Eric Bana is asked if anything supernatural happened during the filming of his new movie, Deliver Us From Evil.
“Absolutely nothing,” he says, destroying all of the marketing for Scott Derrickson’s movie, which is milking the “based on a true story” tagline as dry as the desert Bana is now sitting in during a roundtable interview with four reporters.
He’s flanked by Joel McHale a man so joylessly sarcastic that he drove Chevy Chase out of Community. That’s not the official story, though it seems more and more likely as McHale playfully fake-answers his ways through the longest 15-minute roundtable ever recorded. He’s like Jim Carrey doing his rubberface routines, or Robin Williams riffing on props — the longer he goes on the more uncomfortably awkward, and sad, it starts to get. He’s asked if Derrickson wrote his cop character with McHale in mind. “No, you’re thinking of J.K. Rowling. She wrote the screenplay, and she used her pen name Scott Derrickson … She wrote him with me in mind because I have a lot of knives I personally own.”
He goes on like this for every question. On Bana’s role: “He plays a cop from the future … he’s not Time Cop, though, he’s more like Robocop … and he has a flux capacitor on his suit.” On Bana: “When I heard Eric Stoltz was on board I just had to get involved.” On Star Wars Episode VII: “I want to play the door of the Millennium Falcon that tries to murder Han Solo.”
This is probably amusing on set when he needs to ad-lib through one of Dan Harmon’s Community gags — or on Talk Soup, television anarchy — but here in interviews it’s painful. Bana sheepishly smiles at all of McHale’s dry little quips, but inside he’s probably wondering why he’s here. Certainly he could have been watching the World Cup or reading a John Hillcoat script. Anything but this nickle matinee in Phoenix, Arizona.
And wait, why is he there? Oh yeah, to hype up Deliver Us From Evil, a movie that is better described by other movies: Seven meets The Exorcist. Bana plays a cop who has a crime radar that starts going bonkers in New York City. His partner (played by McHale), has the seven deadly sins tattooed on his neck so surely that might figure into all this. Wrong. Instead it’s just some Iraqi curse American soldiers brought stateside. One soldier paints the curse on basement walls, bedroom wallpaper and on the lion enclosure at the zoo, and this unlocks demons in people, who do terrible things. Bana has to figure this all out while McHale trolls New Yorkers with a Red Sox hat.
Someone asks the most obscure off-topic Star Wars question, which gives both men a chance to not talk about their movie. At one point Bana asks us seriously if we use clothes dryers in this desert heat and he seems upset with our answers. I ask him if he likes jumping from genre to genre; from swords-and-sandals epics (Troy) to war (Black Hawk Down) to comics (Hulk) to science fiction (Star Trek) to spy thrillers (Munich) to horror here in Deliver us From Evil.
His answer lasts about 7 seconds before he’s interrupted: “I’ve been very lucky. I’ve been very fortunate to have been in many different genres. The one that is safe is musical …”
McHale cuts in to suggest he do “a Rex Harrison thing where you sing-speaks everything.” Bana laughs and says even his sing-speaking is not up to par. McHale again: “Or maybe a remake of Sound of Music … you could be Liesle. I am 16 going on 17 …”
They’re asked their favorite horror movies. Bana says The Shining. McHale says Overboard. Zing.
Eventually, a PR person tells us to wrap it up and then, taking pity on this sad interview, she asks the two actors to sum up their visit with a closing statement. Mumbles and blanks are all that’s delivered (sadly, no evil). And then it’s over and we’r
e shuffled out so another group can ramble with the talent for 15 minutes. One reporter seems eternally wounded that she couldn’t get an autograph or photograph.
e shuffled out so another group can ramble with the talent for 15 minutes. One reporter seems eternally wounded that she couldn’t get an autograph or photograph.
Most roundtable interviews are more productive than this one, but I don’t hold it against Bana or McHale. This isn’t who they are. It’s a business transaction. It would be like the barista at a coffeehouse looking for existential meaning in a random transaction; to the customer it’s coffee without meaning or purpose. Just coffee.
And Eric Bana and Joel McHale are just two dudes shilling for a movie. And failing.
