WRITERβS NOTE: This article was written in 2012.
The news of Michael Clarke Duncan’s untimely passing has us all feeling very sad, and I could not agree more with his “Green Mile” director Frank Darabont when he said “Michael has left us far, far too soon. We lost a great man and a great spirit.” That big, warm smile of Duncan’s always seemed to exude a kindness that was genuine, and he is a man who achieved his dream of becoming a movie star and earned the right to be one. This makes his death all the more painful to accept.
Duncan left us with a number of unforgettable performances, but many agree his greatest role was as the gentle giant John Coffey in “The Green Mile,” and it earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Special thanks need to be given to Bruce Willis, who he co-starred with in βArmageddon,β who recommended Duncan for the role to Darabont.
The toughest scene for Duncan, however, in “The Green Mile” came when Coffey tries to save the two young girls he is later convicted of murdering.
“I had a lot of crying to do, a lot of howling to do, and it took a long time to do it and it really drained me,” Duncan said. “I’ll remember that day more so than anything else because as we were filming that, everybody was rushing toward me.”
What made the scene work for Duncan is how everything around him felt “so real,” and he remembered getting incredibly scared every time Darabont said “roll.”
When it came to preparing to play such emotionally charged scenes, Duncan credited the training he received from noted acting coach Larry Moss who taught him “how to dig within myself.”
“I’m an emotional person, a very emotional person,” Duncan said. “All those tears you see in the movie were mine.”
Darabont still vividly remembers how “immersive and incredible” the experience of making “The Green Mile” with Duncan was:
“What sticks most in my mind was his (Duncan’s) devotion to his craft and the strides he made as an artist during that time, which was beyond inspiring to those of us who took the journey with him,” Darabont said. “Never has an actor more richly deserved the recognition of an Academy Award nomination than Michael did for his performance as John Coffey.”
Rest in peace Michael, you will be missed.
SOURCES:
Kimberly Nordyke, “‘Green Mile’ Director Frank Darabont Remembers Michael Clarke Duncan,” The Hollywood Reporter, September 3, 2012.
WRITERβS NOTE: This article was written in 2013.
Many like to laugh at athletes who decide to try acting because while they may excel in their chosen sport, it doesn’t necessarily mean they will be equally successful on stage and screen. Dwayne Johnson, however, has proven to be an exception as he keeps getting better and better with each movie he appears in. In “The Scorpion King,” he proved to have a strong screen presence which would serve him well in future movies like “The Rundown” and “Fast Five,” and he gave one of his best performances to date in “Snitch” as John Matthews, a father who goes undercover for the DEA so he can get his son out of prison. Now he stars in “Pain & Gain,” Michael Bay’s action comedy based on the Miami New Times articles about the Sun Gym Gang who kidnapped a rich businessman in the hopes of extorting him for money so they could live the American dream.
Johnson plays Paul Doyle, an ex-con who has clearly spent hours upon hours in the prison gym. A former drug addict, Doyle has since become a born-again Christian who yearns to do good in life. Still, when his friend Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg) comes to him with a plan to kidnap spoiled rotten businessman Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub), Doyle cannot resist the pull towards a life of crime.
“Pain & Gain” plays around with Johnson’s image as a bodybuilder, but in an interview with Erin O’Sullivan of Yahoo Movies, he explained there was something more than the physical training which made him want to play this character.
“I was really fortunate because I was coming off of ‘G.I. Joe: Retaliation,’ and I was coming off of ‘Fast & Furious’ at that time too. So, a lot of those projects supported and fostered the type of training I was doing,” Johnson told O’Sullivan. “The biggest thing with a movie like this — the biggest departure (for me) was the vulnerability and showing this type of vulnerability, and playing a character who is easily influenced and who’s just out of prison and looking for salvation.”
The movie has garnered quite a bit of controversy as it is said to be based on a true story which involved a brutal kidnapping, torture and murder. The survivors of the Sun Gym Gang’s crimes have been very open about their opposition to “Pain & Gain” as they don’t want the audience to sympathize with the characters played by Johnson, Wahlberg and Anthony Mackie as they are all based on real life killers. None of this was lost on Johnson who told Colin Covert of the Star Tribune he said a prayer every day for the victims of the gang’s crimes and explained how the story hit close to home for him as he lives in Miami where the crimes took place.
“The story rocked our city. It was a crazy time for us down there then. It’s painful for many people to remember it even to this day,” Johnson told Covert. “It’s been a passion project of Michael Bay’s for years, and he had a very clear idea of how to present it; a kind of ‘Pulp Fiction-y,’ fast-moving version that shows what boneheads these criminals actually were. Of course, whenever there is a story based on actual crimes, you have a responsibility to tell it in a way that’s respectful, we were fully aware of that.”
Now you’d think after doing several action movies in a row that Johnson would have all of the muscle and physical training he’d ever need, but even on a movie like “Pain & Gain” which cost only $25 million to make (way below the budgets of Bay’s “Transformers” movies), the actor and pro-wrestler still had a strict training regimen to follow. Johnson discussed his training schedule with the website Bodybuilding.com, and it makes you wonder how he found any free time to work out.
“My routine for this film was training six times per week with George Farah (an IFBB professional bodybuilder and trainer). Many people who go on Bodybuilding.com know who my strength and conditioning coach is. I also have a training coach in Dave Ramsey,” Johnson told the website. “This was a hell of a prep. For a movie like this, that revolves around the world of bodybuilding and the culture of bodybuilding-that we love, by the way, and that we grew up on-the prep was a good 8-10 weeks, six workouts per week, training twice per day. I did my cardio in the morning.”
According to USA Today, Johnson added 12 to 15 pounds of muscle to his 6-foot 4-inch body, and he maxed out at 250 pounds. As a result, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that he recently had emergency hernia surgery even though it was attributed to the WWE match he wrestled in last month. To all this, Johnson said the following:
“When you’re young, you think you’re invincible. When you’re older, you have to start listening to your body.”
Over the past few years, Dwayne Johnson has proved he can handle comedy, drama and action with equal success, and he’s become one of the true bona fide action stars in movies today. We look forward to seeing him again in “Fast & Furious 6” as Luke Hobbs, and he also has “Hercules: The Thracian Wars” to look forward to as well. At this point there should be no doubt, for an athlete turned actor, that Johnson is the real deal.
The Ultimate Rabbit 