"Are you kidding
me?" Tony Shalhoub laughs, sitting in his hotel suite in Miami. "I thought
'Honest to God,'Is this a joke? This cannot be real. It just can't
be." Veteran actor Tony
Shalhoub is recalling the first time high-profile director Michael
Bay told him about his upcoming film Pain and Gain, based on a true
story about the Sun Gym gang who committed grisly crimes in Miami in
the mid 1990s. Bay wanted Shalhoub
to play the part of Victor Kershaw, a businessman who has something
Daniel Lugo (played by Mark Wahlberg) and the rest of his gang
members want - cash, and plenty of it.
"After I knew I
was doing the film, I started to read about it and I kept on having
to ask, 'Wait a minute, is this really true or are we just saying
it's true?' I couldn't wrap my brain around it, then when I started
to read the articles, I was gobsmacked. Only in Miami could this have
happened." The articles Shalhoub
refers to are those written by Pete Collins for the Miami New Times
which revealed the story about a gang of body builders who had a
penchant for strippers, fast cars and quick cash. The same articles
which fascinated Bay, a Miami native, and a story he vowed he would
turn into a movie one day. Over a decade later, Pain and Gain, a
passion project for Bay, has been made into a film starring Wahlberg,
Dwayne Johnson, Anthony Mackie, Ed Harris and Tony Shalhoub.
Shalhoub says he was
immediately drawn to the part and the fact the story was true made it
even more appealing. "That's the
beauty of working on a true story, that like all human beings, these
people are not just one thing," Shalhoub says. "They're
complicated. They have many contradictions within their character and
that's what fascinates me. Just the unbridled ego and ambition that
must have overtaken these guys to make them believe they could pull
something like this off. As they get more deeply entrenched in it,
they get more and more desperate. It's like selling your soul to the
devil. Once you go down the road, there is no turning back." A physically
gruelling role for Shalhoub, many of his scenes were spent
blindfolded and tied to a chair. To empathize with
character further, he would keep his blindfold on during breaks on
set, in an effort to better understand what Kershaw went through. "It was very
challenging," Shalhoub says, nodding his head. "When you're
blindfolded for so long, it has an incredible effect on you. I chose
to keep my blindfold on between setups, not all of the time, but some
of the time because I really wanted to get that sense of isolation
and disorientation. Even with one of your senses compromised and the
inability to move, all kinds of things start happening in your head.
In my character's case, it wasn't just concern for himself, it was
concern for his family, his wife and child. He knew these criminals
knew where they were so there was more than one life at stake. It was
terrifying." After various torture
methods were used on his character, he still refused to buckle for a
long time, but Shalhoub believes it was only because Kershaw knew who
he was dealing with.
"Had the
perpetrators been other people, he may have cracked earlier, but he
so resented those guys and had such a lack of respect for Lugo and
such disdain for them, he just couldn't do it because of that. Had it
truly been anonymous perpetrators, he might have caved, but it was a
battle of wills," he says.
One of the most
difficult scenes for Shalhoub is when his character is on a dry
cleaning carousel and he is rotated around like a piece of dirty
linen while upside down. "My stunt double
warned me I was going to get sick so I knew I was in a rough ride,"
he laughs. "It was tough,
but surprisingly I didn't get too sick."
What kept Shalhoub
going through the shoot was Bay's unrelenting passion for the film.
While most of Bay's films are renowned for having some of the highest
budgets in Hollywood, Pain and Gain is a return to his initial Bad
Boys roots with a conservative bottom line, particularly by Bay's
standards. It was something which did not go unnoticed or
unappreciated by the stellar cast. "He's very
passionate and very intense," Shalhoub says of Bay. "He's very
specific about his vision and what he's about. His energy and his
drive is infectious. It gets into everyone and everyone starts to
work at this super-heightened level, but I also felt an enormous
sense of trust and confidence. He really knew what the tone of this
piece had to be. He has been working on this project for nine years
trying to get this thing made. It has been a pet project of his, so
just knowing that was reassuring. It means he has thought it out very
thoroughly." Shalhoub can see what
the appeal was in the true-life story and why Bay found the case so
compelling. "It makes you
think what are we all racing toward? What's of real value to us? Is
it the stuff we spend our money on or want to possess because it
gives us status? What do we need to feel whole? These guys obviously
felt they could never be happy or feel like men without having what
the next man had. It's insanity," Shalhoub says.
Happy with his lot in
life, Shalhoub says, at 59 years old, he is content. Splitting his time
between New York and Los Angeles, working on Broadway, in television
and in film, Shalhoub has achieved what he believes the Sun Gym gang
never could. He knows when enough is enough. "I grew up in a
small town," Shalhoub says referring to his Green Bay, Wisconsin
roots." I didn't have
pie in the sky visions of being a Hollywood actor or anything like
that. When I started to think about being an actor, I thought it
would be a fun and interesting life pursuit, the acting part not the
celebrity part. The celebrity is not really something I think about.
I think celebrity is something which exists outside of you. It's
people's perception of you. I'm constantly surprised when someone
recognizes me because I am not thinking about it. I have other
problems and other issues I'm trying to deal with," he laughs. " I think of
myself as an actor. I don't think of myself in terms of when people
use the word 'star.' Clark Gable was a star, Meryl Streep, George
Clooney - that's different than me. I am who I am."
Pain & Gain is released in Ireland and the U.K. on the 30th August.
