the character but a little family that you have with your crew,” she said. “Especially when you’re on location and no one gets to go home.”

Theron said her life is her priority, and it would be unfair to bring her work home and “drag everybody into whatever I’m working on at the time.

“I’m a very happy, joyous person,” she said. “I love my life, and I love the people in it.”

While filming “Sleepwalking,” Theron also found the time to appear in Stuart Townsend’s directorial debut “The Battle in Seattle.”

She is currently filming “Hancock” with actor Will Smith and will start filming “The Brazilian Job,” a follow-up to the movie “The Italian Job,” in which she also starred.

Stahl is promoting his second film release for the year, “Quid Pro Quo,” and is in post-production with upcoming “The Speed of Thought.”

“Sleepwalking” will be released nationwide Friday.

Nick Stahl, the smart kind of hot teenage actor

INTERVIEW – SEPTEMBER, 1998

By Laurence Dumortier
Source: FindArticles.com

Nick Stahl was twelve when he starred opposite Mel Gibson in The Man Without a Face (1993), as a fatherless boy who reaches out to a man hounded into isolation by people’s disgust at his badly scarred face. Poised and obstinate, Stahl’s character was the best thing about the movie, a kid who taught his superficial and loveless family a lesson about misleading appearances. Now eighteen, Stahl has continued in his own footsteps: In July’s teen thriller Disturbing Behavior, he was a lonely stoner bent on escaping the unnatural influence of a pack of computer chip-implanted high school jocks and cheerleaders. Even when the seemingly perfect clique succeeded at converting him to their robotic ways and Stahl’s character abandoned his reefer and army-surplus duds for milkshakes and loafers, he seemed out of place among the hunky boys and pneumatic girls next door. Stahl is too pale and skinny and his face reveals too much personality for him to blend seamlessly with the beautiful kids that Hollywood is now cranking out by the dozen.

Stahl says he was baffled by the aesthetically driven marketing of the film, which plastered every other billboard in L.A. with his airbrushed face alongside those of costars Katie Holmes and James Marsden. (”The poster made us all look alike!” he marvels.) But the actor seems determined to ignore the emphasis On physical beauty that actresses have always endured and that is now increasingly felt by their male counterparts. Stahl declares, “I try to avoid the sweet-ass roles. I don’t consider myself anything of the kind, and there’s no point in pretending I am.”

Later this year, Stahl gets gritty. In Terrence Malick’s much-anticipated World War II epic, The Thin Red Line, he plays an Iowa farm boy stuck in the battle of Guadalcanal and coming to terms with the reality of killing. Although he acted in the film with John Travolta, Sean Penn, and Nick Nolte, Stahl reserved his awe for the experience of working with the famously reclusive Malick: “He’s such an intriguing person. He can be quite abstract, but when he’s filming he’s incredibly acute. It wasn’t like any other film I’ll ever do, I’m sure.” Stahl has no fears of seeing his face on billboards for this movie, which is set for a holiday release. “I imagine the marketing will have to be more complex, there are so many characters and story lines,” Stahl says, then pauses. “I’m curious to see how they package this war flick under the Christmas tree.”

Actor Nick Stahl feels right at home with his HBO ‘Carnivale’

DAILY BREEZE – SEPTEMBER 14, 2003

Like the hapless drifter he plays on “Carnivale,” actor Nick Stahl is not exactly brimming with self-confidence.

When he watches his performance in “Terminator 3,” he picks himself apart. “All you see,” he says, “is the inconsistencies, the negative things.” And in parallel to his “Carnivale” character, Ben Hawkins, Stahl, a 23-year-old Dallas native, isn’t much into big scenes. He’d rather be alone.

Stahl lives by himself and says he can go a day without speaking to anyone. “I don’t like crowds,” he says, sitting on a wooden bench at the HBO party with a carnival theme. As festivities swirl around him, Stahl easily steps aside from it.

An impatient publicist is near his side, listening to every word and counting the moments until the interview is over. Behind him is a stage where novelty acts, such as a man who eats fire, are performing. Stahl doesn’t give it a glance. He says Ben is the same way, “an extreme loner,” but his “Carnivale” persona has secrets to keep.

Among them is the ability to heal and transfer energy from the life around him and direct it into something _ or someone _ else. After his mother refuses to let him use his talents to keep her alive, dies and refuses his talents, Ben hooks up with a strange carnival passing through. The freak show only makes him feel more out of place. When nosey co-workers aren’t prying at him, he’s getting probed by a mind reader.

“Carnivale,” a 12-part series debuting tonight at 9:35, centers on Ben’s new life in the carnival while also documenting, in another story, a minister and his mysterious visions of doom. Ben would rather deny his gifts and keep a low profile, but the carnival makes it increasingly harder to do.

“Carnivale” also stars Clancy Brown, Adrienne Barbeau, Clea DuVall and Amy Madigan. The drama is touted as HBO’s new buzz show, a signature series that the pay channel is hoping will be water cooler fodder like “The Sopranos,” “Sex and the City” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

Critics are giving it mixed reviews, saying the show is too slow and unwilling to spill its many secrets early on. Stahl has faced tough critics before. He has been acting since age 10, but didn’t make the move to Los Angeles until age 16. He says the city is a tough place to make friends and build a personal life.

“It’s a place built on this industry, and that’s hard to get used to,” he says. “Whenever (your career) is not on your mind, then there is always something there to remind you of it.

“Early on, it was very competitive in that way, and I am not an extremely competitive person. I had to find ways to enjoy it. I had to do my own thing and not get caught up in that kind of rat race.”

Stahl says his insecurities are “more normal things,” such as relationships. Rarely does he find himself fretting over career problems.

He was so confident, in fact, that he was not looking to do a series when “Carnivale” landed in his lap. And why should he? Stahl starred as John Connor in “Terminator 3,” one of this year’s biggest films.

Airs Tonight “Carnivale”:
Nick Stahl stars in this new 12-part drama, set during the Depression, as a man who can heal others. He joins a carnival traveling across the Dust Bowl. It debuts at 9:35 tonight on HBO.

Tonight’s episode:
In the opener, “Milfay,” Ben (Nick Stahl) reluctantly joins the carnival after being run off his family’s Oklahoma farm.

Nick Stahl comes of age with In the Bedroom performance

BOSTON HERALD – DECEMBER 22, 2001

Despite all the attention being given to “In the Bedroom,” its lead actor Nick Stahl is in danger of being forgotten. The film, which opens in Boston on Tuesday, already has won the L.A. Film Critics prize as Best Picture, the N.Y. Film Critics’ Best First Film award and, for leading lady Sissy Spacek, Best Actress honors from both groups.

Somehow, even with an actor’s healthy ego, the 21-year-old Stahl doesn’t mind. “It’s exciting to me to challenge myself with different kinds of roles and Sissy is just amazing to work with. You meet her and she’s incredibly grounded and unaffected. “She lives on a farm in Virginia with her family and there’s an innocence to her that’s amazing, and a workmanship. Just very inspiring I’d say, so normal and fun.

“I was really just trying to hold my own with these great actors, it was such an accomplished group. It wasn’t competition, I was just trying to survive.”

Stahl plays Frank, a promising collegiate destined to be an architect who finds a summer romance in his Maine fishing village with the slightly older Natalie (Marisa Tomei).

Ultimately “In the Bedroom” is not a warm romance but a wrenching study of a family – Spacek and British actor Tom Wilkinson as upright small town Maine parents – coming undone when a beloved son is murdered by his girlfriend’s out-of-control ex.

For Stahl, “In the Bedroom” is his second buzzed-about flick of the year, following Larry Clark’s “Bully,” in which he played a murdered sexual predator. “`Bedroom’ was pretty simple,” Stahl said. “Once I read it, that was it. Every movie is different in one way or another, but this was one of the better experiences I’ve had, I would say.

“Frank’s a great role for me, I was just fortunate. I saw him as old for his age, I don’t think he’s more than 21. He’s mature for his age and kind of wise.”

When it comes to acting, Stahl, too, has been mature for his age. “I’d been doing children’s plays since I was about 4,” he said. “At 10, I got a role in `Medea’ with a professional theater group as her son, so I started off with death at a young age.”

That was when he was growing up in Dallas, where he soon had an agent and did TV movies. At age 12, Mel Gibson changed Stahl’s life.

That’s when Stahl was cast to star in “The Man Without a Face,” directed by and co-starring Gibson. “He’s a good guy to be around,” Stahl said of Gibson. “He had his hands full with directing. He had a great sense of humor and fun, so it made it easy for me.

“I was just in awe, my first movie and such a big thing to start on. It kind of blew me away.”

Stahl continued to work, appearing in “The Thin Red Line” and “Eye of God,” but only now are his roles finally changing. “I look pretty young for my age, I have this baby face,” he said. “`In the Bedroom’ is the first role really where I’ve played an adult.”

The Victim: against the ropes with Nick Stahl

LOS ANGELES MAGAZINE – JULY 1, 2003

Leaning against a brick wall, the actor Nick Stahl suffers one lost layer of blush to the tip of his snub nose, gently administered by a seasoned professional. Most noses hovering amid the heavy bags and jump ropes of the La Brea Boxing Academy this morning haven’t enjoyed such a tender fate. The tough old trainers and Golden Gloves alumni wear their twisted, flattened monuments to past pain and cruelty right between the eyes. At 23, Stahl stands 5 feet 11 inches, nearly as tall as Mike Tyson, but he’s slender enough to be a welterweight. He crouches beside the academy’s center ring, where an ex-rugby player is smashing the head of his sparring partner. Turning a sensitive gaze toward the camera, Stahl seems in need of the kind of protection Arnold Schwarzenegger will be providing him in this month’s Terminator 3, in which he plays the latest incarnation of John Connor, humanity’s ultimate savior against the evil machines.

Stahl’s love of boxing is a love of beautiful wounds. The first Mike Tyson-Evander Holyfield fight–the one free of ear mutilation–hooked him on the sport. While he has more respect for Holyfield’s career, he’s attracted to Tyson’s pathos. “When Tyson lost to Lennox Lewis, he was like a child. He was truly humbled,” he says. “He gave Lewis a hug, and he was like, ‘Please let me fight you again.’ I see Tyson as an innately smart guy, but it’s filtered through this mask of problems that he has, so that’s what people see.” Stahl is at least as captivated by the punishment boxers endure as by the pain they inflict. “Some people are born with this ability to get hit, and it doesn’t faze them,” he says.
“Some guys, you hit them once and they’re done.”

In the movies, Stahl is usually done in. In Terrence Malick’s 1998 film The Thin Red Line he lasted just long enough for the audience to glimpse, in languid succession, his terrified face aboard a ship, his terrified face on a battlefield, and his corpse riddled with rifle fire.

For In the Bedroom, his breakthrough film of 2001, Stahl fared worse. The sweetness, the guilelessness, the androgynous fragility he lent to his role as a love-struck New England college student made his murder by a jealous husband something worse than horrifying. “It seems more times than not I die in the movies. I’ve died something like ten times,” says Stahl, now smoking a cigarette in the gym’s parking lot. “It’s odd–it’s kind of my forte or something. I moved here when I was 16. That’s when that whole teen craze was around. Those roles were just a celebration of teenage idiocy. Coming into the room and jumping around and being a crazy, zany guy–I never did well at that. I feel like I’m much more suited to pain than pleasure onscreen. It’s much easier for me to do something like cry or be upset than to have fun.”

As a ten-year-old in the Dallas suburb of Richardson, Texas, Stahl landed the role of one of two sons led to the slaughter in a production of Medea. “I don’t think I had a line,” Stahl says. “There was me and a white kid with this giant Afro. Medea follows us. We’d go offstage and scream as if she was stabbing us, and then we would be carried out covered in corn syrup.”

The stage violence insulated him for a time from other afflictions. When Stahl was two, his father left him, his mother, and his two sisters. “I actually met him twice as a kid in kind of weird roundabout ways, but he wasn’t around,” Stahl says. “I didn’t have a happy childhood. I always wanted to be an adult. I felt that I was missing out on something. I feel like I’m in therapy right now. But I never linked it directly to my father. It might have more subconscious weight than I realize, but it was never a burden on my shoulders.” Searching memories of his hometown, Stahl singles out the drinking and the drugs, the pointless physical confrontations and frustrations, the time he was loitering on a street corner when a good friend had a 40-ounce beer bottle broken over his head–”a gruesome occurrence,” he calls it.

In a few of those films where his life has been spared, Stahl plays fatherless boys redeemed by male guardians: the forlorn Latin student uplifted by a mutilated Mel Gibson in 1993’s The Man Without a Face, and now John Connor taking cover behind Schwarzenegger in Terminator 3.

In Stahl’s own extracurricular art, the father-son dynamic rarely works out happily The actor is also an amateur painter who is drawn to tragedy, mythology, and the Bible. He considers only two of his canvases to be completed works. One that he’s still working on is a scene of Abraham taking the knife to Isaac at the altar. “Which is ridiculous,” he says, “I know.” Stahl finished a screenplay a few years back that has yet to be produced. He wrote in no less than three father figures to torment the antihero he created with himself in mind. There’s the absent biological father who’s just escaped from a mental institution and may or may not be coming home. There’s the unhinged stepfather who chases Stahl’s character around the family trailer with a baseball bat. Then there’s the flamboyant cockfight promoter who takes the boy under his wing like Fagin in some latter-day Oliver Twist and orders him to kill his best friend in a test of loyalty.

The mental institution escapee, for his part, does eventually show up as his son’s would-be rescuer. “He wants to take the kid,” Stahl says. “He kind of claims that he’s reformed and he is a changed person. He wants to give this kid a better life and take him out of this world, but it’s too late really, and the kid is too far gone into this situation. So it ends kind of tragically.” Not with the best friend’s murder, of course. In this, as in many other films, the corpse at the grim conclusion is Nick Stahl’s.

JoBlo Interviews Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines star Nick Stahl

JOBLO.COM – JULY 1, 2003

One of the fresh faces appearing in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is Nick Stahl, veteran of such acclaimed films as In the Bedroom and The Thin Red Line.

With Edward Furlong officially entering into the drug-addled, self-destructive phase of his E! True Hollywood Story, understandably skittish producers booted the troubled child actor from the project and offered the role to Stahl. Seeing Stahl in the role of John Connor is a little odd at first, but the feeling fades quickly. It’s kind of like when your favorite rock band changes bass players – it’s not nearly as big a deal as one would think.Joblo.com interviews Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines star Nick Stahl

One of the fresh faces appearing in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is Nick Stahl, veteran of such acclaimed films as In the Bedroom and The Thin Red Line.

With Edward Furlong officially entering into the drug-addled, self-destructive phase of his E! True Hollywood Story, understandably skittish producers booted the troubled child actor from the project and offered the role to Stahl. Seeing Stahl in the role of John Connor is a little odd at first, but the feeling fades quickly. It’s kind of like when your favorite rock band changes bass players – it’s not nearly as big a deal as one would think.

Stahl, looking a little bit like a rock star himself (unshaven, mussed-up hair, untucked shirt), talked about stepping into the blockbuster Terminator franchise.

Do you consider yourself more of an “In the Bedroom” or more of a “T-3” actor?
I always respond to good material, good roles and stories. I can see the importance of doing a movie that’s a little bigger, that more people will see, just to create more opportunities.
But that was the furthest thing from my mind. It’s not that I didn’t want to do a blockbuster, but I just always was cast in smaller movies. More people will see this than any other movie I’ve done, by far. That’s a positive thing, I guess.

Were you a fan of the Terminator movies?
I was. Mostly the second movie, because I was really young when the first one came out. I watched the first one once I was cast in this. But I loved the second one – I saw it multiple times.

Can you talk about meeting Arnold?
I met him when we started rehearsing for the movie. I quickly discovered that he likes to sort of give you a hard time. That’s his sense of humor. He said, “You know, I saw your audition tape.” I was all nervous, and he said, “It was…all right.” (Laughs)

That’s sort of his sensibility. But it was great. He has a really strong work ethic. It was evident that he really wanted to make this movie as good as possible, so he really wanted to collaborate with the director and worked really hard.
That was definitely something refreshing to see, from someone of his stature.

What’s it like stepping into a movie franchise that you were such a big fan of when you were a kid?
I didn’t know what to expect from it. There was some initial pressure I felt, I guess, just because the role had been done before. I know that there were a lot of fans that wanted to see that again, to see that formula repeated. But I realized that I really couldn’t think about that and I had a responsibility to make it my own.

This was a pretty intense role, from a physical standpoint.
Yeah. I’ve done physical roles before, but not as physical throughout as this one is. There’s such a furious pace throughout the movie – we never stop running. There were times in the movie when I felt like my role consisted of looking over my shoulder and saying, “Come on!” And Claire’s role consisted of saying, “Oh my God!” (Laughs).

I also did some weapons training for the film. It was as if I got to do everything I wanted to do as a kid. I got to learn to ride a motorcycle, too, which is something I’d wanted to do anyway.

But it really doesn’t matter how much you work out – you still have to face Arnold each day.
Right. It’s definitely an uphill battle. Arnold has a gym housed in this huge truck – an 18 wheeler that followed us around wherever we went. He told me I could use it whenever I wanted to, but I never did. I was a little freaked out by the notion, I guess, but I looked inside a few times. It’s a nice setup.

What was the audition process like?
When I found out they were doing the movie, they didn’t have a script or anything. But they did say they were going to focus more on John Connor as a protagonist. I felt like it was an interesting idea, to explore what he’s like 10 years later. The one thing that struck me with the second film was that, despite the fact that it is a commercial movie with all this action, there was a really strong story. That really intrigued me.
I knew I wasn’t really an action star or whatever, but if it’s a good role, then maybe I’ll have a shot.

So I went in for the first audition, which led to five or more auditions and two or three screen tests. It was pretty intense – each time it was one or two hours, really hatching it out.

Was Arnold involved at any point in the audition process?

No. There was just a couple of readers who tried to do Arnold. It was like two or three USC students reading opposite me. And they could not help doing at least a mild impression of him. But I didn’t meet him until rehearsals started.

When did you get to see the script?
I didn’t get to read it until after I got the role. I went to an office and had to go into this room, where some guy was standing there. I think he was the “script-keeper” or something. It was very much under wraps. I sat in the room – I felt like I was sealed into a vault – and read it. But I couldn’t take it with me.

Are you signed on to do a sequel?
Yeah I am. But, it’s all speculative, I guess – depending on the success of this movie.

AZ Central Interview: Nick Stahl ‘Quid Pro Quo’

AZ CENTRAL – JUNE 18, 2008

In 1984, at the age of 4, Nick Stahl realized he wanted to act. In 1993, the native Texan got his big break, playing a fatherless boy opposite Mel Gibson in “The Man Without a Face.” Another opportunity came in 2003 with the role of John Connor in “Terminator 3: The Rise of The Machines.” Following that, Stahl moved to the small screen with a lead role on HBO’s “Carnivale.”|In 1984, at the age of 4, Nick Stahl realized he wanted to act. In 1993, the native Texan got his big break, playing a fatherless boy opposite Mel Gibson in “The Man Without a Face.” Another opportunity came in 2003 with the role of John Connor in “Terminator 3: The Rise of The Machines.” Following that, Stahl moved to the small screen with a lead role on HBO’s “Carnivale.”

His latest film is a psychological thriller called “Quid Pro Quo,” in which he plays Isaac Knott, a paralyzed public radio reporter who receives a news tip that takes him on a journey into an unusual New York subculture.

Sitting in a comfortable chair in his public relations firm’s conference room, Stahl talks about why he chose to do “Quid Pro Quo,” his take on “Carnivale” and his future with the “Terminator” franchise.

Q: Tell me more about Isaac Knott. What drew you to work on this film?

A: I just thought it was really unusual and unique, and I’d never read anything like it. The character was very complex, and it just looked like a real challenge as an actor to take on. It’s such a unique story with a lot of plot twists, and the dialogue was great.

Q: Did you go through any process of dealing with the character’s physical disabilities?

A: Yeah. I went around New York in the wheelchair and tried to manage that and to get comfortable with that so I would look like I knew what I was doing and not have to think about it. That was something concrete to focus on – the physicality of it.

Q: Just being in New York must be hard for a physically disabled person. Was it really hard to be in a wheelchair?

A: Yeah, it’s very hard. It’s harder than what I had imagined. First of all, you don’t realize that the city is on a slant, so your arms are pretty much dead when you get to the end of a certain block. And going uphill and curves are a challenge. I only had two weeks to do as much as I could with the wheelchair.

Q: With your character trying to figure out why another character wants to be disabled – what is called a “wannabe” – didn’t that make you wonder why someone would want to be that way?

A: Sure. Psychological disorders. It’s very real. I saw a documentary about “wannabes,” people who want to be amputees or paralyzed. It’s a very real subculture of people, and I think it just kind of falls in line with sort of odd psychological disorders that are different from everyone.

Q: Do you think Isaac had some psychological disabilities?

A: Of course. I think the whole idea of being paralyzed is a great metaphor for trauma and psychological trauma that you suffer at a younger age. I think most people I’ve met have that to some degree. Life is suffering. Dramatic events happen to you as a kid and it stays with you.

Q: How was it for you, going from kid actor to adult actor and taking on all these serious roles?

A: It’s something that I feel lucky that I’m getting better at. I really do feel that with each project I do, I get more dedicated to acting. I feel that I learn things from every film that I do. People ask me a lot, “Why do you do a lot of dark-themed films and heavy drama?” The truth is, these were the films that were available to me, and when someone sees you doing darker movies, those are the movies that come your way. I would love to do a variety of things. I would love to do comedy, more commercial movies, and I think I will.

Q: Has anything come up in line with the “Terminator” franchise?

A: No. No. They’re doing a fourth one. They’re sort of retooling the franchise so John Connor is older, and there is a new director, so I think they are reconceptualizing it.

Q: Do you keep in contact with Arnold Schwarzenegger?

A: Ha. No. We don’t text message or anything.

Q: Why do you think “Carnivale” ended?

A: It ended because there weren’t enough people watching it. It’s pretty simple and comes down to not enough people watching versus the amount of money they spend on each episode. I would say more people come up to me about that than anything else. It was on a premium channel, which narrowed the field of viewers off the bat. It never had the numbers that they wanted. But the fans that it had were very hard-core and loyal fans that loved it. It kept us going for two seasons.

Q: You mentioned you wanted to do more comedy – slapstick or verbal jokes?

A: “Three’s Company: The Movie.”

Q: Playing Jack?

A: Chrissy.

Q: I see the resemblance.

A: Ha. Ha. Mr. Furley. I like all kinds of comedies. I would say I am more attracted to the quirky type of stuff like Wes Anderson-type movies or Tim Burton things. Coen Brothers I love. Sort of the more absurdist type of things. I’m a pretty tough critic on movies in general. I like seeing all kinds of movies and usually there are redeeming qualities in every movie. But I don’t know. There are some comedies that are just intolerable and that are so stupid that I can’t drag myself to sit through. So I don’t see myself in slapstick stuff at all. I don’t think anyone else would see me in that.

Exclusive: Nick Stahl in ‘Quid Pro Quo’

PREMIERE – JUNE, 2008

Nick Stahl talks exclusively with Premiere about his new film, ‘Quid Pro Quo,’ a dark thriller that explores a shadowy subculture of disability fetishists.

By Karl Rozemeyer

What is that makes a sexy, able-bodied blonde bombshell not only a devotee of paraplegic men but also determined to live out her own life in a wheelchair? This is just one of the many puzzling questions explored in the thriller Quid Pro Quo, which stars Nick Stahl as Isaac, a semi-paralyzed journalist, and Vera Farmiga as Fiona, a beautiful wheelchair wannabe with a thing for leg braces and corsets.

An anonymous tip from someone who calls herself Ancient Chinese Girl leads Isaac into a subculture of people who seek various forms of amputation and/or paralysis at any cost. In the course of his investigation, Isaac meets Fiona and finds himself lured into her strange world, perhaps aware that a deeply buried truth about his past is inexplicably connected to her dark desires.

Nick Stahl (Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Sin City, The Thin Red Line) chats exclusively with Premiere about the subculture of disability fetishists, the psychological and physical challenges of playing someone in a wheelchair, and acting opposite the red-hot Vera Farmiga.

PLEASE NOTE: THIS INTERVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.

PREMIERE: The film explores a subculture I didn’t know very much about before the film.
I didn’t either, until we started. I had heard of them because there was [a] documentary about these people that want to be amputees or paralyzed, and so I knew it existed.

Did you do any research about voluntary amputees or wheelchair users first? The film explores the different types of fetishists: devotees, pretenders, wannabes, and then Vera’s character puts herself in a totally different category.
Yeah. I didn’t do as much research into that as probably Vera did, because I’m the guy who doesn’t know [about] it in the movie. I didn’t need to do that kind of research. The research I did for the movie was kind of being in a wheelchair and all that stuff, getting used to the wheelchair. Because I was sort of the detective in the movie, I was kind of finding out all this stuff as I went along, and so I really didn’t want to do the research to learn about all that stuff.

So, was it more about the physicality of the role?
Yeah. Well yes, that was a big factor, psychologically too, just — which is what I do pretty much for every movie I do, just to get a solid idea for where the character is coming from, and the character’s background, history, what they want in life and things like that.

Did you spend a lot of time in a wheelchair before going on set?
I did. I had a couple weeks. I didn’t have too much time, but yeah, for two weeks I wheeled around Manhattan.

That couldn’t have been easy…
No, it’s not, it’s not at all. It’s exhausting. Not just the traffic of people and stuff, but it’s physically exhausting. And the streets — you think they’re flat, but they’re slanted. If you’re going down a sidewalk, and it’s slanted sideways, you’re using one arm to stay up. And then if it’s uphill, of course, that’s really hard. And then curbs and things like that, it can get difficult. I was just trying not to fall out of it because then people would have freaked out around me.

Aside from the physical aspect, can you discuss the psychological impact of being wheelchair-bound? Did you experience anything like people regarding you as “half of a man”?
I did. Yeah, you get a kind of pity. I found it common for people to look away — and maybe that’s just New York in general — not make eye contact. People seemed to shy away or not want to acknowledge you, or pretend you’re not there, because I think when they see people with disabilities it strikes fear in people, sometimes. They inevitably think, “What if that was me?” And then there were the people that were overly nice, trying to push me. And I was like, “No, that’s OK.” Or [they were] opening doors… compensating in the other direction. So it was really interesting to see those reactions, kind of get a feel, a sense, of what Isaac had been experiencing for so many years.

When did you first come across this script?
They approached me about it. This was years ago. And it was taking them a while to get off the ground, to get money. In the meantime I started doing this show for HBO [Carnivàle], so once they finally got their money to do it, I was unavailable. I couldn’t do it anymore… Years later, all the elements kind of came together, and I was available and Vera was available and they had their money and so we just did it.

So did you and Vera spend much time together in order to get that intense chemistry?
Yeah, we did. We got along well. We didn’t really have to, in a way… We definitely had a certain rapport, I think, friendship and similar sensibilities in some ways. So yeah, I was really thrilled to work with such a dedicated professional actress.

The introduction of the magic shoes later on in the movie introduces an element of fantasy, and then Vera’s character suggests that perhaps Isaac suffers from hysterical paralysis. What’s your take on his sudden ability to walk?
I think it was just something that he had suppressed, and the pain that he still had about his parents and his life was preventing him from coming to terms with it. It’s about growing up maybe in a way, his evolution. And I knew that that can occur: hysterical paralysis… Your mind is very powerful, and [if] you’re told that you’re never going to walk again, you kind of give up hope and your mind doesn’t allow for you to ever walk again. But really you might have that ability again, you don’t know. So I just thought that whole idea was really interesting.

And your take on Vera’s character, her desire to be paralyzed and lose the ability to walk?
Well, to me, I always saw her character as just racked with so much pain and guilt over what she had done to this family that she felt like she deserved it.

And that’s where the wires between guilt and sexuality and all sorts of other aspects begin to entangle?
Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

Nick Stahl Makes His Move

PARADE – JUNE 10, 2008

Nick Stahl got his big break at 14, when he was handpicked by Mel Gibson to co-star in Man Without a Face. Even with all the attention he got, Stahl’s career didn’t exactly take off despite films like Larry Clark’s Bully and The Thin Red Line. It seemed Stahl was getting a second chance at stardom when he scored the coveted role of John Connor in Terminator 3.

Now, after co-starring in HBO’s Carnivale, Stahl is being seen in a pair of strong performances in low-budget indies: Sleepwalking, produced by Charlize Theron and now Quid Pro Quo, in which he plays a radio reporter confined to a wheelchair who discovers a bizarre group of fetishists afflicted with a desire to become disabled.

It may not be his shot at the big time, but Stahl proves once again he’s honing his talent with every big screen appearance he makes.

Did you actually get in a wheel chair off the set?

“I went around New York in one just to try to get used to it physically and also gauge people’s reactions. I felt like there were two main types—people that really avoided eye contact with you or ones that were overly helpful almost to the point of sometimes being annoying. I was going up uphill and some stranger started pushing me without asking me if I wanted help or even saying hello. It was really bizarre.”

Did people recognize you?

“It only happened a couple times mainly I think because people just didn’t want to look at me in a wheelchair. I think it scared them and made them really uncomfortable. But it wasn’t as bad as someone looking at you with pity. In just the brief time I was in the wheelchair I got feelings of isolation. I can’t imagine what it would be like to confined there for a lifetime.”

How do you feel about getting great reviews and still being somewhat on the fringe?

“I’ve been lucky to be able to do some intriguing movies like this. I’ve had to do a lot of movies for money as well because I was broke, and some of them weren’t my favorites. I certainly thought that after Terminator 3 that I would be doing more commercial movies. And that wasn’t the case. There weren’t a bunch of big movies that came knocking on my door.”

You’ve delivered some very intense performances in dark roles. Does that affect you?

“I’ve learned to make a real conscious effort to separate it from my personal life, which is hard to do sometimes. I obsess. I’m a perfectionist. If I don’t do a scene right, it keeps me up at night. But in a way, I’m glad that I have that because it makes me want to be better.”

Any memories of working with Arnold Schwarzenegger on Terminator 3?

“He’s a big chess player and he loved to play chess on set. He kept trying to get me into a game because I play a bit as well. But I was kind of scared to play him. He had in his trailer a board that had his name on one side and whoever his competition was on the other side. And it was all these slashes for wins. His side was filled completely and there was like two marks on the other side. So I held off on that.”