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Features
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Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
Blink and you’ll miss Michael Clarke Duncan in The Island. So why is he in New York, doing press for a movie he worked on for a mere two days?
Thursday, July 21, 2005
By Ian Spelling
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Dimitrios Kambouris/Wireimage.com
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A clone and a half
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Michael Clarke Duncan is certain of one thing.
If he woke up one morning only to learn that another, cloned Michael Clarke Duncan was walking the streets, he’d have to get rid of him. Immediately. “If I see another Michael Clarke Duncan, I know pretty soon he's going to be in my house,” he says with a laugh during a recent interview with FilmStew in New York. “And pretty soon, he's going to take over my whole life.”
“So one of us has got to go, right away. I don't really want to talk to him; I'd rather do a sneak attack.”
In the shadow of good-looking and well-promoted young leads Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson, Duncan plays a small but pivotal role in director Michael Bay’s latest action opus The Island. Duncan’s character, Starkweather, is a clone who thinks he’s won the lottery via a trip to the Island, supposedly the last uncontaminated place on Earth. Only, it’s all a ruse.
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Steve Granitz/Wireimage.com
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Popcorn movie purveyor
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But as most of you know by now, in yet another example of a movie being marketed by means of giving away one or more of its key plot twists, the clones don’t know they’re clones. They have no clue that the only reason they’ve been created is to provide spare parts for their so-called sponsors, people who’ve shelled out $5 million each for the best insurance policy ever.
Starkweather’s sponsor, seen only on a billboard, is a famous football player. But when one inquisitive clone (Ewan McGregor) witnesses what’s about to happen to Starkweather, it sets in motion the wild ride that is Bay’s blast ‘em, crash ‘em, blow ‘em up real good sci-fi adventure.
Duncan notes that the most challenging aspect of the gig for him was not the action, despite the fact that in one sequence he crashes through a plate of glass, but rather the moment in which Starkweather realizes his fate, realizes there is no such place as the Island. “The most difficult part, I think, was the crying, getting emotional, because when I first did it, I wasn't really into the scene,” explains the actor, who, pre-The Green Mile, gained a measure of recognition with his supporting role in Bay’s film Armageddon.
“I was thinking that I'm really going to fly down this corridor, and I'm going to beat that camera every time,” he explains. “So to my mind, I'm in the Olympics, 100 meter dash.”
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Theo Wargo/Wireimage.com
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Johansson, looking very glam
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But when Bay asked the actor what he was thinking about during the filming of the scene, it was anything but the mindset of an athlete at a sporting event. “He said, ‘Are you scared?’,” Duncan recalls, “and I said, ‘I'm sorry, man. I am really sorry.’”
“I got back and I said, ‘OK, if I woke up with all these things, how would I actually feel?’” he adds. “And then I started getting teary-eyed, and I thought, ‘Man, I would be terrified if someone was chasing me. I don't know why they're chasing me. Why is my chest cracked open? Who are these people who want my body?’ And I would really just run and be crying, and that's when I got emotionally attached to the character.”
For a star as big as Duncan - and we don’t mean physically, although he is a big, big, big fellow - his role in The Island is surprisingly small. It’s so small, in fact, it’s almost shocking to see Duncan doing the press junket rounds on the film’s behalf.
“You know, the people at DreamWorks got me,” he says, laughing. “When I did the movie, I thought, ‘I only work two days, so at least there's no press conference for me.’ And then last week I get this big (publicity) schedule. I call Michael. ‘I only worked two days.’ ‘Yeah, but you're a significant part of the movie.’”
“I wanted my character to... I wanted to show the football character, to show his roughness and his (being the) total opposite to this character, this character who wears the glasses,” Duncan adds. “Well, Michael (says), ‘The budget is this. It’s only two days.”
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