Cam Gigandet on Camera, Part I
August 4, 2008

“At this point in my career I’m okay with not being the leading man,” says up-and-coming 25-year-old star Cam Gigandet. And that’s probably a good thing: this 25-year-old native of Tacoma, Washington, has already enjoyed considerable success as a bad boy.

Gigandet got into the acting game five years ago, winning small parts in The Young and the Restless and Jack & Bobby before being cast as unscrupulous Kevin Volchok in the 2005-06 season of The O.C. He parlayed that meaty, well-received supporting turn into a larger, flashier villain role in the youth-oriented mixed-martial-arts drama Never Back Down (https://www.videobusinesss.com/article/CA6581784.html), which opened earlier this year and was just released on DVD by Summit Media. Cam’s intense portrayal of bully boy Ryan McCarthy

“It felt like forever,” says Cam of the time he spent training for and rehearsing the brawls in Never Back Down. “I trained for three months before we started filming, and then every day during production. And it took four days to shoot that last fight. There were lots of retakes and it was really tough to keep our energy up.”

Recently he completed work on two horror films, The Unborn and Twilight. The latter, scheduled for release later this year, adapts Stephanie Meyer’s best-selling novels about a teenaged girl who falls in love with a vampire. Cam plays one of the undead, bloodsucking youths—another bad boy. It’s a role he really enjoyed.

“What’s fun about being a vampire is that there are no rules,” Cam says. “These guys are single-track, man, they are just into doing whatever they want. There’s something kind of liberating about playing someone with that kind of freedom, you know?”--Ed Hulse

Check back tomorrow for part II of Ed's conversation with Cam Gigandet!

Posted by Laurence Lerman on August 4, 2008 | Comments (1)