Tye Sheridan takes on mean streets of ‘Asphalt City’
Intense and rigorously authentic, “Asphalt City” teams Sean Penn and Tye Sheridan as angels in the hell that is New
York City’s nightly emergencies.
Sheridan, 27, a producer as well as star, calls it “A movie full of hope. Inherently, playing a paramedic’s life comes with darkness. Because they are being called to people at their worst moments, right?
“They are the shepherds of society if you will. They try to guide people to help, to the light.
“Also,” he added in a Zoom interview, “paramedics hate being called ‘ambulance drivers’! That’s one thing I learned through the process of making this: EMTs” — Emergency Medical Technicians — “are different than paramedics who I think are a super essential part of our society.
“Because most people don’t know much about their lives, the ambition of this film is to get really close and see what they deal with on a daily basis.”
Sheridan and Penn were determined to get it right. “Sean obviously has a very storied career and is someone I really admire and look up to. He takes his job very seriously. You know he has a special relationship with first responders through some of the work he’s done in his personal life.
“For this, we both were excited to pursue this journey and convey the lives of paramedics, people who are so important in our society.
“We were leaning on each other through the process of training, doing ride-alongs three or four nights a week for two months leading up to shooting the film.
“Then we were in a classroom environment together, learning different tricks of the trade, so to speak.”
There’s a religious element to Sheridan’s struggling paramedic Ollie Cross. His zippered jacket is adorned with an elaborate set of wings. In his tiny Chinatown apartment there’s the winged St. Michael the Archangel on the wall. Like his name, Ollie has a cross to bear.
“Yes, there is the symbology of the Archangel Michael. These paramedics are shepherds, so there’s definitely a resonance there of carrying the weight of that responsibility in society.
“What this is really about is the chaos and content of the job and how that can slip into your personal life. You have to compartmentalize these things and separate the personal from their professional life — and is that possible?
“Especially when what you see on a daily basis is quite impactful and emotional. The EMS community in New York has had quite a few suicides.
“What the film explores is what these people face on a day to day basis and how it infiltrates their personal life, their relationships. And their emotional mental state.”
“Asphalt City” opens March 29