Always love a smarmy character from Daniel. Here he is, playing a despicable version of himself, anticipating a fan encounter and making a big show of practicing lines.
great interview with Ferdie! he talks quite a bit about acting and his career in general, not just Reacher.
I think that I've had a really lucky past few years. Each of the last four jobs that I've done has been the antidote to the one before it, if you know what I mean. What we all desperately dream of in this job is that no two jobs, one after the other, are the same job. I actually felt really proud of the things that I've done in the past few years.
Audio ON 🔊 Funny bit from Fran Healy's conversation with Daniel Brühl for the 2021 Edinburgh International Film Festival. This is Daniel elaborating on what it was like seeing himself on the big screen for the first time.
I love this interview. He's totally engaged and relaxed because he's mostly just shooting the shit with a friend. The convo is mostly centered around cinema and their relationship with it but through it, you get a glimpse of Daniel's life as a dad, as a celeb, and as a teenager. Even talks about his first date at one point.
My favorite part though was when they discussed something I've always wondered about: being in (what turns out to be) an awful movie and having to promote it.
Here are excerpts from Daniel's candid answer:
"That is the worst part. If you have to sell it. You have this rotten carpet. You have to sell this shit, it's terrible. It's soul-destroying. It's part of the game. You have to be professional. But God, I have sat in hotel rooms afterwards with maybe a good single malt whiskey and thinking, like, what the hell happened to this film? Why did I accept to do it in the first place? And then looking back, I still know in each case why."
"...it's just part of the game. It's also the fascination because it's unpredictable. You never know if it's gonna work out or not, even if you have a good script, even if you have a talented filmmaker, so much can happen on the way. But God, yes, there are stinkers in my life."
He never mentions the titles of course, but I bet The Face of an Angel was at the top of his mind 😅
Thinking about how Leo says he uses his jokes to cope and y’know, thinking harder on it I think it may very well be because of what else uses one-liners and puns and that type of humor.
Specifically, 80’s action movies and campy sci-fi. Even more specifically, the protagonists of these.
So I can imagine why, exactly, Leo leans toward this brand of humor. It’s directly linked to things he loves! But even more than that is why I think it’s used as a coping mechanism.
In these genres, these quips tend to be said by the winner - or, if not a winner, then someone who will stay alive. So there’s a confidence behind them, an assurance, almost, that even if things go wrong, things aren’t ever too serious. There’s no bad endings here! It’s all good fun, even if the stakes seem high.
Leo canonically has been known to steer his brothers away from the more brutal villains and toward more fun, lighthearted activities and not-so-dangerous criminals. So for Leo, these jokes definitely make things less heavy, make the situations they find themselves in less intense.
It’s kinda not just coping, but also can be seen as a form of escapism. A safety blanket. A way for Leo to defuse the tension of knowing just how dangerous their lives are and replace that with a levity which implies that things will be okay.
Unfortunately, levity alone does not alter reality.