ARTIST IN RESIDENCE
Rising star Daniel Zolghadri finds his comic edge…
Before he started his new hysterical film Funny Pages, playing an aspiring comic-book artist, actor Daniel Zolghadri (Eighth Grade) wasn’t exactly au fait with the world it presents. “I wasn’t really familiar with any comics,” he tells Teasers over Zoom. “I mean, I remember I got a Spider-Man comic when I was 10. But I didn’t know anything about underground comics.”
Written and directed by Owen Kline (son of Kevin), Funny Pages isn’t about Marvel or DC, but cult comics. Once on board, Zolghadri took direction from Kline, getting into comic-book messiahs like Robert Crumb and Peter Bagge. “That very much informed me what the world of the movie would be,” he says.
Yet Funny Pages had other resonances for the 23-year-old actor. “I was very much going through what he was going through at that time,” he says of his character Robert, a highschool grad who rejects his suburban lifestyle to find his artistic soul. “I was just relishing, defiantly and gloriously, going on my own path, and relishing, I guess, being an asshole!”
With a grungy indie aesthetic, the film “reminded me of, like, early 2000s movies that I loved. I guess people talk about Ghost World a lot. To me, it felt like a very specific type of mix of the funny and touching.” Zolghadri also appreciated working with Kline.
“We came up with techniques,” he explains. “There was a lot of talking in between a take – him interrupting and then me responding. There was screaming! He would scream and then I would scream, repeating his scream. It was no rules! It was, ‘Let’s just do anything and everything all at once.’” Right on.
‘It was no rules! It was, “Let’s just do anything and everything all at once”’ DANIEL ZOLGHADRI