Beth Behrs

Stunning American actress Beth Behrs has been acting since a very young age. Having learnt her craft treading the boards of theatre, the 26 year old has parts on screens since 2009 and landed the role of rich-girl-who-looses-everything Caroline Channing in E4’s hit new American import, Two Broke Girls. Joined on screen by Kat Dennings (who plays Max Black) the leading ladies struggle through the day working at a diner whilst chasing their dream of opening a cupcake shop. Created by Michael Patrick King – whose writing credits include Sex And The City, Will & Grace and Cybill – and comedienne/actress Whitney Cummings, the show has enjoyed unprecedented success, bagging a People’s Choice Award for “Favourite New TV Comedy” and a second season was commissioned before the first had been finished. WONDERLAND caught some time with Beth for a quick chat about the show and find out how she got involved in acting.

Is Two Broke Girls a fun show to be part of?
It is! Kat Dennings has become a great friend of mine and she’s so hilarious and talented and we shoot in front of a live audience. It’s fun when they clap and cheer or they’re cracking up. It’s such a cool thing seeing them react.

Do they ever not laugh?
We have an amazing writing staff – Michael Patrick King and all of our writers – who give us alternative jokes and that’s a cool thing as an actor because it won’t be rehearsed and you have to work with it right then. But we’ll always keep them laughing!

What attracted you to your character, Caroline?
I love that she’s not a stereotypical Upper East Side blonde. She is a fish out of water in the restaurant and there are things she doesn’t know, but she’s not dumb. She went to Wharton Business School and has this incredible savvy for money and business. I also love that the girls were never outwardly mean to each other even though they are from different walks of life. I think that’s really refreshing to see – especially to young women out there.

You’re playing a waitress in the show – being an actress, have you had lots of experience of being a waitress in real life? 
I have! I worked at an Americanized Mexican restaurant for a while called Chili’s. I’d work in the cocktail area and they served big beer glasses. On my first night I put all the beer glasses on one tray thinking I’d be fine to carry it and I spilt them all on a table of ten people. I went to the bathroom and cried. It was awful. I wasn’t the best waitress

The show has already won a People’s Choice Award and was commissioned for a second season before the first had finished airing – has the success surprised you?
When we were filming the pilot it was a special experience it felt like we’d been doing it for years which I’ve heard from other actors is very rare so I think we knew we had something special and we all loved each other and working together. At least we were having a good time and you hope that energy and specialness translates to the audience and I’m glad it did.

There has also been a bit of controversy attached to the show. Michael was accused of being too crude and touching on stereotypes – do you think some people have failed to notice it’s a comedy and not a documentary?
Yeah and I think Michael said before, everything the characters do comes out of a real place. There’s backlash with everything but we love what we’re doing and we believe in the show and the characters and it seems like the audience agrees.

Controversy is also good in that it means people are watching.
Exactly! We’ve said the word “vagina” on TV like it’s never been said before. Doing comedy is supposed to push boundaries but that’s what makes it new and innovative and exciting. I’m glad, at least, to be a part of that and this whole “women in comedy” loop that’s going on.

Vagina is hardly offensive at all. If you spent a day in our office you’d be shocked by the language you’d overhear.
[laughs] That’s honestly the truth! In most people’s day-to-day life the word “vagina” is not that big a deal but for whatever reason, saying it on network television was a big deal.

According to your Wikipedia, you’ve been acting since you were 4 – is this true?
It is true. I’ve been doing theatre since before I could read. My mom had to read my lines for my auditions. I used to watch The Sound of Music a million times a day and I fell in love with it and kept asking my parents to let me do something like that so they got me into theatre which was great.

You’ve been an ambitious actress your whole life!
Yes, definitely. And I still hope to come to the West End or Broadway eventually. My dream is to do a Broadway or West End musical. I love Les Miserables and The Sound of Music and Wicked. Although I’d also love to be in a new one – is Andrew Lloyd Webber writing a new one any time soon?

We’ll find out and get you a part.
I’ll cut you 10%

It’s a deal.

Two Broke Girls is on E4 Thursdays at 9pm. Beth Behrs will be in a new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical as soon as we have a word with him.

[Originally published on Wonderlandmagazine.com, April 2012]

Peter Vack

Admit it. We’ve all been there. After a particularly dry spell you end up going out, getting blind drunk and wake up the following morning next to the woman of your dreams only for her to up and leave wearing your favourite pair of jeans and passing you a fake number. You’re gutted to have been so brutally shaken off. And you want those jeans back. Yeah. We have been there. But can this really be the premise for an entire TV show? MTV think so and I Just Want My Pants Back, based on the novel by David Rosen, has turned out to be a surprise hit with its hilariously honest approach to modern day dating. Wonderland met its star, Peter Vack, who plays hopeless romantic Jason who wants to get the girl – and his jeans.

Jason has phenomenal luck with the ladies and is bed hopping each episode – are you as successful with women in your own life?
If only I could be as successful as Jason! The cool thing about him is if you look at the raw facts of his life you would think he is a player. A smooth talking Don Juan type, but I feel like his success with ladies comes from a much more pure place and each new sexual encounter Jason really believes “This could be the one”. He’s not a womanizer even though he does get a lot of action.

Are those characteristics that you can relate to as well?
Being a pure hearted romantic? Oh yeah. [laughs] I mean I’m not exactly like Jason, but I’m definitely a romantic guy. Although there are probably people who would read this and go “No he’s not!”

Oh really? You have some bad history?
I have no history. My reputation is completely unblemished. And I want that written in print! Peter’s reputation is unblemished!

The sex scenes in the show are always a bit awkward – are they just as awkward to film?
It’s interesting. I do think that the show touches on this sort of fantasy of how sexy your 20s are and how everyone seems to idealize this urban lifestyle of young, cool, attractive people hooking up all the time. And I like that Pants shows you that world but it shows how awkward and bizarre it is. There is definitely an underbelly of the single free life that is you might be talking to someone in a bar and they seem normal and then you get home and your in bed and you realize that the world is full of weirdos.

In the UK, Pants means underwear what would the show be like if it was titled I Just Want My Underwear Back?
That’s funny. It would be a totally different show. It would be about a guy who has one pair of underwear that got stolen and then he was uncomfortable having his bear bottom on the harsh denim of his jeans. It wouldn’t be a comedy but it would be a deep meditation for someone expressing their dislike for freedom ‘down there’. I want to be constrained. At least that’s how I feel. It’s really important for me to wear underwear.

The way the show is written is very realistic and honest and seems very genuine – do you feel you could be friends with Jason and everyone?
That’s the thing that first struck me – especially between a male female relationship like the one with [Jason and] Tina (played by Kim Shaw, Jason’s best friend). It’s something so specific and interesting what happens when a man and a woman are just friends with no romantic tension and I think Dave Rosen just nailed that. When I read the script I thought I was reading a transcript of two friends with real history. That’s the kind of truth an actor is looking for in a script.

According to your twitter, you are Piers Morgan’s understudy – how is that going?
Normally he’s fine and he doesn’t need me to go on, but sometimes he does but then I kill it. It is just a side gig but I like it. [laughs] It was meant to be a throw away joke and be funny but I guess I do actually like him. That’s the thing about Twitter. You write something very off hand and “You mean I actually have to answer for what I write?” That’s why I’m not very good on twitter because I’ll come up with something I think is funny to but then I’ll think about it for half an hour and end up not tweeting it which I think flying the face of the whole tweeting handbook. I think I overthink for twitter.

Don’t deliberate, just let it out.
I think those are great words to live by – “Don’t deliberate, just let it out”. I think you should end the interview with that. If there’s something we came to it’s that.

[Originally published on wonderland magazine.com, April 2012]

Tom Sturridge

I’m sat on a rickety bar stool in a west London pub awaiting the arrival of Tom Sturridge. The meeting point is not the most likely place you’d expect to find an on-the-up actor, but I’m here at Sturridge’s suggestion and am surveying the relatively unassuming location. There’s a reassuring pub smell in the air, a dartboard hangs on the wall, a garish red carpet runs throughout and a token drunk is swaying at the bar gesturing towards the barmaid’s breasts. The barmaid barely flinches. He must be a regular.

Sturridge arrives. He’s wearing a long dark coat and grungy beanie. He expertly bypasses said drunk and, like a true gent, whips off his hat before introducing himself with a firm handshake. He’s warm, charismatic and down to earth. Should’ve guessed from the pub.

Born and raised in London, Tom is the son of director Charles Sturridge and actress Phoebe Nicholls and, although he made his on-screen debut aged 7 in a 1996 Channel 4 production of Gulliver’s Travels, directed by his father, he insists he never thought he’d end up being an actor.

“I was a pretty clichéd teenager that didn’t want anything to do with what my parents did,” he explains (the Gulliver’s Travels thing was, apparently, an excuse for his father to legitimately have him on set in Portugal). “I genuinely never thought that acting could be something I would be interested in.”

But then, a combination of admiration and fate convinced him otherwise. A longtime fan of Academy Award-winning Hungarian filmmaker István Szabó, Sturridge jumped at the opportunity to appear in his 2004 film Being Julia when he was approached by a casting director friend to play the on-screen son of Annette Bening and Jeremy Irons.

“It was a seductive experience, really,” he says of the filmmaking. “It was shot in Budapest during the summer holidays of school when I was 17. I was living on my own and it was the first time I felt like a grown up. I wasn’t with my friends or family or the school football team, I was in a foreign country because I was doing a job. It was formative.”

Since then he has enjoyed a small part in Vanity Fair opposite Reese Witherspoon (“um… one scene”) and a supporting role in Brit hit The Boat That Rocked. Yet despite rubbing shoulders with some of the biggest celebrities in Hollywood, Sturridge has so far managed to avoid falling victim to the seemingly relentless paparazzi that would normally surround a good looking young actor scoring parts in Hollywood films. “All I know is the life I have lived and [the paparazzi] have never come into my life once,” he says, stating he prefers a more low key lifestyle.

But wait, isn’t he the much-hounded Sienna Miller’s current squeeze? Er, yes. So it’s fair to say he’s not looking to encourage active interest in his personal life (Miller herself has for years campaigned for improved privacy laws and recently won a small victory against News International on the matter). “The one power I have in these situations is to choose not to talk about it for once,” he says, politely refusing to comment on both their relationship and the fact that they are expecting a child together.

His next film project is On The Road, the highly anticipated Walter Salles adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s heavily autobiographical and era-defining novel. This May, it’s premiering at Cannes – and Sturridge is hoping to eradicate all memory of his last experience there.

“Sometimes you go to Cannes with a trailer,” he begins, describing the last time he came to the French Riviera with 2007’s Like Minds. “They held a press conference for this trailer to try and sell the film. It was seven in the morning and the only person who came to the press conference was from Australian Teletext. So my notion of Cannes is a seriously depressing place where bad films are desperately sold.”

On The Road, is the most ambitious project Sturridge has been involved with to date – not least because it is the adaptation of one of the most celebrated novels in American history, so celebrated in fact that the Americans themselves have long been “too scared to make it,” he remarks. The cast, crew and production of the film have been put together on a truly international scale with funding by Film 4 and French company MK2 Productions. Director Walter Salles is Brazilian, and the cast is balanced between Americans Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart and Kirsten Dunst peppered with Brits Sam Riley and Sturridge, who supports the cast in the role of Carlo Marx. Fans of the novel, will know that Marx is a thinly veiled dramatisation of Kerouac’s real life friend, Allen Ginsberg, but not in the form of the large, balding, hippy that springs to mind when you hear the name.

“The person I was playing was an 18-year-old guy who hadn’t come out yet, wasn’t the voice of a generation, was confused, shy, intellectually brilliant but sort of socially inarticulate – which is totally against what the world’s thought of him would be,” he says, adding that he had a wealth of material to help him research the historical figure. “His diaries and letters from that period have been published so you can literally go through On The Road the book, work out the scene and go to June 1949 to read his diary. You can find what brand of tea Ginsberg was drinking when he had [a particular] conversation.” You might think all this would be incredibly helpful for an actor who was determined to give a good performance, however the materials were almost a hindrance instead of a help, says Sturridge. “I read everything,” he begins. “Every piece of poetry he wrote up until that age, all his diaries. I read biographies, I read so much stuff but remembered on the first day of filming that I wasn’t trying to become a Ginsberg expert, I was trying to play a character. I remember shooting a first scene and them saying “action!” and thinking “fuck! I’ve totally forgotten to sort of… read the scripts!” I can tell you all sorts of things about Ginsbergs dietary feelings in this period in time but have no idea how to say these lines.”

The film itself has effectively been in production since the rights were bought by Frances Ford Coppola in 1979 (Coppola is an executive producer on the project). Attempts stalled until Salles came on board, shortly after completing his own road trip epic, The Motorcycle Diaries. However even with the right talent behind it, it was still a little longer before the film finally went into production in the latter half of 2010 – but the role of Marx was one that Sturridge was determined to bag.

“I did an audition for Walter and it went well. But that was three years before it got made. And then I found out from friends that it was being made again and I knew Walter was in New York so I pretended that I was in New York, when in fact I wasn’t,” he says. “I arranged a meeting with him, and then flew to New York to be like “hey! I was here the whole time, just passing by” and had lunch with him and we talked.”

After going to all that effort to get the part, does he feel he did it justice? Well, yes, but he doesn’t seem to be the sort to torture himself unnecessarily about his craft. “It’s acting,” he says with a smile. “I’m not fucking up surgery. No one’s getting killed.” 

[Originally published in Wonderland Magazine, Issue 30, April 2012. Photography by Toby Knott.]