Crazy stories

I think one of the craziest things that ever happened to me on set was being chased by wolves. I remember showing up and the director, he's a prankster, he's a jokester, he looks at me and says, you have any problem being chased by wolves? I thought he was kidding. I look over and sure enough in the snow there's a mark, an X. I go to the X, I look down the hill and there are two wolves in a cage. Well, I want that on my resume. So I said, yeah, let's do this. So we went over and he said, don't worry, we got a, we got a trainer here. And the trainer said, and I'll never forget, folks, number one, you can't train wolves. There's that. Number two, show dominance, always show dominance or they will continue to attack. And then he looks at me and says, number three, I have a fanny pack full of fresh meat, little pieces. So you are the meat until you get to the meat. I went back to my mark. I had about a 50 yard dash to get to that camera. And you better believe I made that dash in record time. I'm still here. All right.

Video 2 Transcript

So part of my job as an actor is making music videos on my family's channel, Working With Lemons. We've done a lot of videos from Frozen, and I play Elsa in those. When Frozen 2 came out, we were like, okay, we know we want to do those videos, but I was six months pregnant. So I played Elsa as a six-month pregnant lady, and I just like had to suck in my belly and walk in a way that hid that I was really pregnant, and we just like tried to adjust the costumes to hide my belly. It turned out pretty well, but it was pretty hilarious playing a Disney princess with a pregnant belly.

Video 3 Transcript

I went up to Park City for a wardrobe fitting for a film I was doing and I went through all the various wardrobe changes, five or six of them, and then I asked the wardrobe person, so that's it. She said, yeah, except there's that one scene where all you guys are naked in this sweat lodge and you come out and run across the field and jump in the river. I said, well, okay. So I go call my agent and I say, I'm not going to do that. Agent calls, you know, a producer, anyway, they work through it. So they, I don't know, they cut the scene, they changed it so I didn't have to do it, but yeah, that was weird. So they actually wanted me to run naked across the field. Yeah, I don't think so. Oh, and then they said, well, we'll get a body double for you. I said, no, it doesn't work for me because if by chance my family sees these naked people running across the field, because I hope they don't, then they think, well, one of them's a dad. No, not for me. Sorry.

Video 4 Transcript

One crazy story I had was, make sure that you know who you're collaborating with, because we were, there was a group of us, five of us actually, writing a script, and we were actually going to be actors in the film. It was a short film, and to submit on a time limit to a project, and one in particular of the ladies were very possessive, very domineering, and just everything had to be their way, and the rest of us were under the assumption that we had to like submit, and but then they wanted our ideas, and so we were in the middle of trying to collaborate on a zoom call, trying to submit these script edits, and it disappeared. The entire script.

Video 5 Transcript

One time I was shooting a period piece from the 1800s, you know, decked out in all these big old sideburns and everything, old-timey looking clothes, and they took a fire hose out in the middle of the desert and used the fire hose to make a fake lake. And we had to pretend to drink from this lake. Well, high-definition had just come out, and they came up to me because it was close up on me, and the director came and says, Ah, we're really close on you. We can tell you're not really drinking it. So can you make it look more like you're drinking it, whatever you have to do? Well, they had just told everybody, like on the loudspeaker, don't drink this. There's all kinds of stuff in here. So I ended up drinking quite a bit just because I was on camera, and I got horribly, horribly sick for the next few days.

Video 6 Transcript

I was filming overnight a scene involved in which my character wife and I were supposed to be in a car crash. So they had this dented car with smoke coming out of it and they did us in blood and, you know, gash makeup and everything. Sitting in this car, the ambulance comes, takes everybody away. It was a long, long night. We get out of there like five in the morning. I drove home like 40, 30, 40 minutes. The makeup lady got as much makeup, fake blood off as she could. But she said, make sure you get the rest of it off when you get home. Just take a shower. I said, okay. As soon as I got home, I said, I'm not taking a shower. I look pretty good. I just jumped into bed. The sheets, there was fake blood all over the place. Um, cause I just got lazy. The good news is it washed out. Cause it's basically just Cairo syrup and some sort of food coloring, but that, uh, it was crazy.

Video 7 Transcript

The director came up and asked me if I wanted to start a snowball fight. And I said, hmm, sounds like fun, sure, why not? So I got to throw the first snowball at the main actress and hit her right in the back of the head. So, yeah, you know, you can have fun on some of these sets. And you're going to come up with a lot of crazy stories. So, have fun with it.

Video 8 Transcript

All right, crazy stories about acting. Now, this might not be crazy for, you know, it might not seem crazy to other people, but it was definitely crazy to me. So I grew up loving Napoleon Dynamite. It came out my senior year of high school and it just like changed my whole outlook towards what comedies and low budget films could be, how they could be so amazing. So I was a huge fan of John Heder and this last winter I got to do a movie with John Heder and we were co-stars together and I got to hang out in his room and we were playing Tetris late one night in his room together, just having a blast on his PS4. And I just looked over and it's one of those surreal, like out of body experiences where I'm like, man, I was going to be a dentist. Like I used to watch you as a kid and here I am playing Tetris next to Napoleon Dynamite. It was just a very cool, humbling experience that I'll never forget.

Video 9 Transcript

I have stories on stories on stories. Crazy things happen to me all the time, almost every set. But one of my favorites, and it's kind of not so good for me, but it's a fun one to tell, was I'm doing a short film, a World War I short film, and the actor doing this fight sequence with me, he's actually one of my best friends. And so it was really cool getting to work with him again. But I have a lot more experience doing action sequences than he did. And although we did days of training for this fight, we're doing this fight sequence, and his character swings an elbow, and he actually connected with me and shattered my cheekbone. I had to go to the hospital, I had a concussion. I ended up getting this huge black eye that lasted over a month, and we had to hold filming until I healed. And so I love to tease my friend about it. There's a lot more to say about that story.

Video 10 Transcript

So when I lived in LA I joined an extras agency and they sent me out on the set of a disco movie for three days And it was awesome. I got to meet a lot of talented people Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore, Heather Graham, Philip Seymour Hoffman But my third day on the set I finally found out what the movie was about Turned out it was the movie Boogie Nights

Video 11 Transcript

All of my craziest stories just involve the live magic of theater in that you don't know what's going to happen while, of course, you rehearse every night to make it the same show every time. Anything can go wrong and that's where the whole like the show must go on thing comes from, of course. There's just so many times where props or even sets have broken. There's this one time when I was in Mary Poppins as one of the chimney sweeps. We were about to go on for the number and the giant fire curtain, which easily could have hurt someone if we were already on stage, just like snapped and it drops onto the stage and so our director just had to like quickly call it off and hold an emergency intermission and it was really scary but like it's just funny how many things can go wrong or even can go different that just live theater really brings about.

Video 12 Transcript

Well, you've got to be careful. You know, safety first is always the rule on any set. And a director once asked me to run, to climb up this mountainside. And then when he waved his hand, I was supposed to start running as fast as I could with a shotgun down the mountain. And he basically pointed out, you'll run here, you'll run there, you'll run here. And this was, you know, it took me 15 minutes to get up to the point. And then when he waved his hand and I started running, I realized that going up was a lot easier than coming down. And I started bounding down this mountain and not wanting to have to do it again. I just kept going and going until I actually hit a cliff. I jumped right off the cliff about 15, 20 feet, didn't even know it, and landed on my feet. They all thought I was dead. And then I appeared from behind a tree and I kept running. I cut my wrist. That was it.