KEVIN KLINE discusses “The Extra Man”

MakingOf: How did you even begin to create the character for this film?Kevin Kline: Well, it was all there on the page, I thought. The character, when I read the script, it was just so unpredictable, outrageous, silly, funny, eccentric, and I just dove in. And I had the advantage of Jonathan Ames’s novel.

MO: How closely did you collaborate with the other teams on set to create the look of your character?

Kevin: Well the makeup artist and I and the hair designer, we all talked about how he should look and, you know, how to do his real hair as sort of white hair and, did you notice there’s a scene where he’s putting mascara in his hair? And he darkens his hair whenever he goes out with the ladies and his mustache. So that was all very collaborative. We arrived at just how much to age him, and how much to “youth-afy” him.

MO: And how was working with two directors?

Kevin: Twice as much fun. It was fine, because they really spoke with one another and spoke with one voice. Obviously, they had written it together, so there was no…they never contradicted each other. I tried to get them to, but they wouldn’t.

MO: And was shooting in New York, was the majority of the film then shot on location? In the heart of the city?

Kevin: Oh yeah. On the Upper East Side, where it actually happened, and it is very auto-biographical, a lot of this really happened to Jonathan Ames when he was living on Upper 96^th Street or 96^th Street between 2^nd and 3^rd Avenue or something like that. It’s a whole world unto itself, the Upper East Side, where you get a lot of these…a lot of money, a lot of widows, wealthy widows, and your share of extra men. Escorts, if you will.

MO: Where there any behind-the-scenes moments that you’d like to share, something maybe that happened on-set that stands out to you as being a favorite memory?

Kevin: Oh, it’s all too filthy and wrong and off-color. I don’t think I could. But in the car, in the scene with John C. Reilly in the back seat, and Paul’s driving and I sing that song about, an operetta about a man who doesn’t want to be kissed on the mouth, and John is just riffing in the back between takes, and then he just extrapolated from there and it just became pretty, unusable.

MO: And my last question, how is balancing theater and film for you? And how do you do that so seamlessly where you can go from one to the other?

Kevin: I think, once I started doing film I didn’t let too many years go by before returning to the theater, so it’s been pretty easy. The hardest thing was adjusting, the first film was where you think “Where did, all the stage work I’ve done counts for nothing.” It’s this whole other thing, which some people think it is. Happily, I learned that acting is acting. The audience is a little closer than being a camera in a film.