Kurt Russell. He’s a legend.
When I found out that I was going to interview Kurt at our secret set visit of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. #2 last spring, I was speechless. Yup, that doesn’t really happen too often for me, but truly – I was speechless.
Kurt. Russell. We’re talking the Kurt Russell from Overboard, one of my favorite movie’s of all time.
So how does Kurt Russell come into play with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. #2?
Are you ready for this?
Let’s just say he plays a little role called, Ego… the father of Peter “Star-Lord” Quill!
Oh, yes. You heard me correctly, he’s the father of Peter in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and it’s going to be INCREDIBLE! We had the chance to grab some time with Kurt while in Atlanta for our secret visit and he was beyond generous with his time and really open to talking about this film and the role he’s taken on. The cool thing for me was immediately seeing that he was a BIG Chris Pratt fan, you could see it instantly when we were chatting about Chris. These 2 really seemed to bond on this film.
We were very curious to hear about his role and why he decided to take it on.
“Yeah, I’m his father and he’s a man of adventure and it’s a very full role. You have to play a lot of different types of scenes where we are emotionally very different. We get to explore a lot of Peter Quill’s past. You’ll learn a lot about where he comes from and why he is what he is.”
As you know from my past posts about Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, I’m a HUGE Chris Pratt fan. I LOVED Guardians of the Galaxy, so I’m really excited to have Kurt Russell in this movie so that more of Peter is exposed and revealed. In order to really understand who he is, it’s important to know as much about him as possible… and it’s obvious that his father holds the key to many of those questions. I love that Kurt is excited to be part of this movie and knows that his role really will help the audience connect and understand more of about Peter. I love how he mentioned that people had asked him if he was going to be part of this film as Peter’s father and that he started to look into the movie and really see the connection and the story behind Guardians of the Galaxy, “I suddenly realized that this movie must have been very popular and for some reason the audience cared about who his father was gonna be. So I said well, gee I don’t know I’ll see what it’s like. I read the script… and I said well I need to see the movie and I watched it for about eight or nine minutes. I was watching it with Goldie and I just immediately — as soon as he kicked one of those things I said, you know, I watched the movie and I got the jest of the feeling of what the Guardians of the Galaxy world is like. I get very much why I’d be a good person to play the dad with the script that I had, so this is gonna be fun to do and it’s turned out to be a blast, really fun.”
How cool is that? I love that he identified himself as Peter’s father. Not to mention, he got to work side by side with Chris and James! The admiration, I’m telling you, it makes the partnership even sweeter to know that they all like each other! “Chris is great and the whole cast is great and James is really fun to always work with someone who really knows what they wanna do and what they wanna show and pull off and try to create.” Again, it’s just great to see this teamwork, it’s something that everyone in the cast has talked about. I love that there’s such a sense of family within the cast.
We ALL tried to get as much out of Kurt as we possibly could, but he was keeping his lips pretty tight on giving away too much. He’s quite the professional because we tried!! We all wanted some insight, we even tried to get him to talk about music and if there’s a connection there with it for him, too. All he would give us is, “It will be quiet important.” AHHH!!! As we tried to get a little more, Kurt shared, “There’s a strong connection to music, particular songs. It’s a big part of this world and he continues that theme very, very strongly.” So we’re going to have to wait for the movie to find out more!!
We actually interviewed Kurt in one of the big “blue rooms” where they shot a bunch of his scenes. It was really cool interviewing his there because he was actually on set and in between scenes at the moment. We needed to ask – standing in a room that’s obviously a blue screen, what is it like to have a set like this?
“I’ve always been an actor like many actors who respond to their surroundings. And, you know, if you and I are playing the scene together and I see you, and I’m talking to you… I kind of wanna and I see that and I wanna play with that. If you don’t have that the spontaneity is different. On a movie like this, it’s really understanding. When we did Tombstone there was a scene where I was walking with Dana Delany. The wind was blowing that day a little bit and so it was blowing some of the cotton woods around, you know, like little things and one was gonna blow on her face so I just picked it like that and it was just part of the scene and it was very organic. It was very good. That won’t happen. So you have to invent that. That’s kind of fun to do.” It was very interesting to hear Kurt’s take on this because you can tell he loves acting and wants to make it as real and organic as possible. He’s committed to his roles and really wants to give it all he’s got. I love that he just went with whatever he needed to go with on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2. “Chris and I did some stuff when we first got together and he really knows that he’s my son and that I’m his father, and I know that he’s my son… and we’re doing this really cool thing, and there’s nothing there. And he and I looked at each other and we were imagining things, but we were imagining the same things, so that was fun to play with. It’ll be fun for us to see that physicalized and then see if we told them what we were thinking, you know, so then they’ll include that. That was fun because only he and I knew what was happening and it’ll be fun to see that brought to life.” I can’t imagine working with that kind of nothing, but he was cool with it.
I was curious to find out from Kurt, what do you hope the audience gets out of the character? His answer was so much deeper and so much richer than I ever imagined.
“Well, good question – actually because number one, when you’re planning a character, I think you try to find things that’ll be entertaining and do them in a way that’s entertaining, that’s fun to watch. And yet, in movies like this, it’s easy to sort of be frivolous and just look at it as comic book venue. And I think comic books, especially science fiction, there’s two worlds… There’s two worlds where you can ask these big questions and one of them is westerns and one of them is science fiction. You can get away with asking the big questions especially in westerns. You can get away with asking big, American, political questions because it’s so, it’s deeply engrained in American persona, even in children. Cowboys are a certain thing to us. The women who are connected to cowboys are a certain thing to us and in science fiction you can ask, is there a god question? What would you do if you could be invisible? They let you ask these huge connections. And within this, the confides of this story — what if you were Peter Quill and this happened to you? This marvel comic book world that Guardians of the Galaxy is and you never knew who your father was but, like real life you have created in your mind someone who put on a pedestal, which I think is a very important thing to talk about when you talk about children who don’t know who their parents are. Their father has left or their father never existed or their father was never in their life or maybe he was there for a short while and he left. Are you responsible for that? All those very real human things.”
Pretty incredible, right? How honest and open and real and raw he was with us, it was incredible.
“So when you say what do you hope to bring for the audience, I do hope to have all the entertainment value that you should get in movie, but underneath is the reality of when you’re playing it is the reality aspect of the relationship that is important to that person that’s real, that has consequence, that’s not comic book, that’s not cartoon. It’s not funny even though some of it is gonna end up very funny, but that’s life. So that’s why I think one of the reasons James Gunn wants to get Kurt Russell to play the part because I’m gonna go in there and do that.”
This movie it going to be epic.
Advance tickets are now on sale for May 5th!
Disclosure: Press Trip. Travel expenses were covered.
