Alan Tudyk Online

Actor Alan Tudyk sounds surprised when I mention that I’ve been a fan for a while – pleased, but surprised.

He’s a lithe, light-fingered actor who casually steals scenes with impeccable comic timing and unexpectedly rubbery physicality. Tudyk has been good in a lot of bad stuff but he’s even better in good (if little-seen) comedies like Frank Oz’s original “Death at a Funeral” (in which he played a nervous potential son-in-law who accidentally takes a hallucinogen before a funeral) and “Tucker and Dale Versus Evil,” as a backwoods type mistaken for a serial killer. And let’s not forget Wash on “Firefly” – or Steve the Pirate in “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story.” Arrrrh.

But Tudyk is on the phone to talk about playing Ben Chapman, the Philadelphia Phillies manager who becomes the face of racism in “42,” which topped the box-office charts last weekend. In the film about Jackie Robinson’s first year in the majors, Chapman shows up spitting one racial epithet after another from in front of the Phillies’ dugout at Ebbets Field, a monologue of bitter bigotry that left Tudyk feeling slightly hungover after each day of filming.

“It was like I got wasted at a bad party,” Tudyk says. “It would leave a stain on your mood, and put you into a bad mood into the next day.”

In fact, according to the film’s director Brian Helgeland, the hate-speech that Chapman spewed (and which got laughs from his players) was toned down for the film. But that didn’t make it any easier for Tudyk, who had to chant, “Hey, nigger, nigger, nigger,” at actor Chadwick Boseman, playing Jackie Robinson.

“It was hard to get past my own feelings,” Tudyk says. “I had to get past that actor feeling of being someone sensitive and liberal, who’s not used to fighting.”

To steel himself, he would go on the Internet, seeking out videos of streetfights: “But not those cage matches, where they both want to be there,” he notes. “The ones where someone is caught up in a fight he doesn’t want to be in, where he’s kind of saying, ‘Help me,’ and nobody does. I’d watch four or five of those and, when I stopped flinching and I had a knot in my stomach, I knew I was good to go. I had a good store of aggression and anger that I could take to work.”

Yet Tudyk’s job was not to be the most hateful person possible – but to be someone who would have fit right into polite society of the period: “Ben Chapman was like a lot of good ol’ boys I’ve met. He’s nice and funny – and then he tells a joke that’s extraordinarily racist and you think, ‘Oh no, I’ve got to go.’ I love the idea of him being somebody who could be likable. There were people who liked him.”

As he researched the role, Tudyk found that, in fact, Chapman’s entire career had been marked by a pugnacious (and racist) personality: “He would say, ‘Well, I’m an equal opportunity racist. I call Joe DiMaggio a wop and Hank Greenberg a kike. It’s all in good fun.’ He’d argue that, hey, this is a serious game and we’re playing for keeps so we’ll do what it takes to win. But at the same time, he’d say, hey, we’re just having some fun. There was a twisted logic there I could make sense of.”

Chapman’s own history was checkered as well: “He was one of the first players to get fined by his own team – like $100 or $200 when that sort of fine was not given – for starting a fight in the outfield over a Jewish slur he used on one of his own teammates. Apparently 200 people came on the field and started fighting. He actually got into an argument with an umpire one time, pulled the guy’s mask off and punched him in the face.”

With “42” in the theaters, Tudyk still has “Suburgatory,” the ABC sitcom which is just finishing its second season and is predicted to return for a third. He’s happy to have some downtime in a career that he never saw coming.

Growing up in a suburb of Dallas, Tudyk was active in speech – as opposed to drama – in high school “because I didn’t like the drama teacher. He was one of those guys who played a lot of mind games with his students. And besides, I was going to be in hotel management. I loved my job at Taco Bueno. I was taking classes in advance hotel management and thought I would work at a fancy hotel.”

But a teacher told him that he was too good not to try acting: “She convinced me I could become an actor and not be poor. She had this insane confidence.”

He went to a two-year college in Dallas, while finding acting gigs around town, before finally deciding that he needed actual training if he was going to act. He applied to the Juilliard School and was accepted: “Then I left before I graduated because I didn’t much care for it.”

Which was fine, because he was already working: He’d been cast to play a multiplicity of characters in Alan Zweibel’s “Bunny Bunny,” for which he won both the Theater World and Clarence Derwent awards.

While that play was being developed, he held one of his last non-acting jobs, working at Harry’s Burritos on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. There was a gorgeous soap opera actress who was a regular customer, who would come in with her handsome boyfriend and chat with Tudyk.

“I was so in love with her – but she’d bring in her boyfriend,” Tudyk recalls. “But the guy was so nice and tipped me so well that I couldn’t hate him. Six years later, I’m working on ‘Firefly’ with Nathan Fillion, who’s now one of my best friends, and we’re talking about our early days in New York. And we figured out that he had been that actress’ boyfriend and I had been waiting on him.”

Source:hollywoodandfine.com – Alan Tudyk steals another scene