CBS Films — Alex O'Loughlin Rocks!

Alex O’Loughlin Talks to Filmink about Truancy, Potty Training and his Wild Streak

May 23, 2010 By mizzoh 6 Comments

Australian film magazine Filmink recently featured Alex O’Loughlin in their “Actor Spotlight”, an in-depth interview in which he opens up about finding his place in the world and why he is very happy being where he is at the moment. A scan of the article – courtesy of Ozbella – can be found in the gallery!

In Conversation: Alex O’Loughlin

By Gill Pringle

There are overnight stars, and then there are those whose careers take a little longer to percolate. Enter 34-year-old Australian actor ALEX O’LOUGHLIN, a Hollywood transplant of five years, and the survivor of two high profile cancelled US TV series, Moonlight and Three Rivers. His role opposite Jennifer Lopez in the rom-com THE BACK-UP PLAN, however, might be the one to seal the deal for him in Hollywood. Raised in Sydney – the son of an astronomy teacher and a nurse – this high school dropout backpacked around the globe before following his dream to become an actor, winning his first lead role in the local hit Oyster Farmer six years ago.

Do you have to fight harder, as an Australian, for roles in Hollywood?
“No, but you have to work harder to do the accent. I’ve been working on my US accent for quite some years now, so it’s usually pretty good.”

How was your first year in Hollywood? When you were struggling to find work?
“I had nothing. I ended up sleeping on my pal’s office floor while his house was getting sand-blasted and all the floors were being done. The office was sealed off in plastic, so I was literally living in this plastic bubble while the rest of the house was being worked on. I had really dark thoughts in that time. I was very depressed, and I went through a lot of pain. I couldn’t see beyond each day. That might sound overly dramatic, but that’s what I experienced. I didn’t know what to do. I had a good friend who came by every morning and took me for coffee and worked out the plan for every day. I didn’t have the money to go home to Australia even if I’d wanted to. It was friendship that kept me strong. Eventually I just thought, “What the hell! Until you hit your knees, it’s not worth it anyway.”

Did you do crummy jobs to support yourself?
“I’ve done them my entire life. I grew up digging holes and working in construction and demolition. I’ve worked in restaurants and bars. No pun intended, but the shittiest job that I’ve ever done was working for a plumber when I was seventeen. That was shitty! But I don’t care about that. I’m not above that, but it’s good not to have to do it anymore. I’m very happy to make a living from acting.”

Who is your mentor in LA?
“Jack Thompson, for sure. I’ve had a few mentors over the years, some incredible actors have taken me under their wing and really helped me. But Jack? We’ve done a few pictures together now [Oyster Farmer, Man-Thing, Feed], and he potty-trained me! That’s a ‘Jack-ism’ – when we talk about an actor not behaving well, his response to that is, ‘Aaah mate, bad potty-training.’ He’s absolutely right. So if I behave badly at work, there’s no excuse for it, because I’ve had the best potty-training with Jack. The man has such talent, and such integrity. He and his family have become my family over here.”

You’re starring opposite Jennifer Lopez in the rom-com The Back-up Plan. One of the themes in the film is that you can never really plan your life, and that love shows up when we least expect it. Do you relate to that?
“Yes. There’s an expression: ‘If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans,’ and it’s true to a certain extent. Especially when you’re a parent [Alex has a twelve-year-old son named Saxon], your life moves into another area, you grow up and you move into that level of living. When other people come before you, there are certain considerations that you have to make. You can plan certain things and you can plan for the future, but when it comes to affairs of the heart, you never know who you’re going to meet or when.”

Was Jennifer Lopez very different from her public persona?
“Believe it or not, I really didn’t have any preconceptions. I mean, she’s smoking hot, and she’s super famous, but I don’t read any of that gossip type stuff. I don’t allow it in my house, I don’t give a shit about it, I never have. I mean, sure, there are certain things that you can’t get away from. For a long time, I’ve had people who are being gossiped about in my life, since I was very young, so I know that it’s all bullshit. I’ve never plugged into it. I’ve never fed it, its a very dangerous part of the machine. That being said, Jennifer was a surprise to me. For someone as hugely famous and popular as she is, I never thought of her as a ‘celebrity’. I just saw her as a grounded person. She’s a terrific woman with a lot of spunk and fire. She’s my kind of person; there’s a lot of joy and a lot of humour in her. All my dearest friends from Australia have that quality – there’s a certain irreverence, and that joie de vivre. I feel totally comfortable talking to her; I don’t have to worry about censoring myself. We laugh about the same things, which only helped us even more when it came to working together.

What first attracted you to acting?
“I did a play at school when I was about nine years old. I did this skit with two Fish Fingers up my nose, lying on my back, dead. It was a funny skit, and I keenly remember the audience roaring with laughter. I realised that if I did something, there was cause and effect. So the storytelling seed was sown within me, and I loved it. It made perfect sense. I went to drama school when I was 23. I wanted to get the best possible understanding of what I was involved in and where the story comes from and all that stuff. I wanted to learn about the history of theatre, and I wanted to learn about my voice and my body. Before that, I started at the very bottom. I washed dishes in restaurants in Kings Cross to pay for night classes in acting. I worked as an extra, just to see how a film set works. I started at the very bottom and worked my way up, which is a really good way to go. I got bits and pieces of work here and there on the other side of the camera too.”

And you left school at seventeen? Did you truant a lot?
“Umm, a bit! You know, I truanted a bit, and I’d smoke cigarettes at lunchtime. It wasn’t necessarily rebelling, it was more like, ‘Who gives a shit!’ School was such a bullshit, flawed system anyway – that was how I felt at the time. I’d ask a teacher a question, and I wouldn’t get clear answers. They weren’t actually helping me get through the system. It was a combination of my attitude and the pockets of truth that I was in, and also that ridiculous age when everything’s so important. I had a bit of a wild streak, and I didn’t want to conform. I wasn’t interested in one specific thing. What I was interested in was the world, and travelling, and seeing things and hearing different languages.”

How has fame changed you?
“I’m very private, and I keep a very low profile. I just do all my normal things. I live my life, but things are starting to change. We got chased by paparazzi the other night, who were trying to find out where we live. Just little things like that. But I’m not going to change the way that I live. I still ride my motorcycles a lot. I have a Triumph Thruxton and a friend just built a Harley for me, which was my first Harley. It’s the great American dream to own a Harley. It’s a custom chopper, built from the ground up. It’s very simple, and very cool, sort of like a Mad Max bike. I’ve been riding since I was five-years-old, so it’s like a part of me. I also love rock climbing. I’m very active; I love boxing and running too.”

What are your dreams for the future?
“It would be crazy not to say it, but one of them is to continue to work. I want to continue working because when I’m working, there’s stability in my life. As an actor, you’re either incredibly unstable or incredibly stable. We get paid well when we work, and everything’s okay, but when you’re not working – and those periods can go for years – it can be very disconcerting. I’m living my dreams, and that’s really cliché, but I’m so happy right now. I’m so happy with my work. I’m healthy, I’m fit, I’ve got a great job, and I’ve got friends. I go home and I’m just me! I am who I am, I’m Alex – I’m a son, I’m a brother, I’m a father, I’m a lover… I’m a whatever I am. But it’s just me.”

[tags]alex o’loughlin, alex o’lachlan, the back-up plan[/tags]

Filed Under: Alex O'Loughlin, Interviews & Articles, Movies, The Back-up Plan Tagged With: Alex O'Loughlin, CBS Films, Interviews & Articles, The Back-Up Plan

Alex O’Loughlin: Raw Appeal of Aussie Export

May 19, 2010 By mizzoh 3 Comments

Another great interview with Alex O’Loughlin comes our way from Down Under – this time from the HIT supplement of The Advertiser in Adelaide (May 20). A scan has been added to the gallery; the transcript follows below.

Raw Appeal of Aussie Export

The ridiculously buff Alex O’Loughlin is set to make female hearts swoon, writes Andrew Fenton

There’s a scene about midway through The Back-up Plan in which Alex O’Loughlin takes off his shirt to reveal a ludicrously muscular chest and a six-pack.

He plays Stan, a cheese-seller. And from the looks of things, Stan is the fittest cheese-seller in history.

“Cheese-sellers are pretty big, though – so I went method on this one,” laughs the Australian actor on the phone from Los Angeles, the day after the film’s premiere. He explains he was offered a physical trainer by the filmmakers – but then got a bit carried away.

“When I saw it last night, I was like: ‘Dude! You’re too fit! You shouldn’t have got that fit for that movie!”

But on the scale of things, being overly fit to play an entirely credible cheese merchant in a romantic comedy opposite Jennifer Lopez is a fairly good problem to have.

Five years ago, when the AFI-nominated actor (The Incredible Journey of Mary Bryant) moved to Los Angeles, he was greeted with characteristic indifference.

“I didn’t work for the first few years, times got a bit tough and I found myself on a mate’s couch,” he says. “But then things came good.”

Now 33, his luck changed when he was cast as Detective Kevin Hiatt for a seven-episode run in The Shield. He followed that up with the family feature film August Rush and began to develop a massive female following thanks to his starring role as vampire-cum-private investigator Mick St. John in Moonlight.

Some of these female fans appear very devoted.

“I dare say,” he says. “It’s kind of weird. I really appreciate the support, it’s very validating. But they only know a version of me; they know what my face looks like and there are only a few people who really know me.”

Unfortunately for O’Loughlin though, the show never really recovered from the halt in production caused by the Hollywood writers’ strike and it wasn’t picked up for a second season.

His next show, medical drama Three Rivers, suffered a similar fate, getting the chop after just eight of 13 episodes were screened.

Little wonder he’s developed something of a nihilistic coping strategy.

“There are moments when you grab for hope, but if you grab for hope, you’re dead,” he says. “You can’t hope, it’s the nature of the world, the nature of this industry and how it works. All you’ve got is you, and so you show up, you do your best and then go home and try to forget about it.”

That probably explains why O’Loughlin is trying not to get his hopes up about his latest role as Detective Steve McGarrett in the CBS remake of Hawaii Five-0. While only a pilot has been filmed so far, the series looks very promising, coming from the writers who recently resurrected Star Trek.

He says he’s under strict instructions not to talk about it. “What I can say is that we’ve finished the pilot, it’s gone in (to CBS) and we don’t know about a pick-up yet; but it’s something I’m very excited about,” he says. “I was a bit young to be a fan of the show, but I knew it and this is a very modern take on it – it’s a really good remake.”

The vast majority of O’Loughlin’s television work has been with CBS – so it’s no surprise to see the actor headlining The Back-up Plan, which comes from CBS Films.

“Bonds of trust exist, he explains. The film is fairly high-concept – after waiting all her life to meet the right man and start a family, Zo (J.Lo) becomes pregnant through artificial insemination on the very same day she meets Mr Right (O’Loughlin). Hilarity ensues.

“You couldn’t have made this movie thirty years ago, it wouldn’t have fitted the zeitgeist; but today you can,” O’Loughlin says. “It’s about women who have their lives together but don’t have a partner and want a family – and can do it now.”

In real life, of course, Lopez got pregnant the old-fashioned way (to singer Marc Anthony) and gave birth to twins in 2008.

After having been provisionally offered the role, O’Loughlin dropped by the Lopez family home on Long Island with director Alan Poul (Six Feet Under). “I met her and Marc and the kids, and we hung out,” he says. “Then Jen and I had a ‘chemistry meeting’ with the director, Alan. Essentially what we do is find out if we get each other – are we going to have a laugh?

“It’s like when you go to the pub and you meet someone, you work that out pretty quickly: You’re like, ‘Yeah, nah, I don’t want to have another beer with you’, or, ‘Let’s hang out’. It was just like that.”

[tags]alex o’loughlin, alex o’lachlan, the back-up plan, cbs films, steve mcgarrett, hawaii five-0, hawaii five-o, hawaii 5-0, cbs[/tags]

Filed Under: Alex O'Loughlin, Hawaii Five-0, Interviews & Articles, Movies, The Back-up Plan, TV Tagged With: Alan Poul, Alex O'Loughlin, CBS, CBS Films, Dr. Andy Yablonski, Hawaii Five-0, Interviews & Articles, Mick St. John, Moonlight, Steve McGarrett, The Back-Up Plan, Three Rivers

AOLR Weekly Wrap-Up #42

May 16, 2010 By mizzoh 1 Comment

Let’s jump right in with The Back-up Plan updates first:

Here’s an excerpt from The Philippines Daily Inquirer that you’ll love:

The big surprise in the film, it turns out, isn’t [Jennifer Lopez's] lead portrayal, but the performance of her new screen consort, Alex O’Loughlin. This is his first big role and he takes full advantage of its star-making possibilities. He has the talent, face – and body – to go the rom-com distance.
A review by the DramaStudentOnline:

If you’d ask me to go along and see a Jennifer Lopez film with you, I undoubtedly would have, politely as possible, said ‘No, thank you’. But if that had been the case, I would have sorely missed out because The Back-Up Plan is a very true, comical and highly enjoyable viewing experience that I would really recommend.
Another student review, by The Ticker:

The casting of Lopez and O’Loughlin works great and their natural chemistry makes their characters’ attempts to assemble a relationship backwards seem entirely realistic.
For the audience, the impression was that the filming must have been quite comical, because the two actors’ timing is impeccable in the film and they play off of each other a lot, making the audience laugh throughout the entire movie.
A cute review at Sky.com, written by a guy with a sense of humor:

If you can get over the impossibly glamorous lifestyle of the immaculately groomed Zoe and the pumped-up pecs of the good guy goat farmer then Will & Grace screenwriter Kate Angelo’s script will strike a few chords. So it’s not really a guys’ movie…but gals can enter into the spirit if they convince themselves that labour only lasts a couple of minutes and the only artificial aid you might require is lipstick.
Check out which film is included in Us Magazine’s Hottest Summer Movie Romances!
A box office update: Box Office Mojo estimates indicate that The Back-up Plan has grossed $34.2 million to date domestically and according to The Hollywood Reporter, the movie has earned $14.1 million so far internationally, bringing the overall gross revenue to $48.3 million with the film still to open in the majority of countries.

Recent videos:

An interview with Alan Poul on MyMovies.net – Alan, of course, talks about The Back-up Plan.
A video from the Australians in Film Breakthrough Awards with red carpet interviews – including Alex at 00:28 (and he can also be seen talking animatedly at 00:09). Thanks to Blondie for the find!

Other items:

Remember the recent Aussie Cosmo article? The photographer of the picture of Alex that was featured is Darren Tieste and he is working on a soon to be published hardcover book called The Beauty Book, which contains images by Darren of actors, models, musicians and celebrities, including Alex. Sales proceeds will go to an Australian charity called SNOG. Darren initiated the project after the loss of a close friend to brain cancer in 2008. You can register to be notified when the book becomes available here.
This year’s Donate Life Film Festival will take place at the Paley Center in Beverly Hills on June 11-12. The screenings are open to the general public and all other related events are by invitation only, including the cocktail party on June 11th when the Donate Life Hollywood Person of the Year will be announced. If you haven’t voted for Alex yet, please do so here! Voting is open till June 6th.
I’ve added more images and articles to the gallery, including lots of new pictures of Alex at the press conference on March 29th, more Back-up Plan posters and images, a “new” promo pic of Alex as Mick St. John, and I’m still in the process of adding more items from old and recent events (with no end in sight just yet! ). Hopefully we’ll also be seeing some candids this week when he is in paparazzi-filled New York City and CBS will be inclined to release an official photo or two! When you download images from the gallery, please make sure you click on the “download photo” link at the bottom left of the page, otherwise you won’t get the HQ-size ones.

Hawaii Five-0 and the upfronts:

There’s a lot of speculation going on at the moment about possible time slots for the fall season’s shows and by late Wednesday, May 19th we should at least know what CBS has in store for us! The network is presenting its lineup at 4 pm at the usual venue, Carnegie Hall. The reception will be held at a new location for CBS, which is the Tent at the Lincoln Center. Deadline Hollywood has the full upfront schedule.
Also according to Deadline, this may just be the biggest upfront ever, with a spending prediction at the four biggest networks topping $9 billion compared to last year’s $6.5 billion.
DISH TV Blog names Hawaii Five-0 as one of their “14 Most Promising TV Show Pilots”.
The Oklahoman goes a step further and calls our pilot the “surest of the sure bets”:

Surest of the sure bets is this remake of the ’70s series. Cast includes Alex O’Loughlin as Steve McGarrett, Scott Caan as Danny, and Jean Smart, who plays Hawaii’s governor. Reason to get excited: Good cast, and longtime J.J. Abrams (“Lost,” “Fringe,” “Alias”) collaborator Roberto Orci is involved.

I’m sure we have an exciting week ahead of us and that we will all be with Alex and the H50 team in thought and spirit at Carnegie Hall on Wednesday. All the best, Alex – three’s the charm!