“What’s the soup du jour? ‘Soup of the day?’ I’ll have that,” Lucas Till smirks as he orders food just prior to our interview about Paranoia. After debating the dungeness crab and the “lounge sushi,” he eventually settles for “the thing at the bottom there” and we can finally move on to our interview about the new Robert Luketic film, in which Till co-stars as the best friend Liam Hemsworth leaves behind on his ill-fated journey through corporate espionage.
Not content to stop there, we also look back on X-Men: First Class, in which Till played Havoc (and no, he doesn’t know how the movie Havoc is related to the movie Cyclops either), and the Hannah Montana: The Movie, in which he played the teen heartthrob in a cowboy hat with a horse. He had conflicted feelings about that one, but now looks back on it with fondness.
Plus, Lucas Till reveals why he’s dictatorial about DJ’s after filming the upcoming drama Strings. Don’t fake it around Lucas Till, ladies and gentlemen. He knows when a DJ knows what they’re doing.
CraveOnline: There is something slightly implausible I found about Parnaoia. I wonder if you could comment on that. Someone in the film takes one look at you and says, “There’s a virgin.”
Lucas Till: [Laughs] Of all the things! I like that. That’s pretty smart.
“You know he’s like a studmuffin, right? He’s got the solid features…” “But he’s wearing glasses, so clearly a virgin!”
But, also, if you take a couple frames of the movie and you take a picture of, god rest her soul, her later years, from “Golden Girls,” Bea Arthur? You take a picture of those two and you put them side-by-side, that haircut? That little rolly do that I had in there? It’s kind of uncanny.
Was that specifically your comment? “Make me look like Bea Arthur in ‘The Golden Girls?’”
[Laughs] No! But about three weeks in when I’m already established, I was like, “I look like Bea Arthur. That’s what I look like right now.” But no, it was funny though. It was so different than what I had done before.
It strikes me that a lot of this film is about style, and the way people are perceived.
Yeah, yeah.
Liam Hemsworth gets all these spectaculous suits, and here you’ve got a dorky tie. Did they go through a lot of costume possibilities with to find your character, or did they just tell you who you were going to be?
Yeah, no, they were very open to any ideas that I had. I just don’t think I had any fucking ideas. [Laughs] I was like, “I have no idea what a guy from Brooklyn who’s kind of a hipster but a smart kid, I have no idea what he’s going to wear. “That looks hilarious. Yes, I’ll put that on.” I kind of just went with the flow on it. But they were totally open to any suggestions I would have. I think I said no to the socks with the rolled up highwaters. They were funny, and there was just a point where I as like, “Guys, I’m not wearing Capris with leggings.”
“Honestly…”
But I did go in for the joke. As goofy and as nerdy as I could look, but still kind of… I really just wanted to contrast whatever Liam was doing. I didn’t want to overlap at any point. Anything different was the way to go for me.
That is a good point. Your character is the one who doesn’t conform. You’re trying to get by on your own merits, and not just fit in the room. Did you work with Liam a lot on that contrast, or did you just look at him and go, “I’ll do the opposite?”
Exactly. The latter, yeah. Not because he would have… I think that’s what I said to Robert [Luketic] when I first met for this, was, “I want to do everything opposite of [Liam].” He was like, “Do you like glasses?” I said, “Everything opposite of what Liam does,” just to contrast. It makes a nice little pop, to add a layer to the character that’s something I don’t even have to think about as far as performance-wise. It’s already there. It’s on me.
What else did you talk about in that first meeting with Robert?
Let’s see, what else did we talk about… I don’t know. It must have went well. I kind of thought it went terrible…
Why did you think it went terrible?
Well, he started asking me about “What was your training? What did you do, what have you done…?” He was really just asking questions to get to know me, but in my mind he was like, “Well, did you go through training? Are you a trained actor? Are you seasoned? You know, Australian actors come over here and kill it, and what are you doing? What makes you better than me?” [Laughs] I don’t know, I thought I was going through the grill, but I’m also kind of paranoid. I guess it went well because I got the offer after that.
So that was the extent of the audition? You didn’t have pages or anything?
Right.
Did he say work of yours made him go, “This guy?”
I don’t think he had seen anything I had done up to that point. [Laughs]
Did you just have an awesome headshot?
Maybe he checked it out later. Off the top of my head, I don’t know. Maybe he had known that I was in [X-Men: First Class], and he was like, “Ah, that’s a big enough movie. He seems like a nice kid. Let’s put him in this movie.”
Has that opened up a lot of doors for you?
Yeah. Certainly.
