Marc Blucas

Marc Blucas Plays Against Type in "Prey for Rock & Roll" Though his days as Sarah Michelle Gellar’s boyfriend in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" are over, Marc Blucas still can’t shake off the questions regarding his role on that cult fav. "That was a wonderful experience for me and a great initiation to the business," admits Blucas, adding, "It’s fun to be a part of a cult following that will stand the test of time." With his high school quarterback good looks, Blucas often gets cast in squeaky clean roles. As ’Animal’ in "Prey for Rock & Roll" Blucas breaks away from the boy-next-door character and goes for something grittier.

How long did it take to have all the body art applied to you for this film?

We were able to cheat most of it because I had a t-shirt on most of the time, and so those days we only had to draw [on the exposed areas]. We didn’t have to do the full thing. That was an hour and a half or two. Since there were a bunch of women in the makeup trailer getting all tattooed, I usually tried to extend that out a little bit. For the days where I had my shirt off, that was about a three or four hour process.

Were all of the tattoos fake?

Yes. There were a few integrations where people kept their real tattoos. I don’t know exactly what and where the girls’ were, but I know a handful of them have them. I’m sure they used them in the movie. We were in there hours getting applications. It’s just a better version of the Cracker Jack tattoo. You wet it and slap it on.

Does it wash off?

Yes, it takes some scrubbing but they have an oil-based thing. Speaking frankly, like on Friday night when we’d wrap, they’d be like, "Hey dude, let’s go wash this all out." I’m like, "I’m exhausted. I’ll go home and I’ll just take a shower and do it then." I’d leave it on for the weekend so I could kind of look tough (laughing). I’d go to the Post Office with a t-shirt on, ride around in the car - and it’s November and freezing - and you have the window down, and your arm out because you have a tattoo down your arm. When you get the opportunity to look like a tough guy, I guess you take it.

You got to see the two different sides of Gina Gershon - the producer side and the actress/singer side. Are there differences?

Actually, no, because the common denominator is professionalism. She carries both in that. She’s a very creative and talented individual - as is the rest of the cast. The days that I didn’t have any responsibility in terms of scenes and dialogue were kind of fun. I could go and be the roadie and the groupie, and just watch these guys perform. It was fun, I was a well-paid extra. Gina handled everything extremely well. There was never a power trip. There was never anything that I saw that made me think anything other than "There’s a pro.

"Is this role a way to help you break out of boy scout-type casting?

I don’t fight it at all. You have to embrace who you are. I don’t consider myself the boy-next-door, but I certainly know that many actors are categorized in different leading man versus character actor versus so-and-so looks like so-and-so, or however that system works or whatever category you get put in. You have to embrace it. At the same time in conjunction with that, I know what roles I’m going to get and what roles I’m not.

This was a version of that role that every actor kind of responds to because it’s against type. The core of this character was not the core of me. His experiences in life have nothing to do with mine.

Every actor creates a character a different way, but I always try to find that one thing, in what situation does he respond the way Marc would respond? And ironically enough it was the early rape scene that he re-tells about his sister being raped. I have a sister and if I walked in on her getting raped, I can see myself... As human beings, I think we all have that switch. Some people flip it when they get cut off on the 405. We have different variations and levels of when that’s going to go off. I can see myself, if that happened to my sister at 17 years old, I may have been how I responded as well.

It was such an interesting role because you have a 17 year-old going to prison as a boy who comes out a man, but yet he has an innocence to him because he’s a virgin. He’s had no exposure to any civilization. That’s when men grow up. Women grow up a little sooner than men do, in my opinion, from probably 20-24. Guys don’t really grow up until 24-29, where they start to come into their own, in their own sense of maturity. That happened in a confined isolated place for this guy. So to reintegrate him back into society... He’s floating. Again, as humans, we’ve all been to that place in our lives or our careers where we are out drifting. It’s like, "What are we going to do? Where are we going to pinball?" He goes and tries to make a relationship with the one person he thinks he has a shot at doing it with. He falls in love for the first time in the process. These are all new things and not really what you think of when you think of a skinhead ex-con, murdering, tattooed, smoking, drinking guy. Certainly when you see all those elements, when that jumped out of the page to me, I immediately wanted a go at it.

How did they find you for this part?

The standard channels. I wish I had a great story for you, but I really don’t. I read it, I really liked it, the casting director was a fan of mine and said, "You should meet this guy for it even though on first appearance it might not be what you sought for this role." I came in with a take on the character and met with the filmmaker, and read with Gina and they just really responded to what I did. I just kind of got the job in the normal process.

Sometimes actors don’t get along on a set. Sometimes personalities, like in life, collide. If you’re forced to work together for six or eight weeks, sometimes you just don’t get along for no reason at all. That so wasn’t the case on this movie. Everybody got along and was doing the movie for the right reasons because it certainly wasn’t a money job for anyone. It was something that all of us responded to on the micro and the macro. We responded to the individual role, and we wanted to be a part of the story being told. It was a very comfortable set to be on.

What does the title of this film mean? Is the audience the ’prey’ for rock and roll?

No, absolutely not. It means that anybody who is chasing their dream understands the uphill struggle that it is and says, "We are going to go through life and are we going to play by somebody else’s rules or not? Are we going to sacrifice or compromise?" When you are a dream chaser, when you are passionate about something you are going after it.

There are always going to be some compromises, but what you never want to do is sacrifice.

I think that ’prey’ is like you fall victim to your dream. It’s like success at all costs, like failure is not an option. It’s like, "This is the way it has to be." You become so immersed in it that that’s how it is. You don’t want play by someone else’s rules.

You’ve also been filming "First Daughter." What’s the chemistry like between you and Katie Holmes?

Probably the best I’ve felt with an actress. It’s going to be an interesting thing for me to see on screen, whether that translates.

Katie and I, I felt, approach work the same way. We’re not into the game playing, we’re not into ego. We show up, we know our lines, we’re prepared. We both kind of have the same background of training. We really got along. It was really nice to act opposite someone who is 5’10". So many times it looks like I’m telling my child to look both ways to cross the street, because at my size versus a 5’2" girl, it sometimes looks like I’m talking to a kid. It was great.

Forrest Whitaker is just a good-hearted, great man. I think he had a great vision for the movie. I think he made a really good film.

How realistic is the movie’s portrayal of the Secret Service?

We had a Secret Service tech guy there all the time. My research for that was I asked him to - because I’m undercover protecting Katie’s character - I asked him, I was like, "Hey, I want you to treat me as if I’m the President’s son and let’s go walk the promenade." I just wanted to watch him watch me in a public setting and to hear his stories. He’s like, "Well, what I can tell you..." What he’s allowed to tell, you always try to probe and get a little extra dirt - as if he’s going to give that up. But our tech advisor was on Jesse Jackson’s Presidential campaign. You have a black minister running for President, I gotta believe that was a pretty heavy detail. The Secret Service had to be on their toes for that one. He’s since retired but he’s a great guy, a lot of stories. So yeah, there was a lot of accuracy in what we did. I was like, "Look. I just don’t want to do the sunglasses thing and standing [in a clichéd way] type of thing." But they do that stuff for a reason because they’re scanning the crowd and they don’t want people to see their eyes.