#julia rask

Darren’s bio page from the All You Ever Wished For Press Kit

Darren Criss (Tyler) 

“I WAS ENCHANTED BY THE SCRIPT. IT’S SWEET BUT EARNEST, AND YOU DON’T SEE FILMS LIKE THIS ANYMORE – A WHIMSICAL TALE WITH ASPECTS OF MAGICAL REALISM.” 

Darren Criss is an American stage, screen, and TV actor, singer and songwriter. A founding member of the Chicago-based musical theater company, StarKid Productions, he first garnered attention playing the lead role of Harry Potter in A Very Potter Musical. Darren also starred on Broadway in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Darren is widely known for his portrayal of Blaine Anderson on the Fox musical comedy-drama series, Glee. He was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2015 for writing the song “This Time” for the Glee finale. In addition to his music endeavors, Darren starred in the second installment of Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace in 2018. Other feature film and TV credits include the comedy Girl Most Likely, American Horror Story, Web Therapy, and Eastwick. 

In his words: 

“When I met the director Barry Morrow and producer Jules Rask – and maybe it’s because I went to school in Michigan and have a deep affection for artists from the Midwest – they charmed the pants off me. I just wanted to hang out with them. I was coming off a weighty stage role in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and this was just something that looked light and fun. And we get to shoot in Italy? Absolutely! 

Our main location was in the north, a place not well known to Americans, and I’m sure that when audiences see this film they’ll say, “Where is this?” because it looks like it’s out of an actual fairy tale. There’s been many moments over the course of the film where I’ve been doing a scene and had to pinch myself and say, “Wow, I really get to shoot here.” 

Special screening of House of Film’s ALL YOU EVER WISHED FOR. THIS THURSDAY Feb 21 at 7 pm TLC Chinese in Hollywood You MUST RSVP!

Director-Producer duo behind film fest flick 'Smitten!' [INTERVIEW]

A star to lead the way

TCC: I’m surprised your studio connections weren’t enough to get it made that way – would it have mattered if you had had an all-American cast or setting?

JR: Like if Chris Pratt decided he wanted to do… and we did it, but it wouldn’t have been true to Barry’s original vision of literally two Americans and all the rest Italians, or at the very least, Europeans. That also, though, presents real challenges for us as producers because the movie is on the back of really Darren Criss, so you have to find the right actor who’s up for the challenge of saying alright, “I’ll go to Italy, not knowing any of the supporting cast, and I’ll trust you, Barry, to show me the way,” because that is a huge risk that many, many actors won’t take, so kudos to Darren for that.

TCC: What was it like working with Darren?

BM: Darren is a consummate pro… so multitalented. He sings, he plays music, he’s done Broadway, one-man performances, and he’s just as smart as a whip. I have to say he needed very little from me. On the occasion I’m watching the monitor and just see that he’s missing the heart of a scene or a line reading, all I had to do was go into the, wherever we were shooting, his eyes would meet mine and he’d say, “I know, I know,” and he’d come back and do it again. I didn’t even have to use words with Darren, he was that good. The Italians on the other hand, there was a lot of hand-holding – language was an obstacle, even more so than I knew… often I was pantomiming at least the physical parts and the expressions, and I didn’t expect them to mimic me but they would – we communicated differently, put it that way.

JR: Darren is a dream actor to work with. He was always up for the challenge... He was just up for anything, and he bonded with the cast and crew immediately. The other thing about Darren, and I don’t use the term lightly, he’s a bit of a musical savant. He plays about 12 instruments and we had a lot of music, as you saw in the film… We were always playing music when we had a few minutes of spare time. What was great is Dan Chouinard, our local Minnesotan accordion and musical impresario, was there (as a musical consultant) and the two of them would just get together and just watch what each other was doing and play all these songs and that was so much fun. Like I said, we could not have had a better experience with our cast. It was wonderful and Darren was the big leader.

*Criss also was fluent in Italian (he studied in Tuscany for some time) though Rask and Morrow didn’t know that when they first brought him on and didn’t incorporate it into the film.

TCC: How did you land Criss?