We’ve seen him in everything from Undeclared to Knocked Up, but who knew comedy kid Jay Baruchel’s true passion is horror and action. The actor, who plays Tropic Thunder’s newbie Kevin Sandusky, confesses he was in film nerd heaven on the set of his new movie.
“It was the greatest thing ever…I get gored f*cking open in this movie. I got the pressurized blood thing coming out to squirt all over the place. It was cumbersome and inconvenient but the nerd in me was like this is pretty much the coolest. When I die, it was like there’s nowhere to go from here.”
That’s not all, Baruchel tells us all about prepping for the film, surviving the Hawaiian jungle and more …
Hollywood.com: Did you do a big intense military boot camp for this?
Jay Baruchel:
I heard that they had entertained the idea of doing a boot camp and I guess they had enough money in the budget to do a boot camp or a cast supper and they went for cast supper instead.
HW: What was it like shooting in Hawaii, because I read it was miserable?
JB:
I’m one of the few people on earth that hates hot weather, hates summertime so summertime in Hawaii already was a lot to contend with… A lot of people got sick from Leptospirosis, which is prolonged exposure to mud because every animal in God’s creation poos in the mud and it rains 12 times…It is very pleasant stuff [laughs]. I live in Canada and if someone had told me before the movie started that the biggest issue was going to be mud I would have said, “Go fuck yourself, mud’s mud.” Mud is not mud. Hawaii has the market cornered on insane mud. I’ve never seen mud that goes up to my fucking knees. Like the equivalent of snow banks worth of mud. That stuff was crazy.
HW: How did you land the role? Did you have to campaign for it?
JB:
I don’t live here so I often come down here and don’t have a car and getting around with a taxi is quite a schlep. I remember this is the audition where I decided I was going to spend $60 and pay for a town car to take me and wait for me and I was like, “This is going to be pretty shitty if I blew $70 bucks and I don’t even get the call back”…I auditioned and went to take a pee afterwards and Ben [Stiller] came up to me when I got out of the bathroom and said, “So, is this the kind of thing you would want to do?” I was like, “What the fuck are you talking about? Of course this is the type of thing I want to do, are you crazy?”
HW: Given that this film owes a lot to Apocalypse Now, as a film nerd do you prefer Apocalypse Now or Apocalypse Now Redux?
JB:
The original. I wanted to love Redux. I saw it in the theater as soon as it came out. On paper the scene with the French Colonials is a great idea but it doesn’t change the fact that it is boring as dog shit. There is a reason they cut out that 45 minutes…[It is] like paint drying in the middle of Vietnam.
HW: Did re-watch Apocalypse Now anyway, since Tropic Thunder owes so much to the film?
JB:
As much as it owes to Apocalypse Now it owes to the genre of early eighties Vietnam movies…when we got to Hawaii there were gift baskets with like Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill, Apocalypse Now and camouflage deodorant [laughs]. I grew up watching those movies and also my mother’s family is all military. Her father is a career soldier, two of my uncles, my cousin, her husband and all of them so there is no shortage of war movies at my granddads house, so one thing I knew was how to play the crazy Jewish cherry, which is what he is basically.
Tropic Thunder opens in theaters Aug. 13, 2008
