Clark Gregg and Nathan Fillion at the Seattle International Film Festival
Back in May, as the Seattle International Film Festival launched with the opening night gala screening of Joss Whedon’s modern-dress Shakespeare take Much Ado About Nothing, I had the pleasure of talking with two of the film’s stars, Nathan Fillion and Clark Gregg.
Fillion, of course, is best known as Richard Castle on Castle and as Captain Mal on Whedon’s short-lived but much-loved Firefly, while Whedon decided to spin Gregg’s supporting role in the Marvel Universe movies into a leading part in the new TV series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Which meant the conversation was ready to go in all directions, and did, thanks to their playful sense of fun. They met on the set of Much Ado and you could still see that they were getting to know each other, but it was also apparent that they were fast friends the way they bounced off one another, tossing quips back and forth, lobbing tongue-in-cheek insults and self-effacing rejoinders, and diving into pop-culture trivia like boys on the first day of school. Boys will be boys indeed.
Sean Axmaker: Let me begin by asking you: what have you been watching?
Nathan Fillion: I just saw Iron Man 3. I had a great time. (to Clark) You haven’t seen it yet?
Clark Gregg: (laughs) I haven’t seen it yet. I’ve been promoting the new S.H.I.E.L.D. TV show. I have to watch it.
NF: For your thing that you do? You’re killing that whole thing.
CG: Until they bring me back to life, I’m not going to watch any of the movies.
NF: You can’t watch it!
CG: I’m gonna watch it. I actually tried to get back to New York last night but I had one last appearance to do.
NF: You should read the file on it. Then your character will be right on track with that.
Clark Gregg as Agent Coulson in ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’
I’ve read a lot of comic books. Dead is only a temporary state of being in the comic book world.
CG: The last movie I saw … I’ve actually been watching television, I’ve been watching House of Cards.
NF: How is that?
CG: It’s really good.
NF: Did you binge watch it?
CG: No, I’m too old and too tired. I watch one and then I pass out. I watched The Intouchables, a French movie. It was superb. I really enjoyed it and my daughter loved it.
Did you see that on disc or streaming?
CG: I watched it on the Tunes of I.
NF: Mmmmmm! (murmurs his approval)
What’s your home viewing preference, Blu-ray, DVD, or streaming?
CG: I do everything streaming these days. You?
NF: I’ll once in a while throw in a 3D Blu-ray with the glasses.
CG: Really?
NF: I have the TV that does the thing.
You are the only person I know that has a 3D TV / glasses set-up.
NF: I know a couple of people now who have it.
CG: Can you watch regular discs on that TV?
NF: Yeah, absolutely. I had a little soiree, a little game night happened, and Joss Whedon was in attendance and I put up The Avengers and had him throw on the glasses and the next day I got a text: “What kind of TV was that again?”
Nathan Fillion as Mal Reynolds in ‘Firefly’
But you get out to the movies, right?
NF: There’s a theater not far from where I live in Pasadena called the Gold Class Cinema that is just like it sounds, it’s Gold Class. Press a button, someone comes (leans in, drops to a whisper), “Yes, what can I get you?,” and you say (whispering again), “I’ll have another mojito, the tater tots, and the Angus burger sliders.”
CG: Nice!
NF: And when they bring you candy, it’s in a martini glass.
CG: Oh come on!
NF: And they manage to make Caesar salad finger food, which is pretty great.
What’s your favorite Joss Whedon program that you are not in?
NF: Angel.
CG: All of them. I like them all. There wasn’t one I didn’t like.
For what it’s worth, I just rewatched the entire run of Firefly a couple of months back.
NF: Thank you for that.
Before they even announced Much Ado About Nothing as the opening night film.
NF: Nice, nice! Feel good?
It was the first time I’d revisited the show since it first came out on DVD. I watched the first few episodes on TV and got really confused because the character behavior was so erratic. When it came out on disc, I started again and this time I was completely involved in it. They made sense, each of them had a story. It was then I found out the network shuffled the episode order. They essentially sabotaged the series.
NF: You noticed that, did you?
CG: (laughs)
It was such a great show!
NF: This is where I get off, thanks to you. I get a little squirmy.
I should stop the fanboy stuff because I can get carried away.
NF: Oh no, that part I like.
Clark Gregg as Leonato in ‘Much Ado About Nothing’
Let’s talk a little something about Much Ado About Nothing. I know that the roots of this production come from Joss Whedon’s Shakespeare readings, where he invited members of his TV show casts for brunch at his house and read through a play. Clark, were you a part of that group?
CG: (deadpan) Sore subject.
NF: (laughs) I did two of those and Clark … We didn’t know Clark then. Had we known, we probably still wouldn’t have invited him. Because he’s a little too good, he would have raised the bar.
CG: Joss would ask me to drop by some bagels but not come in. No, I didn’t meet Joss until The Avengers. Actually, I met him during Comic Con after Thor, a year before The Avengers, and he came up to me and said, “I want to introduce (you) as part of the cast of The Avengers. I want to use Agent Coulson in The Avengers, is that okay with you?” It was the quickest head nod anybody has ever done. And then after The Avengers I was just kind of brought in, I think, because several people got jobs or passed away and suddenly I was in this movie. But I wasn’t in the brunches though they sound fantastic and I hope we do one in the future sometime.
Much Ado About Nothing was like a 12-day-long brunch, wasn’t it?
CG: It was a brunch, a dinner, and a hell of a cocktail party all rolled into one.
It looked like a hell of a cocktail party. Was there a scene where nobody had a drink in their hand?
CG: Boy, there was a lot of cocktails. Yes, when things get a little testy with all the scandal and the libeling of my daughter, I don’t think there’s a lot of drinking there.
I just want to go on record and say how that was very mean of them.
CG: I’ve never been a fan of people libeling my daughter on her wedding day.
NF: Isn’t libel in print?
CG: Is it like dictation?
(both start laughing)
NF: I remember in Spider-Man where J. Jonah Jameson says, “No, print is libel.”
And that’s where you get your legal expertise, from Spider-Man movies?
NF: Yes, well, there you have it.
CG: (after checking his smartphone) It’s written! Libel is only written! (Turns to Nathan) Thank you for calling me out on that.
Nathan Fillion (right) as Dogberry (with Tom Lenk, left) in ‘Much Ado About Nothing’
In Hamlet, Shakespeare famously gives acting advice: “Speak the speech I pray as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue”
NF: Well, we threw that out.
Did you trip over any of this? It must be hard enough playing Shakespeare, but playing Elizabethan language in modern dress, bringing classical speech and contemporary culture together, must be a different kind of challenge.
CG: It’s a take, you know what I mean? People are so worried that…
NF: Slander!
CG: Slander! That’s it. [continues] People are so worried that Shakespeare won’t be accessible because the language is ye olde, and at the same time the themes and the emotional content of so many of these plays, there’s so many parts of it that could happen today. And so very often, for God knows I’m sure at the turn of the century it was considered so radical that they were doing these plays from the 1600s in 1890s dress. I walk in and I’m wearing a Dolce and Gabbana suit and holding an iPhone and the first thing I say, “As I see from the message that Don Pedro of Aragon comes this day to Messina.” And all of a sudden I think it gives the audience a little bit of a way in and pretty soon you aren’t really noticing the language other than these are people who speak in a very poetic way. But what they say rings very present and very true.
I think you’re right, but as an actor, there’s also the challenge of bringing that language to the modern day and making it flow as if you are a couple of guys on the street having a conversation and yet make it perfectly understandable to an audience unfamiliar with the language.
CG: Oh, I should have done that. That’s a good idea.
NF: I think Shakespeare done well, that’s what it is: it’s making it conversation so people can understand. I think that’s been done very well here. People have said, and I’ve heard this more than once, the first two minutes you have to listen very hard, after that you can relax because you understand everything. Shakespeare is loaded with meaning and in the right hands, in capable hands, I’m gesturing toward Gregg Clark here …. (stops, turns to Clark) I just messed your name up. That’s the problem with having two first names.
CG: It begs for that.
NF: My dad said never trust a guy with two first names.
CG: So did mine. And I said, “You gave them to me, you bastard.”
NF: … is that you understand the meaning that you want them to glean from this play.
CG: Yeah, I gotta say, though, that this play in particular lends itself to that, its prose, and at the same time I think when people just try to make it purely naturalistic, they miss the boat, and I don’t think that’s what we were after, though this is the most naturalistic of all of them. This is written language that is heightened and its people who use tremendously evocative language to further their ends, their conspiracies, their love, and that’s one of the things that’s special about it so I don’t know that one’s task is really to make it feel like contemporary spoken English but to make it feel grounded in something that you’re willing to go to that heightened place. You buying that?
I’ll go with it, and I think it’s true. The greatest Shakespeare movies for me are those where you understand immediately what they’re saying by their performance, the way they make the poetry of it accessible.
CG: I love parts of the Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet a lot but one of my favorite lines from that play, when Romeo says “I am fortune’s fool,” it has a completely different meaning in Shakespeare and it’s not anything anyone walking around the street today is going to say, and yet that’s what makes it so evocative, so powerful. It’s not real life, it’s not supposed to be. It’s poetry.
So, [to Clark], you came to Much Ado About Nothing direct from The Avengers and [to Nathan], I’m just guessing, but did you come in on weekends between shooting episodes of Castle?
CG: He did.
NF: They were kind enough to shoot weekends for all my scenes.
Is that stressful or relaxing or some combination of both to squeeze a movie into a busy schedule like that?
CG: I would say it was a combo platter. It was really stressful, really frightening…
NF: … very challenging…
CG: … and I found I couldn’t wait to get back the next day because those scenes are so damn meaty. There’s so many levels of stuff going on. Did you find that?
NF: You’re on your own, you’re very afraid, am I prepared? Am I getting it? What’s it going to be? And you get there and you’re amongst friends and talented people and you’re just swept up in this torrent of talent. I loved it, and I feared it.
Is that something that Mal once said?
NF: I loved it and I feared it?
It just sounds like something that could have come from a Joss Whedon character. But maybe it’s the way you deliver it.
NF: I’ll take that as a compliment.
Much Ado About Nothing (Lionsgate) is available on Blu-ray, DVD, VOD, and Cable On Demand.