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Features
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A Community Theatre Quartet
For director Al Corley and stars John Corbett, Sean Astin and Marcus Thomas, the opportunity to send up community theater truly was Bigger Than The Sky.
Tuesday, March 8, 2005
By Brett Buckalew
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Dimitrios Kambouris/Wireimage.com
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Actor-turned-director Al Corley
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Versatility is commonly held up as the most essential trait for an actor to have to maintain a healthy career, but sometimes, there are performers who float above the need to excel in a wide variety of roles. And this is not at all a negative thing, as the recent box office success of movies like Hitch, featuring Will Smith’s signature brand of self-deprecating charisma, and Constantine, which puts Keanu Reeves’ air of wry Zen cool to good use, seems to prove. In some unexplainable way, actors like Smith or Reeves can wow audiences by merely putting a fresh twist on their familiar personae.
The mystery of thespians who compensate for a lack of range with a very real, riveting presence is the subject of the new comedy, Bigger Than the Sky, which uses the world of community theatre rather than that of cinema as its central microcosm. In the film, a sad-sack graphic designer named Peter Rooker (Marcus Thomas) unexpectedly lands the lead role in the Portland Community Theatre production of Cyrano de Bergerac, due to the play’s director, Edwina (Clare Higgins), finding an attention-grabbing core of longing within him that transcends experience or schooling.
As Peter becomes immersed in topsy-turvy backstage dramas, including a romantic triangle with the ethereal Grace (Amy Smart) and the theatre’s cherished star Michael (John Corbett), he must find the strength to command the stage in the way Edwina anticipated.
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Steve Granitz/Wireimage.com
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Hammy villain Sean Astin
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During a recent interview with FilmStew, director Al Corley - making his feature helming debut after successfully wearing the hats of actor (TV’s Dynasty) and producer (Palmetto, Noel) - explains the narrow but palpable power of a performer like Peter, using a current Oscar winner as another real-life example of the phenomenon.
“I mean, Clint Eastwood has limitations as an actor, but what he does, like John Wayne or Gary Cooper, you just want to go out and hang out with them at the bar,” Corley observes. “You just kinda want to watch them, and whatever they say, [you] just kinda believe.”
“Every once in while, we’ll come across a guy like that, or I will, in auditions, and you just go, ‘I like that guy,’ or ‘I like that girl.’”
In an added layer of life imitating art, Corley had to take a chance on Thomas, who had only experience playing supporting roles in movies like Drowning Mona and Noel, for the lead, much like the character of Edwina rolls the dice on Peter’s ineffable appeal. “It was very difficult to find an actor who could get the girl, was attractive enough to do that, and sort of had these Everyman qualities, someone who was empathetic the moment that they come on,” the director describes.
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Steve Granitz/Wireimage.com
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Recalling audition horros
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Much less empathetic in the film is the character of Ken Zorbell, an arrogant ham who has his eye on the role of Cyrano in case Peter is unable to eradicate his stage fright before opening night. In the role of Ken, Lord of the Rings star Sean Astin claims to have found the perfect outlet for the latent egomania that every actor inherently possesses.
“In the theatre, you realize that for every actor, the entire story is primarily about themselves,” Astin elaborates. “So is there a subplot about Ken? Why, yes, there is. In Ken’s mind, it’s the main plot. It was the plot that was going on in my mind as I was working on in the picture.”
“It was based on my refracted sense of a kind of satirical, whimsical caricature of civic theatre, community theatre,” adds Astin, continuing to talk about his inspiration for the comical villain. “That was the conceit that I enjoyed living in while we were filming it.”
For co-star John Corbett, there is always a chance that something like Bigger Than The Sky will find a way to duplicate the success of his smash comedy My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Although it looks like the film will soon disappear from the nine theaters where it has been playing, one of the film’s most squirmingly funny set pieces, in which Peter hideously botches his first audition for Edwina, brought many painful memories of inauspicious beginnings back for Corbett.
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Dimitrios Kambouris/Wireimage.com
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The accidental Cyrano
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“When I was starting out, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing,” Corbett shamefully admits. “A person who was helping me out—I didn’t even have an agent—got me five or six big auditions for leads in movies in 1986 that I had no business auditioning for, and I think I ran out of three of them before I even finished the [audition].”
“I remember running out of one of them,” the actor continues. “I remember being halfway through the thing, and everything sort of tunnel-visioned on me, and I couldn’t read the script anymore. I looked at the people [around me], and I just turned, and ran out in a cold sweat.”
Appropriately enough, Marcus Thomas, the actor who plays Peter, has his very own audition horror story to match that of his onscreen alter ego. “I went to an audition for an Aspirin commercial in New York,” Thomas recalls, “and the lady looked at me and just said, ‘If you were me, and you just saw this, would you hire yourself?’ I was just ready to cry, because it was the most horrible thing I’ve ever gone through.”
But Thomas insists that he has little beyond that anecdote in common with Peter, and the Brussels-born actor credits the courage required to test your fortune in a foreign country for getting rid of many of his smaller worries. “I don’t really share a lot of things with Peter. I don’t have a lot of those insecurities and fears,” he reveals. “Also, coming from Europe and trying to be an actor in America was a pretty big challenge in and of itself, so I was not afraid to tackle that.”
Corley, for his part, disagrees with Thomas’ self-evaluation. “See, I thought that Marcus had a little more in common with the character than he thinks he does,” the director notes of his star. “He’s shy, he’s quiet, he’s…conservative in his relationships to people, cautious in relationships to girls, and in his love relationships, and [he] would rather stand back than stand out.”
More surprisingly, Corbett, whose scruffy, laid-back gregariousness in person calls to mind a more outgoing cousin of the Dude from The Big Lebowski, can also be fairly timid, at least when it comes to the prospect of returning to work in legitimate theatre.
| “I’m afraid to do theatre now,” he bluntly confides. “Now that people have gotten to know who I am, I get offered plays here and there, and it was so much easier to do it when nobody knew who I was. You know, I can’t even imagine that somebody would come and pay money just to come see me. And I have this fear of really being bad, and not being worth your fifteen bucks.” | |
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