Ben Kurland :: On the rise actor mixes it up

For Ben Kurland, moving to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career has been a smart move. Earlier this year "The Artist," a film in which he has a supporting role, turned heads at the Cannes Film Festival, where the film's star Jean Dujardin took home the Festival's Best Actor award.

What is unusual about "The Artist" (directed by Michel Hazanavicius) is that it is an anachronistic conceit - a black-and-white, silent movie set in Hollywood at the moment when sound films were about to make silents extinct. On paper it is the kind of film you'd expect the Cannes' elite to view with skepticism, but they were so charmed at its premiere they gave it a 20-minute standing ovation.

"Begone snobs!," wrote the critic from the London newspaper The Independent. "The Artist is most out-and-out joyous film of the festival to date, a valentine to the glories of silent cinema, a triumph of artistic teleportation, pure effervescence that gives crowd-pleasing a good name...By the end, it's all you can do not to cheer on the seemingly star-crossed lovers and not to sigh about how they don't make films like this anymore. Except, of course, Hazanavicius just has."

A more contemporary project

The 26-year old Kurland was thrilled to see the film go to Cannes and be selected by the Weinstein Company for distribution in the United States later this year. But this month the Boston-born actor focuses on a much more contemporary project -- the lead role in a new play Guided Consideration of a Lamentable Deed that Need Theater brings to West Hollywood's Cafe Club Fais Do-Do where it runs through October 15, 2011.

In Frank Basloe's play, Kurland plays Tim who on the eve of his college graduation commits the lamentable deed of the play's title. He leaves the scene of the crime to try to make sense of his actions, seeking absolution from his friends and schoolmates as the long night heads towards dawn. With a cast of 17 actors, "Guided Consideration of a Lamentable Deed" is Need Theater's most ambitious production to date. It is also typical of the edgy work that has won the company the Ovation and LA Weekly Awards and notice in such publications as Variety, the LA Times, Backstage and American Theater Magazine.

EDGE spoke to Kurland about his role in "The Artist" (where he plays a casting assistant who helps bring a new starlet into the age of talking pictures as Dujardin's star is beginning to wan due to the new technology), as well as having played a closeted thug in the movie "Sinners" and his current role in Basloe's dark comedy.

LOL funny

EDGE: Let's talk about "The Artist" first. I won't be getting to Cannes to see it so can you tell me what the movie and what your part is in it?

Ben Kurland: It takes place in the '20s, just about the time where talking pictures were coming out and becoming popular and an aging silent film star (Dujardin) finds himself in a precarious situation where he believes in the medium, he's become very, very famous because of this medium and he's adverse to change. While his career is slowly declining, a new star (B�r�nice Bejo) emerges in the talking pictures and I discover this new star. It is a silent film. It is in black and white and it's just a very unique thing especially for this day and age when people are so used to going to the movies and really wanting car chases and action sequences. It's a classical, romantic, silent film!

EDGE: Would you say the film is more comedy or drama?

BK: I would say it's a dramedy. It has some very comedic parts but it also does have some emotional undertones as well. I really loved reading the script, which was such a bizarre experience because a typical film script is maybe 110 pages and this script was, I think, 37 pages of all action. It was kind of wild reading it and it basically outlines the general plot. It's funny because I remember reading the script and while there were no lines it is still very comical and there were certain moments where I found myself laughing out loud.

EDGE: You have quite a cast working with you, too. James Cromwell, John Goodman, to name a few. How was it working with them?

BK: It was amazing. They are really masters of their trade. The person I worked closest with was actually B�r�nice Bejo and she was a ball to work with. She was so open to her own experience and very playful and I think the playfulness really added to the quality of the work and the experience itself.

EDGE: Many actors wait their whole career for a movie of theirs to go to Cannes and now you're part of one that did!

BK: It's funny. I was at a showcase in Los Angeles and I ended up running into Beth Grant, who is another actress in the film, and she has a whole body of work. She was in "No Country For Old Men" and "Rain Man." I ran into her and said "I've been seeing some news articles that it ("The Artist") might go to Cannes.' She lit up and said 'That's so exciting!' To see someone who had been in the business for so long and get so excited about this film was truly remarkable. I think it is a testament to how special this film is.

Playing characters in moral crises

EDGE: The role in "The Artist" sounds really different from past roles you've done. Your character is not gay in this film but have you played gay before?

BK: I actually did play a character that's gay. I did a very low budget movie called "Sinners" in 2008 and the film was actually based on true events of the writer/director [Tory Christopher]. This group of guys from Texas had moved out to Los Angeles and were going to a bunch of gay bars in and around Los Angeles picking up guys and then taking them back to hotel rooms and beating them up and robbing them. One of the guys doing this ends up secretly being gay himself and starts a relationship with a guy that he meets on one of these pickups and has to cover it up from the rest of the group that he's ensnared with. They end up finding out about it and forced him to murder this guy. It was a really amazing experience getting to work on that.

EDGE: Well, that definitely sounds different than "The Artist"!

BK: The interesting thing to me was that it wasn't so much a story about people who are gay. It was really a story about intolerance and there were also a lot of elements about their upbringing and how they were brought up in a small Lutheran town in Texas with a pastor who was guiding them. The thing that I really liked about it was that it was really a tale of this guy who faced a moral crisis and an identity crisis. His real regret in the end ends up not being the murder itself but not having faced up to his own identity before things got out of hand.

EDGE: You're also doing a very interesting sounding play that is coming to LA this summer.

BK: It's a great play. The world premiere of "Guided Consideration of a Lamentable Deed" which is quite a mouthful, but it circles around my character and his last night at Columbia University. He's graduating in the morning and he finds himself in a very precarious situation because he has just finished having sex with an unconscious girl. It's a wild play but it's really sort of similar to a Bret Easton Ellis story with all these characters who are so self-involved that they're missing the bigger picture. It sort of comments on the elitist realm in which some people's priorities are so out of whack that they're just really losing their basis of reality. There's another cool element to it which is that there's a guide and the guide is similar to the narrator in "500 Days of Summer" where he has information about people's future lives. It's not necessarily an omniscient character but she's definitely just sort of plays a role in how everything carries out and weaves the audience along this journey. That's the guided consideration.

EDGE: So you've done some comedy and drama. Which is more challenging to you?

BK: I still think to me it's different circumstances. Comedy is always just larger stakes but it is much more difficult because in a drama the logic of the character makes more sense or certain things are more justifiable to the average person and typically in a comedy you're dealing with characters that are a little left of center. So to get behind their decisions I think that's a real challenge with comedy. It's to try to really get behind what your characters are doing and why they're doing it. But I think the pay off in comedy can be greater in that respect because a comedy done really well means that you have a group of very committed actors who are willing to go that extra mile to really discover what it is about these people that makes them tick.

The Weinstein Company has picked up "The Artist" for release tentatively later this year and if you're in Los Angeles, the play "Guided Consideration of a Lamentable Deed" is set to premiere in August. For more on Ben, go to his website.