We spoke with Michael Biehn about his comedic role in the newly released series 24 Hour Photo currently available on Hulu, iTunes and VOD. We talked about the show’s outrageous script, how it is to play the straight man against a bunch of comedians and how much work the man has been up to lately. Check out the interview and our review of the first season HERE.
24 HOUR RENTAL follows former Mafia boss Tracker (Romano Orzari), who having barely avoided early retirement in a shallow grave, now operates a seedy video store. Struggling to stay afloat in the Internet age, Tracker runs his shop as a front for a host of petty crimes, from fencing jewelry to peddling dope cut with Drano and desperation, all in hopes of returning to power.
How did you get involved with this show?
Michael Biehn: I knew George Mihalka through Susan Curran who works at Anchor Bay, and Susan has been responsible for picking up a lot of movies that Jennifer and I have made with BlancBiehn Productions. They picked up The Victim which I wrote and directed, and we have another one that just came out called The Night Visitor. These are really like grindhouse kind of movies that I learned about when I did the Grindhouse series with Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. We have this company and we have movie after movie after movie coming out, so we’re just kind of busy with that. I’m in Atlanta right now and I’m shooting a movie right now called The Shadow Light that I just came on to with Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, so I’ve just been really busy.
With 24 Hour Rental, George has done a lot of really good horror up in Canada as a director. He did a movie years and years ago called My Bloody Valentine and it kind of started the whole Halloween thing and this movie was one of the first ones. So I get sent this script and it was so outrageous and so politically incorrect. It was a comedy and I don’t get offered comedies that often. So, it was kind of a no-brainer for me because I thought it was funny when I read it.
It’s always fun to work with comedians, and there were some great comedians that were working on that show. It’s fun to be the straight man on a set around a lot of comedians and I’ve done it once before with John Landis called Susan’s Plan with Dan Aykroyd and Rob Schneider as two goofballs who couldn’t get their act together. It’s jus fun being around funny people, I like laughing and these guys just had me in stitches the entire time we were working. It’s always fun being around a bunch of comics and I thought it was so totally politically incorrect and it just looked like fun, so I went up there and did it and had a really good time.
Did you bring anything to the role of Buzz?
MB: Well, y’know I am not quite as burnt out at this point in my life as that guy was, but I’m probably headed in that direction. (laughs) He is a guy that is kind of into some wild sexual escapades and is a drunk. I’ve done my fair share of drinking in my life and I can relate to that. I didn’t really feel like I was playing comedy, I felt like I was the straight man. There’s two different kinds of comedy; there’s Robin Williams who would go out there and let loose, or you could play the straight man in a situation where everything around you is just crazy and that’s what I did. I just played it straight and the circumstances surrounding the straight man just come off funny and that’s great.
What do you think will get audiences will enjoy most about 24 Hour Rental?
MB: I think the show is so totally, outrageously politically incorrect. I’ve never read anything so bizarrely wild that way before, and that’s what really caught me along with the fact that George was directing it. Then once I got up there, I got to meet all those great guys: Romano, Adam and Aaron and everybody. Y’know I just had a great time. I was attracted to the script first of all, to me it was like my mouth was wide open, I’d never read anything so politically incorrect and I was just like, “Oh, well this is going to be fun. This is going to be fun to play the drunken, crazed sex-maniac.” (laughs) I just thought it would be fun, and it turned out to be a lot of fun.