Massively skilled
Kaitlyn dever has a booming career – at just 17.
FOR Kaitlyn Dever, time is passing too quickly. She turned 17 in December, for Pete’s sake. “I’m the opposite of all my friends,” says the little scene stealer from Tim Allen’s comedy Last Man Standing.
“They can’t wait to be 18 and driving and heading off to college. I’m kind of panicking. I wanted to be 16 a little longer.”
If your career were booming like hers, you might want to stop and smell the residuals, too.
In addition to Last Man Standing, on which she plays flinty youngest daughter Eve, she reprised her role recently as the dangerously resourceful teen Loretta McCready on Justified. Loretta is the firecracker who dared shoot Mags Bennet (Margo Martindale), the kid who keeps drawing the protective instinct out of Raylan (Timothy Olyphant).
At the moment, Dever is backstage on the Last Man Standing soundstage, waiting for a table read. She’s sitting in what serves as the classroom for her and Flynn Morrison, eight, who plays Boyd on the show.
“I’m a junior learning Algebra 2,” she says, “and I’m in with a third grader.”
Lately, she has been playing hooky a lot. But she has a note from her agent.
Dever has been splitting her time between the sitcom and the set of Men, Women & Children, an Ivan Reitman comedy with Emma Thompson, Adam Sandler and Jennifer Garner, now filming in Texas.
It’s one of five films she has done in the last two years, including the forthcoming Laggies with Keira Knightley.
It’s unusual for a network to give a series contract player so much latitude, but ABC realises what they have in Dever and makes every effort to accommodate her.
“She’s a massively skilled actress,” says Last Man Standing’s executive producer Tim Boyle. “It may get to the point where she’s at a Jennifer Lawrence level, where we can’t hold onto her, but we want it to last as long as possible.”
The fact that Last Man Standing runs with clockwork efficiency affords Dever more away time. The lead, Allen, is a seasoned pro, and he brought over an old hand from Home Improvement, director John Pasquin, who stresses rehearsal. The result is quick tapings.
“It’s great for the (studio) audi- ence,” Dever says. “It keeps them happy and awake. If you have to do multiple takes, they tend to fade.”
It would be easy to call Kaitlyn precocious, except she has had her eyes on this particular prize since she was a child in Dallas, Texas.
“I’ve always been good at doing impersonations,” she says. “When I see a person on TV, within three minutes, I can do all their mannerisms and their voice. Acting has always come naturally to me.
“I kept begging my parents to let me take acting classes,” she says. “I came home from the first day of classes and said, ‘Mum, that was the best day of my life!’”
Dever was spotted by a talent agent who was convinced the kid would take Hollywood by storm. Thus started another long siege campaign of her parents.
The Devers were ice skating coaches in Phoenix until Kaitlyn’s father, Tim, won a nationwide cattlecall to become the voice of Barney, the purple dinosaur. (He would later go on to voice another popular children’s character, Bob the Builder.) Tim’s voice work took the Devers to Dallas.
But uprooting the whole family (Kaitlyn is the oldest of three sisters) for something as iffy as a child actor’s chances? On the other hand, Kaitlyn was incredibly persistent.
So they compromised: Mum Kathy would take Kaitlyn out to Los Angeles so the nine-year-old could see what a discouraging job acting was. Then duly chastened, Kaitlyn would buckle down in Dallas. That was the idea anyway.
“I booked the first thing my agent sent me out on,” says Dever. “For a while, we’d go back to Dallas every summer.
But I kept booking more and more things, so three years ago, we all moved out.”
Before we lose you to the table read, Kaitlyn, what would you say is your best impersonation?
“I got it from The Best Of Will Ferrell collection. I put on a wig and giant glasses and act like Harry Caray.” OK, did not see that one coming.
“I want to host Saturday Night Live. And I want to be on Jimmy Fallon’s show,” Dever gushes. “He was on SNL, and he’s the funniest guy.” — The Philadelphia Inquirer/ McClatchy-Tribune Information Services life so scrappy that men will battle to near-death over a couple slabs of wood, while the one-percenters show utter disregard for the shivering masses.
It doesn’t take much of a leap to draw parallels to our modern-day economic gap.
“I see this just as another piece of American madness,” said Sam Shepard, who plays a kindhearted priest trying to bring God to a godless society.
“It’s another chunk of the insanity that we carry around with us, regardless of whether we’re involved in technology or if we’re involved in trapping beavers.”
To capture the raw tone of the era, director Simon Cellan Jones eschewed computer-generated effects and had his actors get their feet wet – sometimes literally.
A pivotal scene had Madden falling out of a raft and barreling down freezing-cold rapids.
“I just kind of convinced myself that it was a studio and we could just turn the rapids off if it got dangerous,” said Madden, last seen being stabbed through the heart on Game Of Thrones, where he played Robb Stark.
Other scenes during the 56-day shoot near Calgary, Alberta in Canada, forced actors to perform in temperatures below 0°C at 2,700m above sea level, a combination that sometimes