Becoming Bulletproof
The explosive THOMAS JANE talks us through the roles of his career
THOMAS JANE IS one of those actors who you sense could go off at any time. Filled with restless energy, he’s the archetypal powder keg waiting to explode. A quality he’s used well throughout his long and varied movie career — and even when he’s playing against type, there’s a sense that you’re never more than a couple of minutes away from drama. Empire caught up with him recently and asked him about some of his signature roles. “I didn’t know I had any signature roles!” Well, he does. Here they are...
TODD PARKER
BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997) Moustachioed and coked off his eyeballs, Todd is the bad-egg buddy who drags Dirk Diggler and Reed Rothchild to the fateful meeting with Alfred Molina’s flamboyant drug dealer, Rahad Jackson
“I was very young and doing theatre on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. There’s a row of tiny, tiny theatres there. And that’s where I learned my craft, in a place that used to be called The Space. I had the script for
Boogie Nights, and brought it into The Space with my little theatre crew, and we acted out the entire script. And I was playing Todd because I wanted this fucking part. Then I went to the audition, and [director] Paul Thomas Anderson brought in John C. Reilly and Philip Seymour Hoffman, and I just fucking knew that script inside and out. Then I started improv-ing with these two guys, and we just connected. That’s how I got the part and after that, I quit my job as a coffee slinger at a coffee shop in Westwood.”
CARTER BLAKE
DEEP BLUE SEA (1999)
Jane’s first real shot at megastardom, battling CG sharks and waterlogged sets as a shark-wrangler
“That was a mistake on my part. I’ve nothing against the movie. I’m happy for the experience, I met some lifelong friends on that gig, but I was too young. If you’re living in a shack and you’ve been slinging coffee, and you’ve been offered a lead role in a studio film, it’s hard to turn down. But in retrospect I wish I did.
It was too much, too soon. I didn’t have the confidence or know the ropes enough. I didn’t do a terrible job, I did the best I could. That said, people still like the film. I know how to pick them. Don’t I pick some weird fucking films?”
FRANK CASTLE
THE PUNISHER (2004)
Jane enjoyed playing Marvel’s skullemblazoned vigilante so much he was the driving force behind a 2012 short, Dirty Laundry, in which he unofficially reprised the role
“I turned down the role three times. I’m a comic-book geek, but I don’t like Marvel Comics, I don’t like DC superheroes. Yet Avi Arad sent me the work of Tim Bradstreet, who did covers for The Punisher, and that’s why I took the part. And there ensued the battle between me and Marvel about what this story was. They were trying to establish their brand as a superhero company and I had taken on the part of a fucking anti-hero. The battle was constant every day. I won some, and I lost some. I went on a blog, superherohype.com, and I had a fake name, and I would go on the Punisher blog to see what the fans wanted. What I loved about Frank was that he was willing to be the bad guy so that other people didn’t have to do it. He was willing to sacrifice his integrity, his reputation, and everything to protect people. A bit like John Wayne in The Searchers.”
DAVID DRAYTON
THE MIST (2007)
As the emotional anchor of Frank Darabont’s supermarket-set Stephen King adaptation, Jane is central to one of the great bleak endings in cinema history; a departure from King’s novella
“Frank and I had met because I’m a comic-book nerd, and we were both huge fans of Bernie Wrightson, one of the best comic-book illustrators in existence. One day at my house, a script shows up and it says, ‘The Mist, by Frank Darabont’. It’s incredible, and it included the ending. I said, ‘How the fuck are you going to pull this off?’ He said, ‘Bob Weinstein offered me double the budget, $30 million, if I change the ending.’ Frank and I had a conversation and said, ‘Fuck, no.’ Stephen King came out and we had dinner a few times. He said, ‘If I’d have thought of that ending, I’d have written it.’”
RAY MANDEL
BULLETPROOF (2020) Moustachioed once more, Jane plays a veteran cop who has to keep a lid on his increasingly combustible temper during a night of random encounters
“It’s an interesting time for a cop drama to come out. But I’ll tell you this. When I was young, I hated the police. When I was in my twenties, ‘Fuck the police,’ that was a motto I could have worn on my T-shirt, no problem. But I have hung out with police, whether it was gun-training for a movie, or training for this, where I did ride-alongs for a couple of weeks with a lot of cops in the Hollywood division. And I saw an incredible tenacity and ethic and morality in all the police I worked with. I also saw that there is a fine line between right and wrong, and the police walk that line. And this movie tries to show the job, warts and all. The cops in our movie are not heroes. They’re workaday cops who are trying to fucking get through the night. It’s a slice of life, not some heroic Hollywood bullshit.” CHRIS HEWITT
BULLETPROOF IS OUT NOW ON DVD AND DOWNLOAD