Christian Kane

Exclusive Interview: ’LEVERAGE’ ACTOR CHRISTIAN KANE IS A LITTLE BIT COUNTRY AND ROCK AND ROLL - PART 2

The award-winning actor/singer/songwriter talks about everything he’s doing, including starring in the new TNT series

As an actor, Christian Kane has earned fans from his gigs on FAME L.A., as the morally ambiguous lawyer Lindsey McDonald on several seasons of ANGEL and as a stalker in an award-winning performance in KEEP YOUR DISTANCE. As a singer/songwriter, Kane has captivated listeners both as frontman for the band Kane and as a solo artist.

Now Kane is coming up as a triple threat. He costars as Elliott Spencer, the most physical of the group of contemporary outlaws fighting on the side of good in TNT’s new series LEVERAGE (premiering on December 7 on TNT) which also stars Academy Award winner Timothy Hutton.

In fact, Kane has a new album due out from Columbia Records in 2009 and he’s co-designer of a line of women’s lingerie (seriously – more about that in a moment). What more could you ask for?

iF MAGAZINE: What can you say about your new album?

CHRISTIAN KANE: It’s with Columbia Records. Jimmy Lee Sloas produced and there are a lot of great writers on there, from Brett James to Casey Bethard to Tom Shapiro to Mr. David Lee Murphy. I wrote eighty percent of the album. It takes a long time for a first single, unless you’re Tim McGraw or Kenny Chesney, to hit the charts running. You’ve got to build on a new single as a new artist, so by the time this thing hopefully, God willing, is climbing, I will be able to get back out [to support the record]. I just spent two months on a radio tour of every city that I could, sometimes two, three plane rides a day, just getting to these people and really wanting to meet them and supporting the record, and I met a lot of really great people out there and the radio personalities were so nice to me as a new artist – sometimes you don’t find that. I feel like I was very fortunate and that it was all in all an A-plus trip.

iF: What kind of music is it?

KANE: It’s country. It’s not rock, but there’s rock and roll in it. It is considered country, but I sprinkled in a lot of the Viper Room sound that we got by playing L.A. so long. You do a ballad, you lose the crowd in Los Angeles, so we always had to rock [when playing live]. So I was fortunate enough that for the album, Mr. Joe Galante, who’s the head of Sony Music Nashville, allowed me to put a little bit more rock in there.

iF: What’s the difference between working with the Columbia production machine and the self-produced records you’ve made before?

KANE: First of all, the self-produced stuff before was us in a garage. It was grunt work, it was gutter medicine. But the musicians in Nashville are second to none. I mean, Keith Urban’s band played on my album. Those were my session musicians. Musicians like that, who know about country, and I think they’re the best musicians in the world, they’re all in Nashville. So it was a well-oiled, well-greased machine over there. You’ve got the best, man. You’ve got Carrie Underwood, you’ve got Brooks and Dunn, you’ve got Alan Jackson, Brad Paisley, Kenny Chesney. I mean, those guys have already paved the path for me over there, so once I got on the track and they got behind me, it really was just, ‘Here’s how we do this, here’s how we do that,’ instead of trying to find out on your own. Why I took two years to do this album, it was very important to me, I had to have the music. The music will speak for itself. If I walk in there and they go, ‘There is this actor guy’ and the songs are bad, you’re not going anywhere. But if the music’s there and the songs are there, they can’t deny that. It’s not even so much me, it’s the producers and the musicians we had on this – I believe the songs are there.

iF: Does anyone feel there’s a conflict between your acting and your singing/songwriting?

KANE: Some do. Somebody said to me the other day in a radio station, ‘Is the grass not greener for you? You’ve got to come over here, too?’ I said, ‘No, I’m just tired of all these singers taking my acting jobs.’ And I’ve got a vehicle. This is all good stuff. There isn’t the cliché of, ‘Oh, you can’t be an actor and be a musician’ or vice-versa; I think it’s gone. I think the rules are thrown out the window now. Everybody’s doing it and finding their thing. So I think it works.

iF: Is playing a very physical character in any way like the energy you put out when you’re performing music on stage?

KANE: It’s two different monsters, and the reason why is, you do [a role in television] and you wait around to see if people accept the role you just did, the scene you just did, the commitment you put into a character. With [live music], there’s no lying. You can’t lie to anyone. Acting is lying. Music is not. That’s the true difference between both. They’re right there. You’re singing – they’re singing back to you or they don’t like it and you feel that immediately. You sing and they give you energy back. It’s like it hits you – you can literally feel it pushing you and it’s like a drug.

iF: How did you get into the women’s lingerie business? Because when they talk about someone being a ‘triple threat’ the third thing is not usually designing lingerie.

KANE: I’m actually a quadruple threat. I love to cook – that’s my big thing! [laughs] This is going to sound really cheesy, but I love lingerie on women, I always have. The trouble I’ve run into is that everything [in commercially available lingerie] is really slutty and I just don’t like it any more. So I paired up with Heather Robinson, who’s one of the top stylists in Nashville, and we came up with the line. What we’re trying to do is bring romance and class back into lingerie. It’s a gift wrap. You don’t need to see everything [on your partner immediately] – you want to get into that a little bit later [laughs]. But for the presentation, I want something more romantic – I want to bring a classical sense back to the lingerie, bring sophistication back into the bedroom. So that’s what we’re doing. We also have bikinis that are definitely a side of the deal.

iF: Anything else you’d like to say?

KANE: Watch LEVERAGE. It’s a great show. I’m so proud of this thing. I honestly feel that I came to Hollywood to play this role. And then the opportunity to get to work with Dean Devlin, who I’ve been a fan of before I even got here – he’s one of my best friends now and I get to go to work with a guy that I’ve respected and loved every single thing that he’s done. I’m just blessed – I’m very fortunate. God’s smiling on me right now.