Link This | Email this | Blog This | Comments (2)

This Cole is Hot!
July 16, 2007

The past year has seen actor Gary Cole pop up in substantial roles in the Will Ferrel-starring comedy Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby and the espionage thriller Breach. Not nearly as high profile but quite notable for its compelling story and an outstanding performance by Cole was the indie period drama American Pastime (Warner, $19.98).

 

Written and directed by Desmond Nakano, American Pastime stars Cole as an over-the-hill WWII-era  minor league baseball catcher who still dreams he’s gonna get a call from the Yankees. Until that day comes,

though, he works as a guard at a Japanese-American internment camp in Utah. By film’s end, you can rest assured that Cole’s character, Billy Burrell, will make some life-defining revelations about himself and his country.

 

“There was nothing really unconventional on how I came to the film,” Cole told us in a recent interview. “The script had been around for a while and they had been looking at people for some time. I came along relatively late.”

 

The film was primarily shot on location in Utah not far away from the actual internment camp that the story was based on. For his part, Cole was quite satisfied with the several-weeks-long production schedule.

 

“Indie or studio, money or not, it doesn’t really change what actors do,” he said. “In most of my experience, I haven’t seen a lot of time wasted on productions I’m involved in. Most of the ones I work on, like American Pastime, move pretty quickly.”

 

Next up for Cole are roles in Pineapple Express, a comedy written by Seth “Knocked Up” Rogen, the indie comedy Say Hello to Stan Talmadge and the as-yet-to-be-scheduled HBO series 12 Miles of Bad Road. Needless to say, Cole appears to be keeping busy.

 

“Some years, there just seems to be more idle time. When you step back and look at the past five or ten years, I seem to be keeping busy,” he said. “When you’re rolling on the wave, you stay on it until you fall off.”

 

 

Posted by Laurence Lerman on July 16, 2007 | Comments (2)