Jena Malone: Indie Ingenue

BY: JUSTINE GOODMAN
PHOTOGRAPHY BY: SETH KUSHNER

Would you like half?” Jena Malone asks me at the start of our interview, referring to her bottle of Vitamin Water. Sweet and soft-spoken (and extraordinarily polite), you may not know her name—yet—but chances are you’ve seen one of Jena’s films. From Into the Wild to Saved! the young starlet has already racked up over 35 big and small screen credits, and at 23-years-old she’s just getting started. That’s why we jumped on the opportunity to chat with Jena about her upcoming films, her burgeoning music career and her take on the world of fashion.

YRB: So, what projects can we look forward to seeing you in this fall?
Jena: The Go-Getter will still be out this fall. It’s this independent film with Zoey Deschanel and Lou Taylor Pucci. It went to Sundance two years ago, and it’s such a beautiful film about a road trip and coming of age. It’s the most, sort of, sexually deviant character I’ve ever played, just in the sense of a young woman understanding what sexual manipulation is within her own femininity. I think there’s a point when every woman realizes that her looks or her body or her temperament can win her certain things with men. And [my character explores] how to push those limits, and how empowering that feels, how strange that feels and how, in the beginning, it can be very innocent, and she kind of gives Lou Taylor Pucci’s character the ride of his life. And then I’m working on this film right now called The Messenger, which should be coming out in the fall/winter.

YRB: I had a chance to check out some of your music on MySpace. Can you tell me a little bit about that side of your career?
Jena: What song did you hear?

YRB: “New Year Come.”
Jena: Oh, that’s by Jena Malone and Her Bloodstains. All that music came from two demos that I made myself, produced myself, engineered myself with the help of musicians—like I recorded a friend playing guitar over the phone. For “New Year Come” I had a friend of mine from Lake Tahoe (where I live) come in and play violin and help me do an arrangement, and he also let me abstract it, cut and paste it and put it together. I wrote that two years ago on New Year’s Eve.

YRB: So you write the lyrics and the music?
Jena: Uh-huh. But I don’t know how to write music, and I don’t know how to read music. It’s just more intuitive, and working with ProTools and finding something that I like and trying to sort of re-edit that and shape it…but Jena and Her Bloodstains sort of disintegrated. Then I had this dream in January that I was gonna build a shoe—a sort of mobile, one-woman music cart—that I would be able to play anywhere, and I wanted it to be in the shape of an old leather shoe, you know, like the story, “There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe.” So I started doing these designs for it, and it ended up looking like this crazy contraption made of chicken wire and cardboard, with all this electrical equipment. I eventually realized, fuck, this is not gonna work. But then I bought this old steamer trunk and I was about to drive down to L.A., and I was looking at it in my bedroom, and I was like, “That’s it! That’s what I’ll build the instrument out of”—because it’s compactable, and I can wheel it around on a dolly. So I put all of my instrumentations in there—a little karaoke amp, a keyboard, a drum machine, a little mono-synth, some hand percussion instruments—and set it all up, and it was absolutely everything I could have wanted. I put it in my trunk the next morning, drove down to L.A., and started experimenting with it. I brought it over to a friend of mine’s house, and we set it up and we just jammed. I jammed on the shoe, he jammed on the piano, and we wrote four songs in one night. And I was like holy shit, I’ve never met a musician who’s able to follow my extractions and add a certain groundness to it; to make it a little more linear. So now we’re in a band called The Shoe, and we just finished an album called At Lemjay’s Garage. It’s a six-track EP. I also started a record label called There Was an Old Woman Records.

YRB: As an actress and musician, how do you feel about the stigma of “actors-turned-musicians”?
Jena: Well, I think the stigma just lies in how we define what an artist is.

YRB: What would you say you’re most recognized for, or would want to be most recognized for?
Jena: Well, the thing you’re most recognized for is never the thing that you want to be most recognized for. I mean when I got Punk’d I found that more people came up to me because of that than for anything else I’d ever done, which was very disheartening. But I think as an artist you want to be recognized for the most recent thing you’ve done because it’s the most personal to you, it’s the most intimate, and it’s what you’re saying at that moment.

YRB: You’ve worked closely with some pretty major celebrities—from Susan Sarandon to Sean Penn—is there anyone that’s been the most fun work with, or anyone you want to work with? What about a particular film that was especially fun to make?
Jena: I’ve wanted to work with Ben Foster for a very long time, and I’m getting to work with him now [in The Messenger]. I thought he was amazing in 3:10 to Yuma and Alpha Dog. I’ve worked with Emile [Hirsch] a couple of times and thought he was amazing. The most fun film I’ve done is probably Saved! because it was the first time I had done a film besides Cheaters where everyone was the same age. It’s like summer camp—we’re all there for the same reason, but there’s also free time, and you’re spending dinners together, you’re going out for karaoke together and throwing marshmallows off the patio.

YRB: Let’s talk about fashion for a minute. What kind of style do you have? What are you most comfortable wearing: high fashion or sweats?
Jena: I’m probably the most comfortable in something that makes me feel outside of myself, in a sense. I was a tomboy my entire life, and then I turned 21, broke up with my boyfriend and started finding that I was suddenly drawn to clothes that were a lot more girly and feminine.

YRB: What are some of your favorite labels or designers?
Jena: I love Sonia Rykiel, and I also love Linda Loudermilk.

YRB: What would you say are some of your greatest musical influences?
Jena: For music it’s been a very specific group of artists: Tom Waits, Neil Young, PJ Harvey…

YRB: As a young actress in Hollywood, how do you avoid falling victim to the Paris and Lindsay-type of existence?
Jena: The thing is, you are what you eat, you are what you wear, you are what you think, and that’s it. So I feel like whether that is for them a heightened sense of reality or not, what we get from it is some version of what their selling—to themselves, or to the public or to their mothers or to their friends. I’ve only ever sold who I am. They exist so I don’t have to. And I’m glad that they fulfill their space in the collective conscience; if they didn’t, other people would. And what they’ve been hawked as, and what the press has over-established them as, is helping to implode these crazy obsessions with celebrity. So in a way, whether we love them or hate them, it’s a very beautiful thing because they’re actually helping turn the tides. I think the public is a little bit sickened by our own interest, and what our interest has turned these women into, or allowed them to be turned into, and we’ve seen a lot of negative effects that our overindulgence has allowed.

ONE NIGHT IN PEREZ: Perez Hilton Is The Celebrity Blogger You Hate to Love

BY JUSTINE GOODMAN
PHOTOGRAPHY BY JEFF FORNEY / YRB MAGAZINE

In the age of the gossip blog, if you still subscribe to the belief that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, then chances are you’re not a publicist.

“I’m a polarizing figure,” says Perez Hilton, the self-anointed “Queen of Media” and the creator of the celebrity gossip blog PerezHilton.com. “Some people love me and some people hate me. Some people wanna tell me everything, some people are afraid to even make small talk around me. It depends who you are and how I rub you.”

Every day, close to four million unique visitors flock to Hilton’s site (formerly PageSixSixSix.com) for the inside scoop on the latest Hollywood scandal, juiciest truth-based rumor and even the occasional news byte.

Born Mario Armando Lavandeira, Jr., the Cuban-American was raised in Miami before he moved to New York to attend NYU’s prestigious Tisch School of the Arts. Living in Greenwich Village (the one place gayer than South Beach), it didn’t take long for young Mario to come out. “I guess I tried to hide it the first semester,” he says, “and then I was at a party and a girl was like, ‘You’re gay!’ and I started crying but then I was like, ‘Yes! I am!’ I knew, but I guess I just had problems saying it.”

That wasn’t the only problem Lavandeira would face. “I went through a very unhappy phase. I filed for bankruptcy, I was suicidal, I was at a job that I hated, I got fired from three jobs…it was like down, down, down, down,” he recalls. But rather than joining some lame support group or writing dark poetry, he launched PageSixSixSix.com, and proceeded to literally blog his way out of debt and depression. It was only after he began receiving death threats – courtesy of some Clay Aiken fans who were none too pleased that the blogger had dubbed their American idol “Clay Gayken” – that Lavandeira adopted a pseudonym, becoming his friend Paris Hilton’s fictitious cousin, Perez.

PerezHilton.com quickly swept through the blogosphere, generating more traffic than a holiday weekend. Suddenly millions of people now had a better way to pass the time that would otherwise have been wasted actually working. Luckily, Perez is working hard enough for all of them. “I bust my butt. I don’t know if people really realize how hard I work. I honestly put in 19 hours a day on my website. I sleep four and a half, maybe five hours a night. Every other waking moment I’m answering emails, I’m writing, I’m researching, I’m scouring the Internet for what to write, I’m going to an event,” says Hilton, whose L.A. office isn’t so much an office as it is a table at The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, a local coffee shop.

Although Hilton maintains that he doesn’t really consider himself a celebrity (“I’m a celebretard,” he says), these days he is just as likely to be the subject of gossip columns as the author of them. When former ‘N Sync member Lance Bass came out betwixt the pages of People Magazine, many critics accused Hilton of having forced him out of the closet, after repeated posts on PerezHilton.com not-so-subtly implied that the singer was gay (literally, not figuratively). Hilton insists that these criticisms are simply the byproduct of America’s deep-seated, internalized homophobia.

“I feel that being gay is not bad. A lot of the reason why people criticize what I do is because a lot of people still think that being gay is bad, and a lot of people still think that being gay in Hollywood will hurt your career, and I don’t believe that… Since I don’t think it’s bad, I’m all about equalizing. So I’m gonna treat everyone the same. I’m gonna report – that’s what I do. I don’t ‘out’ anyone. That’s not part of my vocabulary. I report on facts. I don’t engage in the business of speculation or conjecture.”

What he writes about may be true, but that hasn’t stopped many celebrities from taking him to court. Last year, Hilton was named in a lawsuit filed by Colin Farrell after the now infamous sex tape starring the actor (in what was arguably his best performance to date) appeared on Hilton’s site. Hilton was also sued last November for $7.5 million by a Hollywood photo agency that claimed the use of certain photos on the site constituted copyright infringement. And in February, he was sued by Jennifer Aniston, after a topless photo of the actress appeared on PerezHilton.com.

While some celebs may be less than thrilled to find their personal lives, photos and home videos on display, when they’re not busy suing him they know that being on Hilton’s good side can also have its benefits. Frequent jabs at stars like Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan may not further damage their reputations (they tend to do that all by themselves), but for a Hollywood newcomer, frequent praise (or even just a mention) on PerezHilton.com can make a world of difference. If you’re an up-and-coming musician and Perez is a fan of your music, go ahead and fire your publicist, because you won’t be needing her services. Just one post about how adorable and talented Hilton thinks you are, and millions of people will know the name of your band.

Hilton may not be saving lives with gossip, but that doesn’t make his work meaningless. “Underneath the Perez façade, there is someone who has strong beliefs and will use this platform to hopefully do good. I know I do good, because people enjoy it, and I bring laughter, hopefully, or some sense of escape for folks who are bored at work, or who are going through a difficult time and want some sort of fantasy. That gives what I do meaning, and that’s awesome.”

But just because so many people like his blog, doesn’t mean they all like him. In fact, many of Hilton’s readers actively dislike him. “Dude, you really look like a circus act. I love the website, but there is more and more about you, and you are the most uninteresting person out there. You are a tragedy. From one gay man to another, fucking get a grip,” wrote one reader, after Hilton devoted numerous posts to documenting his own star-studded birthday party (“The Queen’s Ball”) in March.

OK, so maybe no one ever accused him of being overly modest, but isn’t shameless self-promotion exactly what being a celebrity is all about? “I created my own success, I created my own opportunity…I created Perez the celebrity,” says Hilton. “There’s a reason why I put up all these pictures of myself with celebrities: celebrity by association! The whole concept of celebrity is so tangible and so malleable; anyone can be a celebrity these days – even this loser with a blog!”

Love him, hate him, or just love to hate him, Perez Hilton’s shirt says it all: “Keep talking shit, you’re making me famous.”



FASHION CREDITS:
silk striped blazer by The Bohemian Society, “Keep Talking Shit” t-shirt by College Dropout, denim jeans and leather belt by Replay, milano style collection yellow and orange watches by Breil, trainers by Ben Sherman

**One Night In Perez was originally published in YRB Magazine, Issue 73 (May/June 2007)

Interview: Wes Craven

BY JUSTINE GOODMAN
PHOTO: CARLY FEINGOLD, COURTESY OF FOX ATOMIC

Believe it or not, Wes Craven made quite a few movies before Scream (“You mean Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?” jokes Wes), including the original versions of The Hills Have Eyes and The Hills Have Eyes 2 in the ‘70s and ‘80s. We recently caught up with Wes to discuss his latest film and his approach to scary movies.

JG: What is required to make a good horror film? Do you just need to have a morbid imagination to make a movie like Hills?
WC: I don’t really have to have a morbid imagination these days – I just have to read the newspaper… It’s basically doing something that’s intriguing to you at the moment that you find frightening. Not that there’s Hills Have Eyes people running around in the United States. But if you nudge that just a bit, you can understand what it’s like, say, for an American soldier in Afghanistan, encountering people that will literally skin you alive or cut your head off in the middle of the mountains. The Hills’ underlying concept is, ‘What do Westerners do when they confront people who would like to kill them, and follow none of the rules they were trained to fight by?’ What does that do to your own sense of personal confidence and morality?

JG: So you’re tapping into our very real, collective fears.
WC: The first maniac that the audience should be frightened by is the filmmaker. You have to have a sense that you are not in the hands of someone who is going to be considerate of your deepest fears – in fact they’re going to take you there. And they will cross all sorts of lines of taste and gentility and morality and take you into the dark side of things, and it’s a very painful and terrifying part of life to see the dark side of life, of our personalities, of our friends, our nation, and just the way that mankind is. We build and we build and everything’s beautiful and then we tear it down or blow it up, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to stop it, that sort of madness. These kind of pictures are scenarios of societal nightmares, and the human spirit needs ways of encountering these things… In real life if any of these things happened people would be devastated and traumatized and everything else. But in attenuated form of the fatal, you’re able to go through it with other people, in the safety of a theater. And you scream and you’re terrified but you know that you’re gonna walk out intact at the end. I think to the extent that you identify with the central character of almost all horror films, they survive. So you have that template of, ‘OK, this is not only the worst thing that I could imagine but the worst thing Wes Craven can imagine, and if that character can survive and that character seems a lot like me, then maybe I could survive that too.’

JG: Would you say there’s almost a hopeful element involved?
WC: I really think so. And most reporters you say that to just sort of stare at you and think you’re nuts. But why else would humans have retained nightmares? We’re involved in a war with all the military might of the United States, and the fact is that with all those resources we have not been able to defeat this enemy. And they continue to kind of have their way with us, and that is a profoundly frightening thing; everything that you think of as being there to protect you, if it cannot do that, then you feel incredibly vulnerable. And there’s a lot of kids from the core audience that will go into the armed services and will have to face these things. So it seemed to me very, very germane. But on the surface of it, I don’t think anybody’s gonna see that. It’s just a very scary movie.

JG: Is it different for you to make a movie that has a sort of supernatural element as compared to the Scream movies?
WC: I don’t consider anything in Hills to be supernatural. They’re just people. In a way, that’s one of the key statements being made. You can refer to these people as mutants, but they’re mutants in the same way as a person who was born with six fingers because of being exposed to radioactivity. The shock of recognition is that they’re not that different from us in most ways; they are part of the human family. I think that kind of stuff makes audiences think. The other thing I struggle mightily do is not put anything on screen that the audience has seen before, which is, I think, a common flaw of so many horror movies – ‘Let’s do something that’s a combination of Saw and The Ring.’ And the audience recognizes it in the first five or 10 minutes and then they’re bored. So we try to come at it from a totally new direction.

JG: Do you go to a lot of horror movies?
WC: I see the ones that do very well, as kind of homework. Ironically, by and large I don’t like to go see horror films! It’s just that I don’t enjoy watching suffering. It’s funny. I go to see a lot of movies and watch a lot at home, but it’s more the whole spectrum of films, not just scary movies.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN YRB MAGAZINE. COPYRIGHT © 2007

Interview: The Vincent Black Shadow

BY JUSTINE GOODMAN
PHOTOGRAPHY BY JEFF FORNEY

Listen to “Metro.”

The infectious lead single off The Vincent Black Shadow’s debut full-length Fear’s In the Water (Bodog Music) will turn metalheads and grunge enthusiasts alike into instant fans of the pop-punk rockers.

The Vancouver-based quartet, which pounced onto the scene in recent months, is fronted by Cassandra Ford (lead vocals) and the Kirkham brothers – Robbie (guitar, vocals), Chris (bass, vocals) and Anthony (drums).

Cassandra was always musically inclined. She attended school at a convent in England where students were required to play multiple instruments – everything from piano to recorder to xylophone. Yadda, yadda, yadda, a few years later she found herself in the Philippines being bred for a career as an Asian pop star, courtesy of Universal Music’s Philippines division. “I was like, ‘Why am I doing this, I don’t wanna do it,’ and everyone was like, ‘Oh, but it’s a foot in the door,’ and I was like, ‘A foot in the door for what? I don’t want a foot in this door, I wanna pick the door that I’m sticking my foot in,’ so I just bought a plane ticket and came back,” says Cassandra.

Shortly thereafter, Cassie, Rob and Tony formed The Vincent Black Shadow (Chris joined later). “We were already showcasing for labels on like our fourth show,” says Tony, the youngest member of the band. “We sent Bodog a five or six song demo, and they were really stoked on it.” Stoked indeed; Bodog called them back just a few days later. “We didn’t even really have a band together. It was me, Rob and Cassie. Rob played the bass and piano, and I played the drums and Cassie sang on it. And they were like, ‘We want to see you right away,’” Tony recalls.

“And it was funny because we were like, ‘Oh, sure, we’ll book a show,’ and the show we booked was at this shitty bar in the shittiest part of town, and then they ended up not being able to come!” says Cassandra. “But we ended up meeting with them anyway; they came to a rehearsal and we played for them, and they were like, ‘Well let’s talk contracts,’ and our second ever show was playing for Bif Naked.”

Although the band has yet to break into the mainstream MTV scene (not that they would necessarily want to), they have been blowing up the more alternative music television outlets, particularly Fuse, where they were featured on last year’s Fangoria Chainsaw Awards and went on to repeatedly earn the number one video for “Metro” on countdown shows like Oven Fresh.

As we talk in the hallway of the Park Central Hotel in midtown Manhattan, TVBS is preparing to play a sold-out show at trendy SoHo nightclub Crash Mansion to kickoff the CMJ Music Marathon. Next, they’ll return to a grueling tour schedule throughout the U.S. and Europe in support of Fear’s In the Water, which is flying off the shelves after its re-release in January.

So if you don’t know about The Vincent Black Shadow, here’s a piece of advice: Listen to “Metro.”

To learn more about The Vincent Black Shadow, go to www.myspace.com/tvbs


ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN YRB MAGAZINE. COPYRIGHT © 2007

Dax Shepard

BY JUSTINE GOODMAN
PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHRIS FORTUNA

THE GOOD SHEPARD
“I feel like the Jude Law of comedy this fall. Prepare to get Daxed-out,” says actor Dax Shepard, who stars in three movies this year – Employee of the Month, Idiocracy and Let’s Go To Prison – all released between Labor Day and Thanksgiving.

Dax is perhaps best known for his role as a field agent on the first season of MTV’s celebrity prank series, Punk’d, but how does a dude with a degree in Anthropology from UCLA wind up getting paid to make Justin Timberlake cry on national television?

“I was going on probably 15 commercial auditions a year for six years and booking none of them,” says Dax of the days when he was a struggling actor trying to make it in Hollywood. (To be fair, he did play the coveted role of “Vomiter at Party” in a movie called Hairshirt in 1998.) While auditioning and attending UCLA, Dax also performed improv with the Groundlings Theater in L.A. (famous for having launched the careers of Phil Hartman, Lisa Kudrow, Will Ferrell and others), and pursued another hobby: racing cars.

“I was really into cars and I met the right people and I was gonna go and try to get a job racing,” says Dax. “At the exact same time, I got into the last level of the Groundlings […] and I thought, ‘Well, you can maybe parlay an acting career into a driving career, but not the other way around.’"

Then, in 2001, Dax auditioned for a role on Punk’d, which his experience as a Groundling had prepared him for. Seven callbacks later, he landed the part. “It was like, ‘Oh my god, I got a pilot, and the pilot’s going great!’ And then the pilot got sued and there was a full year of sorting that out before I finally went back to work.” When it aired in mid-2003, Punk’d was a hit and Dax was on the road to celebrity.

In 2004, he starred in Without a Paddle, alongside Seth Green, Matthew Lillard and Burt Reynolds – whom he describes as one of his “childhood gods.” (And who among us doesn’t have the fondest childhood memories of sitting fireside, surrounded by loved ones and watching Deliverance?)

“Oh, [Burt Reynolds] is so great,” says Dax, adding wistfully, “The only thing I regret is not having gotten to see his balls on set, because I wanna know if they’re as big as they look in those tight pants.”

Although Without a Paddle is no Smokey and the Bandit, working with Burt was still pretty sweet. But, Dax says his ultimate Hollywood experience thus far has been working on a movie that was never actually made. Dax was to star in Car Wars with Dustin Hoffman – whom he speculates “may be the most charming man on the planet” – and the two hung out quite a bit, something that left an indelible imprint on Dax.

“At one point we were with a third person, [who] asked Dustin something about [a] scene in Rain Man […] so Dustin starts explaining the entire scene and how it went down, and the next thing you know, he’s on the couch next to me, and I’m playing Tom Cruise, and he’s […] doing the lines. I had to stop and say, ‘In my wildest dreams, I never thought I’d be reenacting a scene out of Rain Man with Dustin Hoffman.’ ”

In fact, for a dude whose career only took off in 2003, Dax has been keeping a lot of excellent company. Idiocracy – a shamefully under-publicized Mike Judge movie that was released in September (though one wonders where) – features Dax, Luke Wilson and SNL’s Maya Rudolph. A role in the children’s action adventure film Zathura (2005) paved the way for a close friendship between Dax and Jon Favreau, who directed. Add to that Dax’s fellow Employee of the Month stars Dane Cook and Jessica Simpson, and you’ve got one really dope rolodex.

And speaking of the elder Simpson, is she as gifted an actress as she seems to be? “What I thought was good about her acting was that she wasn’t trying or working hard at it, which in my opinion is always the worst kind of acting,” says Dax. “[Jessica] just listened and said her lines, and that’s really all any of us can do. But she did great in the movie, she was super-cute […]. And her boobs are really big.” OK, so her range as an actress isn’t tremendous; but at least something about her is.

Dax also made his own physical contribution to this movie, albeit less sexy. “I don’t know if you can catch the finer details of my character in [Employee of the Month], but I want you to notice that I have waxed my forearms for the role, and I have bleached my hair for the role.”

You have to respect that level of commitment – and hey, short of starring in a Holocaust picture, changing your physical appearance for a movie role is the only surefire way to lock down an Academy Award, right? “There is Oscar buzz, I’m not gonna lie,” says Dax, in a tone that actually seems to say, ‘There most definitely is not, nor will there ever be, anything even remotely resembling Oscar buzz about this movie. Never. Not ever.’

For comedy nerds who are on the fence about Dax, the fact that he’s down with Arrested Development’s Will Arnett may earn him some street cred. This November, Will and Dax are starring in a little picture called Let’s Go To Prison, which promises to deliver.

“Let’s Go to Prison I really like, because that was a four million dollar movie that we made in 25 days, which ended up getting picked up by Universal and has an actual marketing budget now, and that’s kind of a rare thing to happen. If you like Will Arnett you’re gonna get your fill.”

And if you don’t like Will Arnett, chances are you’ve either smoked way too much weed or not enough.

Although Dax and Will met on the set of Let’s Go to Prison, the two already have plans for a future project. “Get ‘Em Wet is a script that I wrote for [Will] and I to star in. While we were on the set of Let’s Go to Prison we started thinking of different ideas that we could put together because we had such a good time, and Get ‘Em Wet was the product. Will and I play American hottub salesmen who go to Japan and try to blow the lid off a burgeoning market that’s not really there.”

Don’t get it twisted: Dax Shepard is no post-SNL Jimmy Fallon; he knows that just because a bad movie exists, doesn’t mean he should star in it.

“[Even before Punk’d] I was passing [on projects] sometimes when I shouldn’t have been, financially-speaking, because I’ve watched other actors who’ve been in the same spot I’ve been in, and I’ve watched them kinda disappear – it always boils down to doing something they know is shitty. It is very tempting – I have a house payment, I need money as much as I did when I was broke – so, it’s very hard to turn down […]. My theory is that as long as I don’t ever do a really shitty one, I still have a shot of working again. But if I do a couple of real shitty ones in a row, then I could permanently go away.”

Smart guy. “Well I was Magna Cum Laude at UCLA – I’m no slouch,” he reminds me.

With so many projects on deck (including a mockumentary about “me switching genres from comedy to martial arts movies”), Dax’s future looks bright. “If all my dreams come true I will become Paul Newman and start racing cars when I have money to have my own race team, and then do that in my retirement. I mean that would obviously be the greatest thing ever.”

And so far, it looks like he’s on the right track.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN YRB MAGAZINE COPYRIGHT © 2007

Interview: Nick Cannon

BY JUSTINE GOODMAN
PHOTOGRAPHY BY ROBERT CHAMORRO

LOADED CANNON
He arrives at Universal Motown’s artists lounge rocking dark denim, a gray hoodie and a N.Y. Yankee’s hat and jacket – never mind that he’s from the Left Coast. Ever the dignified baller, he doesn’t seem to be a man of excess. Today, at least, he wears only two pieces of bling – an iced out watch and a relatively modest gold chain – and it’s all he needs. He is, after all, Nick Cannon, and at just 25-years-old, he has already conquered the worlds of stand-up comedy, television, film, music and even fashion, after he “kinda’ just purchased” the PNB clothing line.

It’s enough to make even the most ambitious among us feel like slackers. It seems that anything you can do, Nick Cannon can do better, and he probably already has.

Born in San Diego, Nick moved to North Carolina at the age of 11, where he began using his father’s public access program as a venue to perform his own skits and comedy routines. He soon returned to the West Coast, and before long managed to work his way onto the stages of such famous Los Angeles clubs as The Comedy Store and The Laugh Factory. Still in his teens, Cannon was cast in the popular Nickelodeon series All That, before catching his first big-screen break in 2002, when he landed the lead in Drumline, exposing him to a much larger (and older) audience. “Kids knew who I was before Drumline – I was like ‘Mr. Nickelodeon’ before then – which I didn’t have a problem with…hey, their money spends just like everybody else’s.”

Even if you missed his stint on All That, it would be harder to miss Nick Cannon Presents Wild ‘N Out (it seems to be on television as often as Law & Order re-runs), the MTV sketch comedy series he created, directs and hosts. “I’ll give you two secrets about Wild ‘N Out. One is that we rehearse the actual games. We never rehearse any of the subject matters, or what the audience throws out there – you can’t rehearse that stuff. But we know the games back and forth, so we know the logistics of the games,” he says. “The other thing is, when they give us all the topics and stuff and you see us huddle – on the show you see us huddle for like 10 seconds. But realistically, in real-time, it’s more like 45 seconds. So we get a little bit of time to kinda’ come up with stuff.”

And then there’s his music career. Nick’s Can I Ball/Universal Motown imprint will release Stages (the follow-up album to his 2003 self-titled debut) on June 15th, by which time the single, “Dime Piece,” will have been getting heavy radio burn for months. In addition to Kanye West, who produced the track “My Wife,” guest appearances on Stages include Anthony Hamilton, Talib Kweli and E-40 -- what he describes as “an eclectic group of folks.” Cannon has also been busy searching for the perfect female co-star for his next video, hitting up virtually every major city in the U.S.

It’s difficult to classify Nick. Is he an actor with a hit record, or a singer with a hit show? When asked whether there is one talent that he identifies himself with more closely, Cannon cleverly responds that choosing one “is like choosing between your kids. You don’t really have a favorite, you love them all the same – and if you do love one more, you don’t tell the other ones!”

While he has tended toward lighter, coming-of age-type flicks in the past, Cannon’s latest silver screen roles will test his abilities as a dramatic actor. This summer, he’ll be appearing in a horror flick called Monster House, and, perhaps more surprisingly, in Bobby, a drama that tells the story of the 1968 assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Written and directed by Emilio Estevez, Bobby also stars Hollywood veterans Anthony Hopkins, Demi Moore and William H. Macy.

“I need to do a movie so I can go to Sundance… something small, something quick, just to get a ticket,” says Cannon, smiling. “Before I was in Drumline, Love Don’t Cost a Thing, it was kinda’ like one is good money, and two is like, just to get my face out there. But I feel like I’ve established a brand and a name thus far that I really now wanna’ take a step back and focus on the craft element of it, and not always be worrying about the biggest movie [or] box office and stuff, because I have stuff like my music career, the television show -- the things that kinda’ keep me out there, so when it comes to film...it’s just a little more challenging and exciting for me to keep it on the independent route,” says Cannon, adding, “Like I’ll do a movie with a $500,000 budget
if I believe enough in the script.”

If you watch HBO’s Entourage like the rest of the cool kids, then you know what he means. “Entourage is my life! When I tell you that’s my favorite show in the world, it’s because I could write that whole show in my sleep, because it’s just like they take elements of my life. Everyday, you know, I go to my agent, and it’s like, ‘Look, I don’t wanna’ do Aquaman, I wanna’ do Queens Boulevard!’” Nick says, referring to the Entourage storyline.

If Queens Boulevard is fictional movie star Vincent Chase’s opus, then Weapons is Nick Cannon’s. He says he was approached with various other scripts when this “phenomenal” one came along, and although some people were ambivalent (“A lot of people at my agency were like, ‘Why would you wanna’ do that? What about your youth audience?’”), he was determined to do the film. Weapons is scheduled to premiere at this year’s Toronto Film Festival. It may not be Sundance, but it counts.

With mentors like Will Smith and Jamie Foxx looking out for him (“Jamie Foxx, hands down, is the most talented person I’ve ever met,” he says), it’s not exactly shocking that Cannon was able to catch a break in Hollywood. In fact, he has often been compared to the Fresh Prince himself. “I joke around about that, because I love the fact that people compare me to the highest-paid movie star ever. If they were comparing me to Gary Coleman, then I would have some problems with that…[Will Smith] has been like a brother to me, always giving me advice and helping me in my career. He put me in my first movie, Men In Black II – if you blink, you miss me, but it was a wonderful experience at the time.”

Though the guy who titled his first hit single “Gigolo” is no longer the Nickelodeon poster child he once was, to a great extent Cannon has managed to retain his crispy clean public image. “I’m a good guy with bad tendencies. I think everybody has that in them,” he admits. “Ultimately, I feel like I am really a nice catch that you could probably take home to your mom, but I still have all those same thoughts as all the bad guys, I’m just maybe not acting on them as much as they do.”

With taping for the third season of Wild ‘N Out underway, and with three movies and a solo album about to drop, what other choice did Nick have but to buy the PNB clothing label? “I’m having a lot of fun with just designing denim. It’s the coolest thing you could ever do if you meet a girl and be like, ‘I could custom-make your jeans.’ They love that; ‘Oh, you’ll make me some jeans?’” he says, assuming a girlish voice.

At this rate, 10 years from now Nick Cannon will be running for President – and if the Constitution didn’t require that candidates be at least 35-years old, he’d probably be on the ticket in 2008. In the meantime, he hopes that in the future he’ll be able to get involved with “philanthropy” and “humanitarian work.” He’d also like to start a family eventually (though he remains single after a rather public break-up with former girlfriend, singer/actress Christina Milian).

So what’s the one thing the man who truly has everything simply couldn’t live without? “Magnum condoms,” he says, laughing (much to the dismay of his publicist). “Hey, that’s safe sex – I can’t live without ‘em! You don’t have ‘em, you won’t be livin’ too long!”

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN YRB MAGAZINE COPYRIGHT © 2007

Andy Samberg

BY JUSTINE GOODMAN
PHOTOGRAPHY BY SETH KUSHNER

LIVE FROM NEW YORK
Ever since Jimmy Fallon and Will Ferrell bade farewell to Saturday Night Live, the weekly sketch comedy show has been driven by veteran cast members like Darrell Hammond, Tina Fey, Chris Parnell and Amy Poehler. But with the remarkable success of the SNL Digital Short “Lazy Sunday,” which aired last December, a rookie cast member has been catapulted into the spotlight: Andy Samberg, 27.

Unless you’ve been in a coma for the last few months, you’ve probably seen the two-and-a-half minute rap video, which follows Samberg and Chris Parnell as they quench their “snack-attacks” with pink frosted cupcakes from New York’s famed Magnolia Bakery, load a backpack with Mr. Pibb and Red Vines purchased with less-than-crisp $10 bills at the local deli, and cab it to the Upper West Side to catch an afternoon showing of The Chronicles of Narnia.

Samberg arrived at SNL last fall with his two best friends, Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer, who both now write for the show. (The three wrote “Lazy Sunday” together with Parnell.) Talking to Samberg, it seems clear that as far as his comedy is concerned, he doesn’t think of himself apart from his partners in crime – almost as if they were conjoined triplets. The “Dudes,” who grew up together in their hometown of Berkley, CA, are collectively known as the Lonely Island, a title initially bestowed on the apartment they shared after graduating from college and moving to L.A. in 2001. Putting their degrees in film and theater to good use, the Dudes soon began to write, direct and star in their own short films, which they posted to their website, www.thelonelyisland.com.

In addition to longer episodes like "White Power" (an 18-minute film about three otherwise good kids, struggling to overcome an addiction to White Power-brand teeth-whitener), music videos in the vein of “Lazy Sunday” have long been part of their repertoire. Under the name Incredibad, the Lonely Island has produced a number of songs, most notably “Just 2 Guyz,” “Ka-Blamo!” and “Stork Patrol.” Like the rest of the Dudes’ work, the videos are funny, but the quality of the music itself (from the beats to the lyrics) is also impressive; they’ve even been compared to the Beastie Boys. “‘Ka-Blamo!’ you could say, has a lot of Beastie Boys influence, like we’re even sorta’ aping them at some point. But like in ‘Stork Patrol,’ we’re all doing our best Ghostface,” Samberg says.

The Lonely Islanders seem like the kind of dudes who got stoned and then actually made movies instead of just watching them like the rest of us. Of their pre-SNL work, perhaps they are best known for The ‘Bu, a series that originally aired on the L.A.-based website, Channel 101. A parody of TV dramas like Fox’s The O.C., the Lonely Island website explains the series’ title: “Young, sexy people that live in Malibu call it the ‘Bu, because when you say the entire word, it takes time, and then you wouldn’t be young anymore.”

The eighth and final episode of The ‘Bu coincided with plans for a pilot called Awesometown; although the show was not picked up, Samberg and his boys were well on their way to establishing themselves in the comedy world. But a good reputation doesn’t always pay the rent, so when the Dudes were broke, Samberg did what any other L.A. comedian would do: he went on commercial auditions. In the spring of 2004, he landed a part in a Japanese commercial for Honda. “It was fuckin’ awesome. It was so sweet – they flew me and like five other Americans out to Tokyo, business class. We just kicked it in Japan in a five-star hotel for a week, and shot this commercial and went out and got wasted and did karaoke,” he says, adding, “Just for the record, I do not like karaoke. But I did enjoy it in Japan.”

How did Andy Samberg make it from the Lonely Island to the island of Manhattan and Saturday Night Live? Speaking, as he usually does, of himself, Schaffer and Taccone, in the plural, Samberg says, “We first got introduced to the SNL world, so to speak, when we were writing on the MTV Movie Awards. We did it two years in a row, and this past year Jimmy Fallon was the host, so we worked pretty closely with him. I guess he suggested [that SNL producers] check us out.” After watching the material on the Lonely Island website, SNL producers asked Andy to audition and ultimately invited him to join the cast, while Jorma and Akiva were offered writing gigs.

Given that his background is unlike that of most Saturday Night Live cast members, who performed in sketch and improv groups like Second City before joining the show, has the transition to live TV been difficult for Samberg? He did a lot of stand-up comedy prior to SNL, which he says prepared him for the experience of performing in front of a live audience, though it did take some time to get comfortable with things like blocking and playing to the camera. “In terms of transitioning the comedy, I feel like definitely those people [the other cast members] have done a lot more live sketch, but we’ve done a lot of sort of controlled comedy of our own, and obviously it plays more when we do stuff that’s sort of pre-shot, ‘cause that’s what we’re used to…and the success that ‘Lazy Sunday’ had is a testament to the fact that that’s what we’re the most experienced with.”

To call it a success is an understatement. A slew of bloggers immediately rushed to update their Live Journal and My Space entries, calling Andy SNL’s new savior and posting links to “Lazy Sunday.” The short has since been downloaded millions of times, spawning a new generation of catch phrases (e.g., “It’s all about the Hamiltons, baby”). Although “Lazy Sunday” has been subject to a barrage of press, Samberg maintains that his life is more or less the same as it was before – except that now, he is recognized almost every time he leaves the West Village apartment he shares with Schaffer. When he arrives at trendy Union Square eatery, Coffee Shop, for the photo shoot, he is wearing a new black jacket, which he bought to replace the fur-hooded parka he wore in the video; he’s identified more frequently in the parka, and doesn’t want people to think he’s wearing it because he is seeking the attention.

But while most people under the age of 30 might recognize Andy Samberg – as the awesome, shaggy- haired dude who made that rap video with a clever hook that combined the name of a children’s movie with allusions to getting blunted – apparently it is much more difficult for them to remember his name. A New York Times copy editor is probably seeking employment elsewhere after the paper misidentified him as “Adam Samberg” on the front page of its Arts Section. Andy says he was not surprised by the error. “I’ve been getting that in standup since I started. Everyone calls me either ‘Adam Samberg’ or ‘Andy Sandler.’”

He jokes about making it big so that no one will get his name wrong again, but Samberg seems not to be distracted by fame or fortune, and he’s not rushing to prove that he’s a major league baller. Us Weekly recently crowned him, “The Next Jimmy Fallon,” and while he’s flattered by such comparisons, Samberg doesn’t see himself as being the Next Big Anyone, per se. “I kinda’ just wanna’ do my own thing, and hopefully someday have someone else who does their own thing be called, ‘The Next Andy Samberg.’” Somehow, the remarkable popularity of “Lazy Sunday” – and the subsequent rush of publicity he has experienced in its wake – doesn’t seem to have fazed him, though he hopes it won’t prove to be a one-hit wonder. But the video is not unlike a lot of the work in the Lonely Island portfolio; “It just happened to be on Saturday Night Live now. So I think if we just kinda’ keep trying to make each other laugh, we should be fine; that’s always been the rule,” he says, referring to Schaffer and Taccone. (In fact, as we go to press, “Young Chuck Norris,” another SNL digital short starring Samberg, is already making its rounds on the internet.)

From the moment he arrives at the Coffee Shop shoot (cradling a rather large ceramic cow as if there’s nothing at all unusual about that), his playful charm is like an energy that endears him to everyone in the room. A self-described “fuck-around dude,” Samberg seems like someone you might know; like someone you went to school with, or wish you had. “All I’ve ever really wanted is to do comedy, and it’s exciting to have any success with it,” he says.

So set your TiVo for Saturday nights at 11:30 EST on NBC, because Live From New York, It’s Andy Samberg.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN YRB MAGAZINE COPYRIGHT © 2007