Mike Faist Info

Interviewer: [...] I love that you say that because I was just going to say to Mike is there's a lot of little moments that all of your characters get that I think tell a deeper truth about who they are. I actually think of the moment towards the end when Patrick is looking at the woman's breakfast sandwich and like is actually going to take it. Like, I'm like, this is who you are. I would die of the embarrassment that I even looked at this woman's sandwich, let alone had the audacity to eat it. And I was going to ask you, Mike, if you had a little moment that you felt was really illustrative of who Art is, that maybe the audience and again, those internal motivations that are not maybe in the dialogue, but tell a lot about who he is as a person and maybe what motivates him in this story.

Mike: Yeah, that's a very good question. There is one moment that jumps out to me in particular. And again, piggybacking off what Josh said, it is the, these conversations that we were very fortunate to have with Luca and each other all throughout that rehearsal process. And one of the things that was discussed about Art was this idea, you know, Patrick's character is much more, I think brazen, a little much more relaxed, much more calm about life in general, and Art's character is maybe a little bit more controlled, particular, very neat, very organized, trying to really make sure that things are correct. And within that, there's this this scene at the party and we're watching Tashi dance on the dance floor. And then we have a conversation with her and she leaves and we decide to stay and wait for her. And so Josh, Patrick, and Art. We're just sitting on the couch and and there's this dessert that was presented to us and it had it was like some sort of cake and it had an icing on top of it. And there was strawberries on top of the cake. And I remember thinking Art would love to eat the cake. They probably won't eat the cake. That's not the right thing to do. So I guess we'll have the strawberry. But then, the strawberry has icing on it, so he has to scrape the icing off of the strawberry. While he's eating and I remember doing that and that felt as if that, that probably was the correct choice, and I think it's in the movie. I don't know if it made it (Zendaya: it is! Mike: it is? Zendaya: it is!) it felt right (Zendaya: but it is) and it felt very indicative as to who this person was in terms of, you know, the decision to eat the cake or not eat the cake is its own thing and the consequences of that. Well, I guess. Yes. You know.

Interviewer: [...] I want to bring it to you, Mike. Because I feel like with Art, there's much more to find things. Yeah, starts off is very flirty and a little bit unsure. Then it becomes focused, and my favorite moment is right after the sign-in at the tennis match, when he hits that ball back at Patrick, we see basically the ice turn into fire. And that is like the biggest emotional shift we see from the character from that moment on and all of the stuff that comes after that has to be told through tennis. I'm curious, what was in the script? What were you trying to basically say in addition to those tennis moves that y'all are doing in that final climactic moment? There's a lot of emotion coming out from Art, like more so than you maybe even seen from him in earlier moments. I'd love for you to talk a little bit about that climax. And then I want to come to you, Josh, about how you were on the other side of that, because you essentially popped open all that emotion. So Mike, yeah.

Mike: Well, it's interesting because I think that was actually, it wasn't planned. Um, that moment, it was something that was felt, um, sorry, there, there's no way to articulate that other than, you know, I think there are these strange things that happen. Um, and they're kind of unexplainable where, you know, you, you do all of this prep work, you do as much thought as you can. Um, with the material that you're given, the conversations that you have with the creatives, the wardrobe that is, you know, built for you. And then at the end of the day, you're placed in that situation and you have to allow the character to kind of come forth and decide for themselves what is appropriate in that situation. And, and I remember that day very distinctly. Because we had been, we had been shooting, um, uh, that tennis, uh, see all those tennis sequences going back to that, um, for two or three weeks. Um, and, um, we did shoot that section of it towards the end of those two to three weeks. So there was this kind of natural progression leading up to that climactic moment that you're talking about. And, and, and that particular moment. Um, it just felt as if that this thing was coming out of me and it felt like Art was taking over-is the truth of the matter.

Um, and it's one of those, you know, unexplainable events where, like I said, you do this work, you do as much prep and thought as possible. And then you let these things kind of take over and let them go. And, and that felt also correct in the sense, for our characters, well with this person that does work so terribly hard in terms of making the right choice, and stepping in the right place, and doing the right thing in order to get to those places and here's with the situation where truly the game that is playing... if you were look at his career it really doesn't matter, however in this moment, you know because of the dramatic, the dramaticniss of the story that we're telling is the most important thing

And in this moment as well, he is letting go of all of that, which I think is, which I think is the thing that both Art and Tashi are trying to get out of him as not just a tennis player, but also a person. And it did feel as if when we, when I, I remember just reading the actual tennis sequence itself and the way that it had come across to me off of the page was, oh, now everybody has fallen back in love with not just each other, but the game and why they are doing it in the first place. And so that release of that tension that Art allows himself kind of allows everybody to let go of it all and just let go. I'm not being very articulate, unfortunately, with this, but I think it was just one of these things that naturally, that tension and buildup is kind of placed into Art's hands. And he has the decision as to how he's going to let both Tashi and Patrick kind of feel about it. And the choice that he makes is to actually kind of come into himself and let go of all of that and choose to engage with it.

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The Unspeakable Act (drive)

Yellow (short)

Touched With Fire (drive)

The Grief Of Others (drive)

Our Time

I Can I Will I Did (drive)

Active Adults

Wildling (drive)

The Atlantic City Story

West Side Story

Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game (drive)

Challengers (drive)

The Bikeriders

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Eye Candy

Law & Order: Special Victms Unit (drive)

Deception (drive)

Panic (drive)

Extra:

Brokeback Mountain

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By Nate Jones, a Vulture senior writer covering movies and pop culture

From the very first trailers for Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, one character popped off the screen — the scraggly John Mulaney lookalike playing Riff, leader of the Jets. Without taking anything away from Russ Tamblyn’s jovial performance in the 1961 film, this new Riff is something different. He’s a true street rat, almost feral with a live-wire charisma. Since the film started screening, viewers and critics alike have been asking: Who is this guy?

That guy is 29-year-old Broadway veteran Mike Faist, whom theater buffs will recognize as one of the newsies in Newsies as well as the depressed teen whose death kick-started the plot of Dear Evan Hansen. (Faist got nominated for a Tony but declined to reprise the role for the movie — a wise decision in retrospect.) West Side Story is his 14th screen credit but his first major film role, and it’s a true breakout performance: Alongside Ariana DeBose’s Anita, Faist’s Riff has been spotlighted as one of the best things about the new film, the personification of Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner’s more historically grounded take on the material.

The praise is a long time coming for Faist, who shot West Side Story back in the summer of 2019. As he told Vulture over Zoom recently, he’s spent the intervening months looking for projects that would live up to the experience, living that #VanLife, and thinking about what he actually wants to get out of acting.

In the most recent interview I read, you’d left New York and were living out of a van.

The pandemic did a lot of weird things to everybody. I was working in Austin when everything shut down. They were going to send us back to New York. I’m in Austin. I have all this space, the sunshine. I’m not going to go back to New York and just hang out in my apartment during a pandemic. So I had my dog, and we drove around the country a bunch. I would purposefully stay away from people. I would find people that had farmland. They were nice enough to let me set up a tent. I actually sold my apartment in New York this summer. Got rid of it.

Much has changed for L.G.B.T.Q. people since Annie Proulx’s short story was published in 1997. But a new theatrical version is a reminder that homophobia is far from over.

By Douglas Greenwood - Reporting from London (May 12, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET)

In 2016, when the theater director Jonathan Butterell was considering a proposal to adapt Annie Proulx’s 1997 short story “Brokeback Mountain” for the stage, he wondered how to translate the prose’s vast landscape and insular emotions into a play.

Last month, in a central London rehearsal studio, Butterell and Ashley Robinson, who wrote the play, tried to answer that question. To help the cast connect with Proulx’s story of a cowboy and a ranch hand falling in love against the wide-stretching landscapes of 1960s Wyoming, black-and-white photographs of American plains and mountain ranges were tacked to the walls during rehearsals.

“The vastness has been there from the very beginning,” Butterell said in a recent interview. When it came to evoking the story’s emotional landscape, the director had stuck one sepia-toned photograph, of a lone cowboy in a snow-covered Wyoming, behind a pillar. The image “speaks to the bit of us that feels alone in the world,” Butterell said. “Maybe he’s at peace with this, maybe it’s the source of his agony.”

Butterell’s “Brokeback Mountain” opened in previews May 10 at @sohoplace in London’s West End. It’s the first time the story has been adapted for theater — an opera by Charles Wuorinen premiered in Madrid in 2014 — and each version now follows in the footsteps of Proulx’s text and the film that popularized it: Ang Lee’s 2005 Academy Award-winning adaptation, which is often cited as one of the best L.G.B.T.Q. films of all time.

Butterell said he was aware of his audience having expectations based on the film. “They’re inevitable,” he said, “but I don’t mind that.”

This theatrical version also has some Hollywood clout. Its lead characters, Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar, are played by the BAFTA-nominated actor Mike Faist and the Oscar-nominated actor Lucas Hedges.

In late 2016, Robinson first wrote a treatment for what he called a “memory play” based on the short story, after speaking with the composer Dan Gillespie Sells and Butterell. Robinson’s script stated that the Wyoming setting should not be conveyed “in a purely literal sense,” and his story is set in 2013, with an older version of del Mar reflecting on the years he spent with Twist between 1963 and 1983.

Proulx approved of Robinson’s vision. She has “high hopes for the play,” she said in a recent email interview. “When I read Ashley’s script several years ago, I thought he had done a fine job.”

In Proulx’s story, del Mar and Twist’s interior worlds are conveyed by an omniscient narrator. In the stage adaptation, music does much of that work.

“These two men can’t sing,” Gillespie Sells said, because “they don’t have an emotional dialogue.” Instead, a character called The Balladeer — played by the Scottish singer-songwriter Eddi Reader — sings with an onstage country and western band. “She takes us through time,” Butterell said. “Sometimes it’s from night to day. Sometimes it’s 10 years.”

“Brokeback Mountain” will be the first time its two lead actors have appeared onstage in five years. Faist, who plays Twist, originated the role of Connor Murphy in “Dear Evan Hansen” on Broadway, and has had more recent success in film, including Steven Spielberg’s 2021 remake of “West Side Story.”

Hedges “hadn’t acted in a while” when he was sent the script, he said, having been focusing on writing instead. The “Brokeback” offer and playing del Mar changed that. “There wasn’t an angle I didn’t love about this,” he said.

As the project entered its final week of rehearsals, both actors were grappling with the process in different ways. Hedges said he was experiencing “tragic and triumphant ups and downs” about his own work. “I have a day where I think I’ve figured it all out, and then a day when it all disappears,” he said. The “collective experience” of theater was daunting compared to working in film, he said, adding that onstage, “I can’t use tricks to make it through.”

Faist concurred: “It’s a challenge, and it’s terrifying,” mainly because of the expectations of having to match the source material and 2005 film, he said. “But as terrifying and frustrating as it is, I really am having the time of my life,” he added.

Butterell said that Faist and Hedges were “as men, as actors, very different creatures.” Faist, he said, had “a sense of life and vivacity,” while Hedges “has this deeply complex interior landscape that’s very much of Ennis.”

Neither Hedges, Faist nor Butterell had revisited Lee’s film since they were approached for the project. “The truth of the matter is, no matter what, he’s not Heath Ledger and I’m not Jake Gyllenhaal,” Faist said of the film’s two lead stars, who both earned Oscar nominations for their performances. He and Hedges, Faist added, would both bring their “own weird things” to the roles.

The production has forced Faist to confront his “traumas,” he said. “We can take those traumas, turn them around,” he added, and, he hopes, make the audience “think deeply about their own lives.”

Following the success of the “Brokeback Mountain” film, Proulx said fans of her text sent her fan fiction that rewrote the ending of her short story, claiming the original was too sad. She told the The Paris Review that those fans had “misunderstood” the story and stated that it was, most importantly, about “homophobia.”

This is the first adaptation of “Brokeback” to be released since the Supreme Court made gay marriage legal in all 50 U.S. states. Robinson — who lives in Brooklyn but was raised in the tiny town of Lockhart, S.C. — said he wrote it to remind audiences that gay trauma still exists.

“These stories aren’t necessarily being told anymore because of a trend to put onstage what we want the world to be,” he said, referring to the theater community. “That’s a wonderful thing to do, but we shouldn’t cancel out all of the opportunities to talk about what’s going on underneath it.”

Butterell added that the fight against homophobia was “not over” in Britain either, citing a recent spike in the number of attacks on L.G.B.T.Q. people.

“This is a tragedy,” Butterell said of the play. “Of course love exists — I don’t want it to be solemn — but the tragedy of this piece is that fear wins.”

Find this article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/12/theater/brokeback-mountain-play.html