Paranoia stars Liam Hemsworth as a working class guy who enters the world of corporate espionage, gets a whole new wardrobe and hangs out with a legend played by Harrison Ford. So it only made sense that when I got to interview Liam Hemsworth that I would focus on his fancy costumes and opportunities to work with legendary actors like Harrison Ford.
The rugged, bearded Hemsworth and I bonded briefly over our shared appreciation of our own facial hair before we got down to business, and talked all about his new thriller, Paranoia.
CraveOnline: I feel guilty for asking this question because the film is about the dangers of dreaming of excess, and avarice, and yet I really want to know if they let you keep all your suits.
Liam Hemsworth: You know what? They did, actually. I had all those suits delivered to my house last week. A big rack of suits. It was kind of weird though, because I don’t know if I’ll ever wear them again. I wore them in the movie, and I feel weird about wearing them in real life now.
None of them are like, red and yellow pinstriped. No one’s going to know…
Yeah, that’s true. They’re pretty simple, yeah.
White shirt, grey slacks.
No, they’re some nice suits in there though. [Laughs]
Was Paranoia a “Liam Hemsworth project” or did you have to audition for this?
The director came to me, probably middle of last year or something, or maybe even earlier. Maybe March of last year. I had a meeting with him and he told me about this script and said that he wanted me to do it, and then I read the script and thought it was a great story.
Did you read the novel as well, or did you want to just go by the script?
No, I just went by the script at the time. Robert [Luketic] had such a clear idea of what he wanted to make, and I wanted to just keep it with him. It was too short a period of time. I didn’t want to read the script and the book at the same time because it would have just confused me. [Laughs] Yeah, it’s a great story. It’s a great insight into the world we live in now, and how much technology has advanced, and how we’re really not prepared for what we’ve done.
I feel like with the whole NSA scandal that came out, this movie could almost seem sort of naïve now, just a few months later.
Yeah.
Now they have everything we do online, ever.
Everything. I think it’s been such an illusion that when we do things over the internet or by phone, [any] communication, that it’s private. It’s so easy for anyone to hack into your personal information, your photos or your computer or e-mail or your texts, all that kind of stuff. It’s all stored out there now. It’s all just in the air.
A part of me takes solace in knowing that it’s way too much information for anyone to ever go through.
Yeah, they’d have to signify and select…
“Liam Hemsworth. My daughter has a crush on him. Check out his account and see if there’s anything creepy going on…”
[Laughs] Yeah. Let’s go look through his creepy photos!
Was the rest of the cast on board by the time you talked to Robert?
I think Harrison [Ford] and Gary [Oldman] were in talks at the time. I think we all came aboard around the same time. I was so excited that they were going to be a part of it. Tremendous guys.
Harrison is on a different wavelength than we’ve usually seen him in this film. Often he’s asked to play Harrison Ford, and here he’s like a badass Bob Balaban.
Yeah.
What were your scenes like with him? Was he in it?
Harrison Ford comes on set and he’s very polite, and says “hello” to everyone. He cares about everything that’s going on, on set. He cares about what’s going on with your character and what’s in the scene and what’s on the desk. He’s very particular about it all, but he’s there to help you as much as he is himself. He’s really a team player, and working with him at first was intimidating but then once we started doing scenes he was just so generous. We would talk about it and discuss it, and I was able to just sit back and watch him do his thing for a lot of takes when I’m off-camera. It’s just great. He cares about film so much. He loves making movies, and that’s why he still makes them. He cares about the whole storyline. It was really exciting and intimidating at the same time, but we became friends through the process. He’s a great guy.
