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

Alan Tudyk stars as Ben Chapman in the upcoming movie 42, which chronicles the life of baseball legend Jackie Robinson. Now, the actor speaks to Hypable about the controversial role.

Hypable has spoken to actor Alan Tudyk both about his upcoming Suburgatory storylines and about his thoughts on a Firefly revival, and now we bring you the final part of the interview. Here, Tudyk previews his role in the upcoming movie 42, which premieres April 12.

42 tells the incredible story of baseball legend Jackie Robinson (played by Chadwick Boseman), who became the first black Major League Baseball player in the United States when he signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.

In the movie, Alan Tudyk plays Phillies manager Ben Chapman – Robinson’s greatest adversary off the field, who actively tries to undermine Robinson’s position and spreads very vocal racial slurs about the player.

Naturally, any actor might find such a role hard to take on, but writer and director Brian Helgeland believed that Tudyk was the man for the job. Tudyk, on his part, has nothing but praise for the director.

“I was really excited to work with Brian Helgeland again after working on The Knight’s Tale together,” he says, “and the script was just so brilliantly written.”

It was Helgeland who approached Tudyk about playing Ben Chapman because of the complexity of the character. While Ben Chapman was, in Tudyk’s words, “not a very nice guy, basically the face of the worst racism at the time,” he was also someone who a lot of people really liked. “So Brian had said that he wanted me to play it, because he didn’t want somebody who just comes on and plays a villain,” Tudyk explains.

Helgeland’s vision for the movie included a Ben Chapman who wasn’t just an average bad guy. “He wanted someone to do Ben who could show that he wasn’t just straight-up evil. That he was a ‘good ol’ boy’ who just had this very narrow view of race,” Tudyk says. “Ben was a product of where he grew up – and that’s how I played him. He’s not out there just being a meanie, he’s out there having a good time, he’s having fun.”

In terms of preparing for the role, it helped that Chapman had been so vocal about Robinson to the press, because that meant that Tudyk could go back and read all of his worst statements verbatim. “He had some really twisted logic,” Tudyk explains. “He’d say, well, Jackie wants to be treated like everybody else. This is how I treat everybody else. So I’m showing him respect, why don’t you show him the same respect I am?”

While Tudyk was happy to take on this role, he did have a few reservations going in. “I was a little worried,” he confesses. “People identify actors with their characters, and up until this point it’s been really good for me. I’ve played a lot of really funny, silly characters… so people will be like, ‘oh, I really like that pirate who plays dodgeball, there he is right there!’ It’s a good thing.” Now, there is perhaps a slight worry that people will identify him as, “‘that racist guy who got fired from baseball after being such an ass.’”

At the same time, “the things he’s saying aren’t being said just to make the audience feel a certain way. It’s actually what was being said, and this guy was actually the manager of a major-league team standing out in front of everybody, saying these things.”

Tudyk also confesses that shooting some of the more explicit scenes took a toll on him. “There were some scenes, the scenes where I was just really race-bating Jackie, those scenes were very hard,” he says. “And they put me in a really bad mood. And then I went home, I realised that I was in this terrible mood, basically taking my work home with me.”

Despite having to get into the mindset of this character however, “being a part of this movie is just really fantastic,” Tudyk says. “There’s some laughs in it, too, and some really great performances. Certainly, there’s Harrison Ford like you’ve never seen him before.”

Harrison Ford underwent quite a transformation to play Robinson’s coach Branch Rickey, and even Tudyk admits that, “there are moments within it where you’re like, ‘oh right, this is Harrison Ford!’ He doesn’t look like him, and he’s got this deep voice as the cigar-chomping Branch Rickey – who was also this great, colourful character at the time.”

The actor recently had a chance to watch the movie, and is very proud of how it turned out. He was especially impressed with Chadwick Boseman, a relative newcomer to the industry. In his own words, “he knocks it… well, he knocks it out of the park. There you go. Oh boy, that just happened. ‘It’s a home run performance,’ I can see the quotes now!” (But don’t feel too bad, Alan – we can think of much worse puns right off the bat.)

Ultimately, Tudyk says, this movie tells a story which should have been told a long time ago. “It was an important time in baseball, in the United States,” he says. “All the characters who were around at that time, the baseball hall of famers who were just getting their start at that time, they were on that team.”

And more than anything else, “it shows how amazing Jackie Robinson was. That’s gonna come across: what an amazing – not just baseball player – but civil rights leader and human being he was.”

42 hits theaters on April 12. It also stars Christopher Meloni, Lucas Black, and Nicole Beharie.

Source: hypable.com – Alan Tudyk talks becoming Ben Chapman for 42