{"id":255,"date":"2009-09-25T07:49:54","date_gmt":"2009-09-25T07:49:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theduanewells.com\/?p=255"},"modified":"2018-07-29T01:46:33","modified_gmt":"2018-07-29T01:46:33","slug":"david-millbern-among-friends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theduanewells.com\/staging3\/david-millbern-among-friends\/","title":{"rendered":"David Millbern: Among Friends"},"content":{"rendered":"

For his latest role, actor David Millbern gets to be bad — very bad — and by his own account he savored just about every moment of the experience. Cast as Liam Macklin in\u00a0here! Networks’\u00a0Death Among Friends<\/em><\/a><\/strong>,<\/em>\u00a0Millbern portrays a ruthless hired gun who kills a young lawyer in order to cover up a corporate secret, then goes on to terrorize the same lawyer\u2019s family when he realizes that the precious secret his boss so desperately wants to keep under wraps didn\u2019t die with his victim. A thriller (rife with twists, turns, and even a few explosions), the Ron Oliver\u2013directed\u00a0Death Among Friends\u00a0<\/em>is at its core a classic tale of good versus evil, featuring villainous performances from Millbern and an intoxicatingly venomous Margot Kidder. Ultimately\u00a0Death Among Friends,<\/em>\u00a0like all successful films, is simply a vehicle for the cast to tell a story, which is what\u00a0 Millbern says he enjoys most about his job. \u201cI just like to tell stories,\u201d Millbern says. \u201cThe job of an actor is to sit around the fire and tell stories. That\u2019s what we all do. That\u2019s what filmmakers do. That\u2019s what screenwriters do. And the chance to tell authentic stories of the [LGBT] community is where it\u2019s at.\u201d With\u00a0Death Among Friends<\/em>\u00a0debuting on here! this Friday, Millbern talked to Advocate.com about the way telling same-sex love stories has changed over the years, playing the heavy in his new film, and the joys of working with Margot Kidder. Advocate.com:\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>You, sir, are really quite over-the-top sinister in this new film.<\/strong> David Millbern:\u00a0<\/em>I know. It\u2019s so good to be bad. [Laughs<\/em>] It feels so great. I\u2019ve got a lot of inner rage. So I take it you truly relished this role, then?<\/strong> Well, it\u2019s true … it\u2019s just so much fun to be bad. I know what Joan Collins must have felt like in Dynasty.<\/em>\u00a0Evil is good, you know? [Laughs<\/em>] The film used to be called\u00a0Something Evil Comes\u00a0<\/em>and … I was the evil that came. Was Liam Macklin the most wicked character you\u2019ve ever portrayed on film?<\/strong> It\u2019s\u00a0interesting because I did a film for here! called\u00a0In Her Line of Fire\u00a0<\/em>with Mariel Hemingway and David Keith. In that particular film I played\u00a0a psychotic ex-marine mercenary …\u00a0 [and] for that character I had tats on\u00a0and a shaved head … the whole jarhead haircut and everything. That\u00a0character was more visibly psychotic. With this character [Macklin] I\u00a0had to sit on everything, which is actually more menacing because you\u00a0don\u2019t know what my character is going to come up with. Indeed. In fact, it\u2019s the unknown depth of your character\u2019s sort of psychotic nature that makes him most compelling to watch. <\/strong>I\u00a0think we\u2019re most fearful of the people who don\u2019t show anything at all.\u00a0My character is not a raving lunatic — he\u2019s just silent the entire time. Ron Oliver, the director, wanted [Macklin], this hired\u00a0assassin [who is] employed by the Margot Kidder character, to not be\u00a0quite up with technology and how younger people were communicating.\u00a0[He] wanted him to be not quite with it, which I thought was\u00a0interesting as well. All he knows how to do is kill and follow orders\u00a0with no sense of self at all. How did you prepare to be so deliciously bad in this role, and what were you thinking about as you did?<\/strong> I\u00a0think all of us have a lot of inner rage, and whether it is allowed to\u00a0come out or not is what defines whether you\u2019re sane or not. An actor\u00a0can take some of that inner rage that we all have and make it translate\u00a0to camera and get it out. It\u2019s like the whole primal scream thing. I\u2019m\u00a0allowed as a person because of what I do to get it out, and I think you\u00a0just tap into that as an artist. You just tap into what ticks oneself off, and once you do that, then when the right moment comes on-screen\u00a0you can just let it out and it comes from a very real place. That\u2019s\u00a0joyous for an actor. That\u2019s joy to be able to tap into real things and\u00a0go through with it. Did you make any special concessions to your character on the set while you were shooting the film? <\/strong>I\u2019m\u00a0a Method actor, so I consciously did not want to become friends with the\u00a0cast. I\u2019m a really friendly guy, but it\u2019s hard to be on a set and be\u00a0like, “Oh, yeah, great car” and “Oh, you did this last night” and then go\u00a0into a murderous rage. It comes off fake. So I did keep myself\u00a0separate from most of the ensemble cast and I found that was great\u00a0because my character didn\u2019t know them and there was a sense of\u00a0discovery throughout the movie … of discovering who these young people\u00a0are. Again, being Method, I didn\u2019t want to know a lot about [the\u00a0cast] personally because it didn\u2019t service the piece. So it was a very\u00a0lonely shoot in a way. I didn\u2019t fraternize with the cast in between\u00a0takes because I was basically in character and I didn\u2019t want to have\u00a0any diversion. You work with both Margot Kidder, who has a divinely\u00a0evil role in this film, and Nicholle Tom, around whom much of the film\u2019s\u00a0drama swirls. What was it like acting opposite those two women?<\/strong> Working\u00a0with Margot Kidder was a real joy, and Nicholle Tom is certainly a\u00a0wonderful, wonderful lady. Both of those ladies are really wonderful to\u00a0work with and they brought a lot to their characters. Margot and\u00a0Nicholle are two classy ladies who brought reality to the piece in a\u00a0fun way. Speaking of fun, there\u2019s always a bit of that behind the\u00a0scenes on every set. What was one of the funniest moments for you\u00a0during the shooting of the film?<\/strong> Everybody on the set called\u00a0director Ron Oliver “Daddy.” At one point on the set … I caught myself\u00a0calling Ron “Daddy” and he just sat there coolly and said “See, they\u00a0all come around to calling me ‘Daddy.'” [Laughs<\/em>] I was just doing it out\u00a0of rote. I would never call a director “Daddy.” You were in two films,\u00a0Twilight of the Golds<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Gods and Monsters,<\/em>\u00a0which dealt with gay\u00a0themes in a pretty straightforward and explicit manner. However,\u00a0Death\u00a0Among Friends,<\/em>\u00a0deals with a same-sex relationship between two of the\u00a0main characters in a much more matter-of-fact way. Is that a sign\u00a0of changing times? <\/strong> I think that speaks to what here! Networks does —\u00a0they speak to today in that we don\u2019t have to make a big deal about\u00a0people being gay or not gay. The lesbian characters in this film are\u00a0just who they are. [Their relationship] doesn\u2019t have to be highlighted\u00a0or bracketed. That\u2019s where we\u2019re going and that\u2019s what here! does so\u00a0brilliantly. They portray the LGBT community in an authentic way. And\u00a0that\u2019s what I think this film does beautifully.<\/p>\n

Originally published at <\/span>Advocate.com<\/span><\/a>. To read this post and more by Duane Wells at the Advocate, <\/span>click here<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For his latest role, actor David Millbern gets to be bad — very bad — and by his own account he savored just about every moment of the experience. Cast as Liam Macklin in\u00a0here! Networks’\u00a0Death Among Friends,\u00a0Millbern portrays a ruthless hired gun who kills a young lawyer in order to cover up a corporate secret, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":88889,"featured_media":696,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1588],"tags":[1183,1483,1592],"class_list":["post-255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","tag-celebrity","tag-lgbt","tag-actor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theduanewells.com\/staging3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theduanewells.com\/staging3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theduanewells.com\/staging3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theduanewells.com\/staging3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/88889"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theduanewells.com\/staging3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/theduanewells.com\/staging3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5565,"href":"https:\/\/theduanewells.com\/staging3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255\/revisions\/5565"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theduanewells.com\/staging3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theduanewells.com\/staging3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theduanewells.com\/staging3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theduanewells.com\/staging3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}