Christian Kane

ANTHONY DE LONGIS CARVES OUT A SPOT ON ’LEVERAGE’

The actor/sword master/whip wielder talks about being the Butcher of Kiev opposite Christian Kane’s fierce Eliot Spencer

Sometimes violence pays — at least, knowing how to play it and knowing how to teach it. That’s how Anthony De Longis wound up guesting as the lethal Butcher of Kiev in “The Wedding Job” episode of TNT’s LEVERAGE which airs tonight on TNT at 10:00 p.m. As an actor, De Longis started out on stage doing Shakespeare at the Old Globe in San Diego in the ‘70s. Branching out into films and television, he’s appeared in the features CIRCLE OF IRON, MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE, ROAD HOUSE, WILD BILL and FEARLESS, to name a few, and has the distinction of guest-starring in one of the most popular episodes of HIGHLANDER: THE SERIES, dueling with star Adrian Paul in real pouring rain, as well as a recurring role as the Kazon leader on STAR TREK: VOYAGER. Behind the scenes, De Longis has made a name for himself as a master of weapons, including sword and whip, and a master teacher, instructing Michelle Pfeiffer how to handle the lash as Catwoman in BATMAN RETURNS and, more recently, helping Harrison Ford brush up his whip technique for INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL.

However, the job relevant to De Longis’ LEVERAGE gig was on 2003’s film SECONDHAND LIONS. Kane played the adventurous younger version of Robert Duvall’s character and De Longis was responsible for teaching Kane how to use a sword, as well as dueling him on-camera in several sequences.

Cut to five years later. Kane has been cast on LEVERAGE as Eliot Spencer, the martial arts expert muscle of the band of justice-obtaining antiheroes, and “The Wedding Job” calls for him to have a fight with an old adversary of equal skill. Since Kane has said of De Longis as both sword master and sword teacher, “He’s the best in the business when it comes to that, as far as I’m concerned,” it’s no surprise who comes to mind for the gig.

iF spoke with De Longis in this exclusive interview about his role as the Butcher of Kiev, his onscreen battle with Christian Kane and how he came up with the idea of giving his character a bigger blade.

ANTHONY DE LONGIS: I was on the front lawn of a commercial I was just about to shoot for Orville Redenbacher. It was a tie-in for the release of INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL I have a couple minutes before I go into the set, and I get this call, and it’s, "Hey, Anthony, it’s Christian!" I hadn’t heard from him in a couple of years. He said, "Have they called you yet?" I said, "No …" He said, "Well, the show that I’m doing is called LEVERAGE and I’ve got this chance to really showcase the [fighting skills of the] character, and there’s this other character who’s a nemesis, and would you be available to do this?" A little while later that day, Charlie Brewer, the stunt coordinator on the show, called me and said, "Christian says you had trained him for SECONDHAND LIONS and you guys worked great together and would you be able to come in?" And I went, "Yes!" [laughs].

I’m playing a character called the Butcher of Kiev. He’s Russian. I came in and I met Charlie Brewer, and I met Jonathan Frakes, who was the director. He’s great, he’s very enthusiastic. Christian had done a great deal of groundwork for me — Christian has long been a champion of our work together. For SECONDHAND LIONS, we trained very intensely for a couple of weeks and then we went to do the film. Christian explained to me on that, "I don’t have any dialogue in this, but I’m playing the young Robert Duvall. I’m doing his action in all the flashback sequences — he’s doing my dialogue and I’m doing his action. And you don’t very often get these action opportunities." Now this has obviously blossomed into something that is a major part of his character on this series and he certainly has the skills to deliver the goods.

iF: What’s the fight like?

DE LONGIS: Charlie said, "Okay, we’re in a location house. We want this big fight, it’s going to happen in the kitchen and you’re going to have a knife, but we can’t touch anything, we can’t bounce off the walls, we can’t drop anything – we can’t do any damage to the house." Certain options that you would have available to you on a set, you don’t have on a location. So I came in early the next day and he walked me up to the house and said, "Here’s the space we have to work in, and this is really going to be a bitch to shoot." Charlie was great. I met Christian at lunch and I said, "How about if we’ve got the knife here, and I twist it away, and it comes back here, and I take it away, and we’re going back and forth?" The story essentially [is about] two people so evenly matched that neither one of them can quite get a commanding domination of the situation, so it looks hazardous, it’s extremely dynamic and violent and the jeopardy is constantly shifting from one to another. So we went up into the area and we started moving around, and Charlie says, "Well, I can only shoot this from here and here." "Okay, we’ll open up [play toward camera] here and we’ll turn and we’ll open up here." The scene starts – I come in and cut [Kane] off and two henchmen come in from opposite ends, and the first thing he does is plow through those two henchmen, and I went, "Well, while he’s doing that, I’ll be taking my coat off and setting it down."[Brewer] said, "You’ll get your knife from here and we’ll do the knife blocking."

iF: So talk a bit about having a bigger blade on LEVERAGE.

ANTHONY DE LONGIS: Well, if my character’s the Butcher of Kiev, I’d probably have a signature weapon. "How about a cleaver?" That says something right there, when a guy pulls a cleaver out of the back of his pants. I asked the prop guy, "Do you have a cleaver?" He had a rubber mock-up of one and I said, "Now, if I pull this cleaver from behind my back and I reach over and grab the knife out of the knife block, now I have two weapons." [Armorer] Dave Baker made an aluminum one overnight [for the filmed fight]. Christian is cornered in the kitchen. He looks around – what’s he got? He’s got this pot that he grabs from the stove as I come at him with this flurry of blows from two weapons. And in the course of that, he’s able to knock the cleaver out of my hand, and then I knock the pot out of his hand and then I’m trying to stab him and he grabs it and twists it back at me and I feed it back at him and so on, but also being very careful not to hurt anything in the kitchen [laughs]. It’s about a five-phrase fight. People just don’t do this as a rule in television, especially if you don’t have a lot of rehearsal time. We shot the whole thing in masters, start to finish every time. There are places where I’m sure they’ll intercut, because they had two cameras and two angles, but what was fun was, we would shoot it start to finish, all five phrases. And that’s a big rarity. Not that many people can do it. Christian can. I can. When you see how good [the Butcher is] and how good [Elliott] is and the two of us struggling to get an advantage with each other, it just adds to Christian’s credibility as that character.

iF: Executive producer Dean Devlin directed some second-unit for the episode …

DE LONGIS: Well, actually, they were shooting two things at the same time. They were shooting the big dialogue scene literally twenty feet away with Beth Riesgraf and Aldis Hodge. They’re in a very tight little space and they’re having to pull out walls to shoot this. This is what Jonathan [Frakes] is doing while Dean is overseeing this short little insert piece that we’re going to shoot as soon as they take a break from this big sequence that they’re doing. [Kane] grabs this burning piece of lumber, like a two-by-four, from the ground. The idea is that we’ve been fighting and the building is burning around us and we’re still fighting, because this is very personal between the two of us. We were doing it in front of a green screen, because they wanted [the scene] to have a lot of fire, and where we were, that wasn’t going to be possible. There is a hit where I take it across the face and then I’m grabbing him and he’s grabbing me. It’s very emotional and very high energy. Dean was right there with Jonathan and Pat Banta [co-stunt coordinator with Brewer], looking through the camera – "More, more, that’s what I want, yes, do it again, good." [laughs] Dean was very hands-on that day. It was a pleasure to get to work with him.

iF: What did you actually get hit in the face with?

DE LONGIS: Actually, nothing. Although it was a real piece of wood, like a big table leg, so it was solid. Because it was Christian, I trusted him, we got our spacing, we got the angle that he was going to be coming at so that it would be most effective for camera. He really swings it like he’s going to hit a home run. If he didn’t have his control and if anything had gone wrong [laughs], he could’ve killed me. But I knew he wasn’t going to, because I’m watching him and I’m very aware of the distance and he’s watching me, so he’s taking good care of me, but at the same time, going all out as his character. Because the two of us know each other and trust each other, we shave those layers of safety as thin as we possibly can. I love when I get to be in front of the camera as an actor. I also bring all these additional physical and action abilities to a role when appropriate, but it’s all acting, whether I’m using words or I’m using action or weapons.

iF: Might the Butcher of Kiev return to LEVERAGE?

DE LONGIS: I very much hope we get a chance to do this again, because I love working with Christian. Very few actors can work at his level. He comes in as a consummate actor and he also brings in a tremendous repertoire of physical skills. He appreciates the value of the storytelling rewards that can come from a good action sequence.