In the Freevee comedy “Sprung,” Garret Dillahunt reunites with “Raising Hope” creator Greg Garcia for their latest show together. The premise: A loose collection of knuckleheads fresh out of prison form a ramshackle heist crew that helps other poor sods in need.
What drew Dillahunt to this particular story? “It’s been a hell of a few years for all of us,” he said. “One way or another, everybody’s business model for their lives was called into question. Is this the best thing I should be doing? Does this matter? And I certainly struggle with those things, too. I feel like I’m fiddling while Rome burns a little bit. But I also want to make people feel good. And I know how to tell a story. I know what love is and what family is in all its permutations. And I just thought: Let’s make something that makes people feel good again.”
Dillahunt may be best known for playing goofy doofuses in comedies, but he can be just as credible playing creeps on everything from “Deadwood” and “Law & Order.”
When asked about a worst moment in his career, he recalled a scene that required him to cry on cue. There’s an old actor’s trick to help those tears along when they aren’t coming on their own. And for Dillahunt, that’s where everything went wrong.
My worst moment …
“This was some time ago. I had an audition for a TV series in 2004, and the two scenes they gave me to prepare were a fairly typical and straightforward scene, followed immediately by a scene where I’ve learned that my brother is dead and it’s horrifyingly emotional and devastating.
“In the old days, when someone had to cry on camera and if you weren’t feeling it and you couldn’t get there, they’d blow this camphor or menthol vapor at your eyeballs to make you tear up. When I was on ‘Deadwood,’ I met John Rizzo, who is sort of a legendary makeup guy. And he told me about this other thing called a tear stick, which is like a tube of lipstick that’s just solid camphor that you dab near your eyes.
“No one told me how to use this stuff. But I thought, I have a plan: I’m going to nail this audition, I’m going to cry and they’ll be shocked. So I took some of the tear stick and I put it on the back of my hand before I went in for the audition.
“It was a busy day and I had a ton of auditions. And I’d been told, ‘Come in between 1 and 3 o’clock.’ And I thought: Oh, I’ve got this giant window and they’re seeing a ton of people. But they weren’t seeing a ton of people — I don’t know how I misunderstood, but I ended up making them wait an hour. And I’m never late. I’m chronically early. So I’m already a little mortified, like: Oh my God, they’ve been sitting here waiting for me. I don’t think that had ever happened before. This was very early in my career.
“But anyway (laughs), I finally go in and there and I’m very apologetic. I’m a little thrown because I’m late. But the good news is that they’re going to be amazed when I pull off, this incredibly emotional turn between scenes because I put some of that little camphor stick on the back of my hand.
“So I do the first scene, seems to go fine. And then I do the second scene, and I’m sort of absently scratching the back of my hand that has the camphor on it, as if I have an itch there. But I’m just going to slyly poke my finger in each eye, which is what I thought you were supposed to do.
“So that’s what I’m doing, and it’s like I have no concept of reality because I’m thinking: They’re going to be floored by what I’m about to do! And I stick it right in my eye. Pure camphor directly on my eyeballs.
“And it’s absolutely burning. It feels like it’s liquefying my eyeballs.
“My head is down. I can’t open my eyes at all. Any slight breath of air across them is now excruciating. There’s water pouring down my face. And I’ve understood now that I’ve made a horrible mistake (laughs).
“I can’t lift my head up. I’m trying to pass it off as if I was taking a few minutes to get ready for the scene, like some sort of weird actor moment, which I never do but I’m trying to pass it off as that.
“But now it’s gone on for like 30 seconds — a significant amount of time with my head down. And I’ve made another mistake in that I sort of tried to wipe it off with the back of my hand, and instead, I ended up just grinding it in more. And now my eyes are swollen shut, like I’d been in a 15-round fight.
“Finally I was able to open my eyes and I look up (laughs) and I start doing the scene and I don’t know how to describe the looks of horror on their faces. I left myself nowhere to go emotionally. It was like I started the scene with ‘my entire family has just been wiped out.’
“I finished. They said thank you, I went back out to the waiting room and now there are like four or five other people there and they look at me, look back at their sides (scripts) and they all have this expression on their faces like: What went on in there?”
Clearly, Dillahunt was in distress — did anyone in the audition room say: “Hey, are you OK?”
(Laughs) No! I don’t know what they thought. They were quiet. And they were unimpressed (laughs). And they knew that I had done something that had gone horribly wrong, which was also probably not confidence-inspiring. Or they thought: He’s just way too emotional for us, we don’t have time to wait for him to go through his process.
“I had to get in my car and drive home after this and I was kind of one-eyeballing it. I was just so mortified I had to get far away. I just kept blinking and the swelling was intense. The camphor evaporated away within an hour or so, but it’s still embarrassing to think about.
“Even all these years later, I’ve managed to do a few decent things, but I’ve still never heard from these guys (that he auditioned for) to do anything since.”
How does Dillahunt deal with crying scenes now?
“I’m just kind of an imagination-based guy and usually the story will get me where I need to go.
“And if I do need that stuff like the tear stick, you just put a tiny bit underneath your eye. Now I’m an old pro (laughs), I know how to do it. You don’t have to put it on your eyes.”
The takeaway …
“I wish I had just trusted my technique a little more (laughs).
“And don’t use things that you don’t know how to use.
“But also, when you’re younger, you put way too much currency on crying — that if you can cry, that’s somehow the pinnacle of acting, when in fact it’s rarely that moving in a scene. I think as you get a little more experience, it doesn’t matter as much. You don’t even necessarily have to cry. It’s not the point of the scene, whether you can cry or not.
“Sometimes it’s more powerful not to cry. So now I just never feel like it’s a command. It’s just: This is what the writer thought when they were writing the scene, that there would be actual tears falling. But maybe the character is fighting those tears and the audience will be more moved by that. There’s no one response to tragedy.”
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