David Dastmalchian

even Oppenheimer. Or maybe you've seen the films he wrote and starred in, Animals and All Creatures here below, Or if you're into comic books, David is also the author of the series Count Crawley Reluctant Midnight Monster Hunter. Or if you've been casket shopping lately, you might know him from his partnership with titan caskets, whatever the case may be. He is a multi hyphen it in the industry, and

he does it all very very well. I might add, we're going to talk about how he got all those hyphens in the first place, how he overcame addiction and ended up a movie star. His latest film, Late Night with the Devil. I cannot wait to see it. Let's get the conversation going. Here is the immensely talented David Destmulchin.

kind of the same things. But I do in the dream of being the kind of artists that or actor or whatever we want to call ourselves that can live in space, and it's it seems like you feel the

same way, since you're comfortable describing yourself as such. I think that being a character actor, although maybe we don't get as many zero's at the end of our checks, we tend to get a lot of freedom and flexibility in the sense that we get the opportunity to stretch in ways that sometimes different types of journeys go for actors. And I think it's a real gift.

is physically as well. But it's interesting to me because while we would sort of on the surface both describe ourselves as character actors, I think we use that term so often and so loosely that it's it's almost reductive in a way.

the protagonist and the director's vision. If I look at the film as a whole, I can't imagine. I can't look at a film and be like, Oh, I should have been there's there. I was meant to play Bob till I look at a movie like The Dark Knight, and I don't think to myself like I wish I would have been the Batman or the Joker. No, I think like that role just seemed like it was just

so suited for what my skills and joy. People often ask me like, oh, You've made such great choices in your career, and I wish that I could take more credit than the Roulette wheel of being an actor. I wish that I was some savante artist living in my cabin, cobbling shoes and getting to go no, no, no, no, oh, yes that one. Oh that. It's just not my reality.

I'm a working actor who reads work. I'm just so I think dedicated maybe to the kind of stuff that I consume as a watcher, reader, listener that maybe energetically in some woiy way, it's maybe like made me do better auditions or have stronger energetic connections to material that is in the genre space is a little more in

the dark shadows whatever. But the times I've said no to things genuinely, and there's been stuff that I have absolutely done because it wasn't my favorite script or role, but I was like, I'm working, I need to work and I know I can make something useful and help this story. The times when I have said no was either because there was no money, and that happens often where people go, we've got this great project and we just can't pay you, and I go, I'm sorry. I

have to support a family. And when I'm going to do no money work, it's always my own stuff because I'm always trying to make my own little things. So I try to block out three or four months a year of no money work, and that's always my own stuff. But the other reason is only when I genuinely try to connect with the material and I feel like I can't find my way into it, and I won't do it because I genuinely believe you can see it, you

can feel it in a performance. If you don't connect with in any way, shape or form, or you're just like I would be doing a great disservice to somebody who's paying me or someone who's trying to direct me. If my internal monologue is I don't connect with this at all, I feel like that would be really hard. So aside from that, though, I'm kind of a yes man, and luckily that's just snowballed into getting to work with really cool people and cool projects, and being open to

making myself. I think you do this as well, and it's another badge of honor in being a character actor. The vulnerability of playing the fool, to me is a

really powerful experience as an actor. I really think getting over my fear and my ego and being willing to just stand still and be If anyone knows much about history of storytelling, theater, comaedia, dell art, whatever, that very important function of the fool, and it's not as simple or pejorative as it may sound in saying that word to your viewers or listeners, but it's like it's actually kind of a beautiful place to exist in storytelling. It's like I want to strip down myself of all ego.

I want to just stand there and experience things and let the camera capture those feelings of vulnerability. And sometimes I'm very lucky that it just it works. Whether it's in comedy or drama or horror, it's a place I like to go.

of the game. We you know, listen, I sound like Uncle Rico right now, but I genuinely like I like. I walked off the field and football was to me a means to an end. I loved playing it at the time. I loved my team and my coach and the experience of going out on the gridiron and playing football and giving it all I had. But my heart was definitely I was yearning to be like making haunted

houses and being in the theater. And I was always a little I was building sets for the theater, like they were doing a production of Dracula, and I was like helping build sets, but I wanted to be in the play. I wanted to be, you know, doing that. And I had good grades, but not good enough to get academic scholarships. But I was good enough at football that it was going to help me get to go to college. So it was something I really dedicated myself to.

And then when I walked off the field the end of my senior year, I assumed the next summer I would be in training at one of the colleges that was recruiting me to play football. And I was preparing to go do the next six months of continuing to get bigger and bigger, and then I was encouraged by a couple of teachers to audition for this theater training program in Chicago, and I did, and I got a scholarship. I completely did a one eighty, and I said, that's

that's what I want to do. That's what I'm going to do.

dialect monologues. And I had prepared a monologue from a play by Peter Shaffer called Equis and I was kind of obsessed with that play in high school. And I and I also had done a monologue from Eric Bagosian's talk radio where I played a bunch of different characters, and they didn't want any of that shit. So I show up. Here's all these kids in dance belts with jazz shoes on and coming from you know, all these training ground places. They just everybody was like, I was

so intimidated. I was so out of my depth. But I had something that I'll always be grateful for that Maybe if I had overtrained as a kid and teenager, maybe if I had been so ingrained in thinking, I had an approach that I knew what I was doing. Because I believed that I had no clue what I was doing. I was like raw dull. I just was like open to and I had this willingness to just jump into whatever and kind of make a fool of myself.

And then I do this monologue completely wrong. And the guy running the audition was the dean of the school at the time. He's like, no, no, no, what else do you got? And in my back pocket, I had been reading this play called does a Tiger wear a necktie. And I had just started to like kind of on my own, do this monologue. And I did it, and then I get a letter, you know, two months later that's like you get into the school. And I was like,

that's great, but there's no way I'm going. At that time, I think maybe it was sixteen seventeen thousand dollars a year, and here I've got an opportunity to go to either Iowa or California, or to go back east and get like a full ride, you know, to get an English degree and play football at one of these other colleges. And then this letter comes that says you've or were happy to inform you that you've been awarded this this scholarship.

And I I'll never forget that moment, man, I'll never forget opening that letter and seeing that and knowing my life was about to change. Now I was going. I was going to go to Chicago. I was going to go the path of so many of my heroes, you know, John Malkovich in this up in Wolf Theater Company and the Goodman Theater, and and it happened. It's wild, it's crazy. I'm so low, it's awesome.

you know, vocal movement, all of those things. Was there a moment for you did that happen at to Paul where you were like, oh, oh, I see now and this is awesome.

two years. And it was a really intense environment where they would cut maybe a quarter of the students every year. I think I just had that openness and willingness because I knew nothing, but I knew that I had this like attraction to the words, getting the words out of my mouth, finding a way to inhabit the body and manufacture. In the beginning of the journey, I thought it was about finding the way to tap into having the real physical and emotional and verbal responses and reactions that I

would have in the given circumstances. And so we began training doing strictly improvisation. It was all Spolen work and Dell Close work and all of this really important stuff, learning about being present, being in the moment, being a responder,

to seeing partners, into material and to given circumstances and environment. Oh, there was so much emphasis put on how your environment affects your body, and just all this work to keep you in the space of your imagination so that you can pretend to have these experiences, so you can manufacture

these emotional states of being. And what was really cool about it, each of the different teachers you had would come from a different school of thought, so you'd have somebody with what felt very methody, and somebody you know, there was you name it, Stanislavsky on down every book

that every teacher seemed to have their day. But what started to click and crack through for me that I didn't realize until much later was the very pragmatic tools that I could utilize to manufacture and imagine these states

of being and then to replicate them. At this point, it was strictly theater training, So the idea of being able to replicate them on a nightly basis while still feeling present and still feeling like you're able to respond to any changes that may occur, but finding the tools so that I could, if I'm playing Vince in Bury Child, scream my guts out for twenty minutes a night, and come back and do it the next night and have

all of my faculties with me. And at that point I was still in the place of like, I'm going to go there. If I'm in mourning, I'm going to lay here and think about all the people who've died, and I'm going to build myself up. But what was being laid, the groundwork that was being laid underneath that approach was a much more technical style and approach of acting. And this is just for context, something that I think

is important to know. During those years when I was at school, I had a lot of addressed mental health issues. I had a lot of untreated struggles that manifested in a pretty debilitating opiate addiction. So by the time I left this incredible school with all these incredible tools and knowledge, I didn't think I was ever going to act again because I just was so lost in the sea of my addiction that I swam out in a way from kind of society for a number of years, nearly died

a number of times. Eventually came had a miracle of consciousness where I came to the belief and decision that I needed help and that I was wanted to live. You know, I was like, I was like Frank Cross, Bill Murray and Scrooge when he's in his coughin casket getting pushed into the to the crematorium and he's like, I want to live. I want to live. And it was like a miracle. All of a sudden, I was

alive again. But it took me about five years to get back on stage once I got clean, because I was so scared that I wouldn't be any good if I didn't have the benefit of getting sedatives after work, and I was also afraid that going there emotionally every night was going to trigger me to relapse. And instead what happened was I did I got back on stage, and I found that my acting was much better than it had ever been before because of all the work

I had been doing and the sobriety. And then secondly, I had this incredible breakthrough where so let's say, and it's one of the very first things I did when I got back on stage was I played both in Oscar Wilde solom and he's a soldier who's so obsessed with Solome and when she refutes his advances, he kills himself on stage. And I am a person who has

struggled with suicide attempts and suicidal ideation. So I thought, oh, I just have to go there didn't work, and the performance when I was trying that in rehearsal and the director was so wonderful, was like it was not I wasn't working, And instead I started to go back into all these tools that I'd learned that I didn't even realize I'd learned about manufacturing something really beautiful with my face, my voice, my eyes, my body, my presence, my energy,

but manufacturing in a way that was much more skilled, like like a guitarist who has notes he is hitting and is manipulating the little muscles to get those notes because it's not real. It's like what I'm doing in that theater wasn't real. It was a little bigger than real, and it was a little to the left of this, and it was to fit in the world of Wild's language and the director's vision. It needed to be sculpted some other way. And it just started to click. Man,

and I just started to go, oh wow. And that has been the journey now for my God, that's been you know, eighteen years, almost twenty years of this path, this journey for me, that has been the joy that I get out of being a technical actor. So many of those tools I learned in school. And you know what else I learned in school that I think is

really important. And if anyone's an actor and watching this, it's like becoming comfortable with who I am energetically physically knowing who I am and knowing that there is a there is a probability that any role from Hamlet to Falstaff, from Willie Lohman to Biff Loman, depending on the vision of the production, if I bring my authentic David self. But I'm not trying to create the Dustin Hoffman version of Willy Loman or the Philip Seymour Hoffman version of

Willy Lohman. I'm not trying to create the so and so version of this thing, the Marlon Brando version of whatever. That I can take my best shot at it, and if I don't get it, I don't get it. But it gave me this great freedom that anything felt possible and that I could embrace being who I am as

a character actor. I honestly think DePaul is one of the best training grounds for character actors just because of that very thing, and in fact, actors like Michael Rooker, w Earl Brown, who else, Judy Greer, PJ byrne Ough, so many fantastic I'm forgetting tons. Carl Malden studied there back in the day. Like it's kind of like a character actor's dream school.

and difficult. But I think ultimately, if you're using those tools to create a character and not you know, self abusing yourself, you know that part of it for me is not as difficult to go certain places.

so sorry, David. We realized we didn't get the coverage on this thing. We need to go back to where we were five minutes ago. When you're saying to her, I think I'm leaving you now, and I need you to Can you do that? But can you make sure your face is kind of sorry? The lighting in this place is weird. Could you like, could you face that way? Because I want to make sure we get the light on you. And I just look at you and I go yes, and I go and I can do it.

And then you go, oh my god, that was so great. Can we do it again? But this time we just had to pick up the pace a little bit because I needed yes, and I can pick up the pace a little bit. Oh god, that was a little too fast. Can you slow down a little bit next time? I go, yes, I can do it. That to me is the dream, not And I've had this happen to me before, and it's been really difficult when I've been in a scene or a production with someone who's like, I'm ready, I'm there.

you know. For me, the only time that I need to put myself somewhere like what you're talking about, I think you and I work exactly the same. And so partly why I'm asking this is to find out if you have that. One of the things that we talked about in school was about entrances, and we spent those tons of time with just a door right like we.

Nolan in No Time Flat. That experience for you being on set with the late great Heath Ledger and Aaron Eckhart and Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, just to name a couple. What was that experience for you at that time in your career.

you know, smaller regional theater is amazing theater. Some of the best theater in the world, in my opinion, is in Chicago. And I was having these incredible experiences, but you know, I was not I was making a meager living. I was getting occasional commercial actually working with pretty incredible directors on like silly commercials. But you know, these these a tour doc filmmakers and indie filmmakers would be shooting

commercials to make money. And all of a sudden, this lifelong dream of being in cinema and finding some way to merge my love of acting with my love of comic books and sci fi and genre, I get this insane opportunity to audition for the sequel to Batman Begins, which I had loved Batman Begins. So I was so excited, and I auditioned along with every other actor in Chicago for a very small there's a cluster of clowns at the beginning of the movie, pulling off of Michael manstyle heist,

and that was the role I auditioned for. I got called back, got to read in front of Christopher Nolan, one of my favorite directors, one of the best directors of all time and definitely of our time, and then I didn't hear anything from them for four months, so I did an entire run of Othello. I closed that show.

going to get to go to London and Jude. So all of a sudden, man, I'm standing in the midst of this surreal reality that is making me in the moment of having to be on set on camera with thousands of extras actors like Gary Oldman walking around, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger. I'm in the presence of greatness and i have to deliver really important energy into a sequence that is supposed to really terrify one of the main protagonists of the story. And I felt so out of my depth.

I felt so terrified, and thank the power of great directors, somebody like Christopher Nolan, who could like give me some really simple direction, help set me at ease, told me a couple of jokes I think to loosen me up, and then really just encouraged me to follow my impulses. And we created that character in that moment. And I'm still floating. I'm still levitating fifteen years later on the

exhilaration I got walking off of that set. Even though I was racked with insecurity and I was sure that I had done a terrible job, just the opportunity to have done that was like a drug like I'd never felt before.

thank you. I think I just verbally diarrhead a bunch of words at him, and he was like, oh, okay, Hi, but you know, you go you get a chance to play on a maestro's orchestra. There's a part of me that was always like, oh, I wish I could get another chance to play the triangle for him. And then when that call came in and they said, hey, there's a role that Chris wants you to play in his new film and would you come down to Universal you could read the script, and I flipped.

of creativity and imagination, and he's relentless. He is a relentless creator, and he's always trying to kick under the rocks and look around and find all the detail and all the magic and kilcondure anything that he can make happen by the way he puts people together and the

way he creates a space that is so safe and encouraging. Again, I've had to do some really dark and twisted and weird things in his films, and I always feel like he just makes me feel so safe to go there, and I always land you in his arms and feel really really proud of the work that he's elevated out of me. I feel like I've learned so much as an actor from him, And again, it's very similar to what you learn from Nolan and all of these great directors.

You've got to trust what's inside. You've got to trust that camera, got to trust your director. Got to stop trying to telegraph or tell the body anything with your body and voice. You've got to allow it to be sent with the most microwaved signals. And believe when I do that, with their encouragement, I always feel like I can give performances that I didn't know I was capable of.

bear of a role to take on. But it was an awesome challenge and I'm so proud of the movie. It's so scary and yet so fun at the same time, and it was really dramatic for me. It's about a guy who's on the verge of a nervous breakdown, who's lost his wife, who's drinking too much, who's about to get canceled. His show is literally on the chopping block because he's like fiftieth in the ratings and Carson's at

number two at this point in nineteen seventy seven. So he just throws everything he possibly can at the screen one night, hoping to elicit shock, and instead really bends the boundaries of his own ethics and invites onto his show some stuff that he really shouldn't have. And Yeah, I'm so excited. I'm so proud of it, and I can't wait for everybody to see it.

are Liz Hayes, Hannah Harris, and Emily Carr. Our talent producer is Ryan Papa Zachary, and our intern is Ali Amir Sahi. Our theme song Bubble and Squeak, performed by the one and only Creed Bradon