Folk rocker Father John Misty is making his big screen acting debut in Jodie Foster’s upcoming thriller Hotel Artemis.
The former Fleet Foxes star, real name Joshua Tillman, filmed a short appearance for the action movie over the summer (17), when he reunited with his music video collaborator Drew Pearce, who wrote and directed the new project, marking his first feature film.
During an appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers, Father John Misty admitted his character doesn’t last long onscreen: “It’s a guy who gets his head blown off within like, 30 seconds of the film,” he said. “It was like, two days (of shooting)… with real actors like Sterling K. Brown and Brian Tyree Henry…”
However, the musician’s “big scene” didn’t initially turn out as he had hoped, and he ended up fearing he had blown his Hollywood break.
“The second day was kinda like, my big scene, where me and these future bank robbers blow a hole through the wall, then I run out and yell something like, ‘When were you gonna tell us?’,” he explained. “That was my one line.
“But the first scene… I just like tripped out of the hole and I breathed in all this particle dust and I coughed through my line, and I was like, ‘Oh god, I’m blowing it…’ and instead of just copping to it like a decent person, I pretended like I was some kind of like genius action hero… So I spent the day just coughing and tripping through these scenes…!”
Despite making a fool of himself in front of the cast and crew, Tillman thinks his performance turned out “pretty good” overall.
The singer previously worked with Pearce, the co-writer of Iron Man 3, in 2015, when they shot the video for The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apartment, reports Pitchfork.com.
Hotel Artemis stars Foster as a nurse working in an underground hospital used to treat Los Angeles’ gangsters. It also features Zachary Quinto, Jeff Goldblum, and Guardians of the Galaxy’s Dave Bautista.
