Interview: ‘The River,’ ‘The Grey’ make actor’s year exciting
One look at Joe Anderson and you know he was born to play Kurt Cobain in something — a film, a TV series, a play.
And, yes, Anderson says, “there have been talks, but nothing official. Until it comes to fruition, I just have to wait.”
Not wait around.
A natural musician — he starred in the Beatles-based “Across the Universe” — Anderson worked on three projects in one year — “The River,”“The Grey” and “Breaking Dawn.”
In less than a week, he went from minus 40 temperatures in Canada to scorching heat in Puerto Rico.
The former was for “The Grey,” a drama about a group of airplane crash survivors fighting off wolves. The latter, a role in “The River,” a new ABC drama about a wildlife expert who goes missing.
“Throw in ‘Twilight’ and it was a pretty interesting year,” Anderson says with a smile.
While he knew his fate in “The Grey,” he doesn’t in “The River.” “I honestly cannot say what’s going to happen. It’s kind of appealing to come to work and know it’s going to be different week in and week out. It’s not a procedural. There’s opportunity for a massive amount of flipping and shaping in the character’s arc. It can turn on a dime and become something else quite quickly.”
In certain, over-excitable corners of the blogosphere, The Grey has been renamed Wolf Puncher. That’s understandable: the trailer does, after all, go heavy on imagery of Liam Neeson strapping miniature bottles of liquor to his knuckles, then limbering up to face a slavering beast. But Joe Carnahan’s follow-up to The A-Team is actually a long, long way from that bicep-baring, tank-flinging slab of macho cheese. A tale of men dropped into an extreme survival scenario, it’s best described as a meditation on grief and resilience. And if that makes it sound boring, it’s not. At all.
The opening sets the tone: while the other roughnecks on his oil-drilling crew celebrate the end of their Alaskan stint, loner John Ottway (Liam Neeson) wanders out into the snow, kneels down and puts a shotgun barrel in his mouth. For whatever reason, the howl of a far-off timber wolf makes him opt out of suicide — for now. One horrific plane-crash later, Ottway finds himself lost in the wilderness, the wolf’s brethren relentlessly stalking him and his fellow survivors, a fire slowly sparking to life in our hero’s eyes.
It’s a meaty role, and Neeson sinks his teeth into it and doesn’t let go, whether he’s growling lines like, “I’m going to start beating the shit out of you in the next five seconds,” or quietly talking a man through his protracted death. You believe, 100 per cent, that this is the man you’d want by your side when everything goes to hell.
Ottway’s clearly the alpha male of the pack, with the rest of the group far more hazily sketched — there’s an ex-con (nasty), a family man (wears glasses) and so on. But that’s kind of the point. The whole tale can be read as a metaphor: a grief-stricken man wandering in the woods of depression, haunted by demons that just won’t leave him alone, trying to hold himself together long enough to make it out the other side.
Or you could just grab some popcorn and enjoy it as one of the best survival horrors in years. Carnahan succeeds where the likes of The Way Back failed, making this trip to the edge of hell more thrilling than draining. No green screens here, just a bona fide freezing forest where even the trees can kill. As for the wolves — a combination of puppetry, real beasts and 300-style CGI — they’re as wily, implacable and haunting as fairy-tale creatures. Except Red Riding Hood never strapped miniature bottles of liquor to her knuckles.
Verdict
Carnahan’s best work since Narc, with a powerhouse performance by Neeson and real emotional heft. So, as much Gut Puncher as Wolf Puncher.
Joe Anderson on The Grey, ABC’s The River and More
In Joe Carnahan’s survivalist thriller The Grey, Joe Anderson plays loudmouth oil rigger Todd Flannery, who always manages to rub his co-workers the wrong way with his less-than-appropriate comments. However, once their plane goes down, Flannery and the rest of the survivors – played by Liam Neeson, Frank Grillo, Dermot Mulroney, Dallas Roberts, Nonso Anozie, Ben Bray and James Badge Dale – are forced to work together to endure both the harsh wintry terrain where they landed as well as a pack of deadly wolves whose feeding grounds the group unknowingly stumble upon.
Dread Central recently caught up with Anderson to talk about his experiences working with such a brilliant ensemble of actors on The Grey, his thoughts on his character Flannery and how nothing can ever prepare you mentally for the kind of shoot they endured alongside filmmaker Carnahan. Anderson also briefly chatted about his next project on the horizon, ABC’s upcoming found footage horror series “The River”, which was created by Oren Peli and Steven Spielberg.
Anderson, a classically trained actor, discussed how he first learned of Carnahan’s work as a director and what his first impressions were of the script for The Grey.
“The first time I learned of Joe Carnahan was while I was in drama school,” explained Anderson. “They showed us his movie Narc, which is this incredibly brutal cop story that was so dark and haunting. But there was this one shot that always stuck with me, and it was Jason Patric standing in the shower, holding his child, and that’s not the kind of sensitive moment you see very often in that style of storytelling. Who would have thought a handful of years later I’d be working with him and on something just as brilliant as Narc was when it was released?”
What an update I have today! In the past few days, Joe has been out not once but twice promoting his new projects! On January 10, he attended the TCA Winter Press Tour to talk about The River, and last night (Jan 11) he attended the LA premiere of The Grey! Pictures from both events, as well as a new promotional shoot for The River, have been added to the gallery – enjoy!
2012 | The Grey
2012 | "The River"
2012 | Lives of the Saints
2012 | Twilight: Breaking Dawn Pt. II
