It isn’t easy finding someone to go up against Liam Neeson who can actually come across as a serious threat, but watch out for Common in Jaume Collet-Serra’s latest, Run All Night. Whereas Neeson is an old school hitman, Common’s character takes a much more modern approach to eliminating his targets. Jimmy Conlon’s busy using his fists and guns, but Andrew Price rocks some especially high tech gear that makes him nearly impossible to outrun.
While promoting Run All Night’s March 13th release, Common participated in a roundtable interview with a group of journalists to discuss details about Price that never made it into the final cut of the movie, what it was like working with Neeson, how things have changed since his Oscar win and more. You can check it all out in the interview below.
Question: You’re known as a villainous character and also as this amazing human being. How many times have you thought about, ‘You know, I can play the bad guy and feel real good about it?’
COMMON: I feel great about playing the bad guy. It’s a lot of exploration for me as an actor to go to those places because I don’t get to go to them in real life. The human being that I strive to be is a great human being, like a loving human being, but as an actor, you take on roles that are not you and that’s the fun part for me as far as acting goes. You really get to learn about other human beings and not judge. Even playing this assassin, this killer, I still had to find who he was as a person and you don’t look at everybody and just say, ‘Okay, that person is a drug dealer,’ or, ‘That person is a scientist.’ You don’t label people as much. You kind of understand it’s a human being under whatever they do. I love being the crazy guy.
Who is he as a person? I kind of picture him just sitting at home during his free time cleaning his guns.
COMMON: [Laughs] Well, the funny part is that one part that was written in the script, but didn’t make the film was you first find him in this S&M type of club and so he was really like, out there. [Laughs] A lonely guy and he also is a focused type of human being where if he’s got a goal, his goal is to kill and that’s what he’s gonna do. He’s relentless in his ways, and I didn’t realize until yesterday when I was doing the press junket that he doesn’t talk that much in the film. He’s not even talking that much, but he still has a presence and you know what his focus is.
Although you don’t say much, there’s still a menacing thing to you that's just so intimidating. When I was watching you on screen, I was wondering, what’s going through your head? Who did you study to get that out of you? Clearly it wasn’t the Common that I saw at the Oscars.
COMMON: Yeah, well, I mean, that was Price. My thing is if a character is written as Andrew Price, I’m gonna become that person. My research entailed me working with Jaume, the director, just thinking of ideas, creating that and also, I actually read about certain killers, just read some of their background and stories and I didn’t emulate any of them, but I wanted to know. Not everyone is the same. Like I said, you can’t label a person just because of what they do or what they’ve done. But I got some background and then it started helping me to start to formulate who Price was. I guess really what was going through my head most of the time was, ‘I’m here to do this job in the mind of Price. I’m here to get these guys and that’s what I’m going to do and do whatever it takes to get that.’ And I understand that on another level, not on a murdering level, but when it comes to goals, I’m able to set goals and go for them and I like going for it relentlessly too, so I can relate to Price in that way.
It’s only been a couple of weeks so you must still be on a high from the Oscars. It’s like you're hitting on all cylinders right now. Have things been different at all the last couple of weeks? Do you feel like your life has changed a little bit?
COMMON: It’s a wonderful feeling because I always dreamed of being heard by the world and being recognized as an artist by the world, not only just a music artist but as an actor, too. To have a platform like the Oscars is like the greatest level of achievement for any entertainer, and for it to be the Oscars, for us to have that platform, for us to represent Selma and “Glory,” to be up there with that type of message was really important to me and valuable for me. I wouldn’t want my first award to be for anything else but that.
You wouldn’t want it for Price.
COMMON: Right [Laughs]. Well, you know. Hey, I’ll take another one! [Laughs] But I gotta say, it’s definitely a blessing that it was through Selma and now, you know, I’ve still got goals. I want to achieve more as an actor and as an artist, I want to keep growing and at some point maybe do theater. We’re looking to do a television show so one day I want to have that. But I have to say, life has changed some. It’s like a whole broader audience that knows who I am and really approaches me in another way. It’s not like, ‘Okay, you’re just this guy that we look at and label you just as a hip-hop artist.’ Now it’s kind of like, ‘Okay, you’re a hip-hop artist, you’re an actor, but you have something to say,’ and I think people, more than anything, approach me like, ‘Man, we feel the same way. We’re glad about what you said,’ or, ‘Your performance was moving.’ So it just lets me know that we all are connected and a lot of us feel the same way. We want a better world, we want love and harmony amongst people no matter what color you are, what race or what background you come from or sexual orientation.
It seems like your trajectory changed right around Happy Feet 2. Your body language changed, it seemed like you decided to go inside of yourself and do what you hadn’t done before. When did the shift start that led to where you are now?
COMMON: I didn’t know it was Happy Feet 2 that did it. [Laughs] I ain’t mad! The one that changed my life, Happy Feet 2. [Laughs] I’ve gotta say though, I think you’ve got a good observation. It was around that time that I made a decision like, ‘I’m not settling for good. I want to do great things,’ and why not utilize the gifts and the platform at the highest level, embrace that and not be, like I said, settling for mediocre or willing to dim my light a little bit or just be passive with it. I strived for greatness and achieved greatness. I made a decision for that and so that happened maybe around Happy Feet 2. [Laughs]
I’ve actually never seen you act before this. You did such a great job. You became really sinister and that fight with Liam. What was it like working with him?
COMMON: I was so excited to know that I was going to be in a film with Liam Neeson. His films, they’re always fun and entertaining but this one was even more exciting for me because it had a great story to it. And getting to work with Liam, not only did I get the tips and the education on the fight scenes, learning from him and sometimes just observing, but then he also would teach me certain things. I also got to see him as an actor and really showing he has gravitas and weight. You see that in most of his movies, the gravitas. I really felt as I watched the film you could see the emotions of the human beings. You felt like, ‘Okay, this is not just an action movie. There’s a story to it,’ and it’s dealing with relationships between a father and a son and these two best friends that now gotta go against each other. So there are some real dynamics and relationships. What I got to see was this guy that’s 62-years-old like shining.
Is he as cool as you are?
COMMON: Yeah, he’s cool. He’s real cool. I really like him. One thing I like is he is a guy and then at the same time he’s still cool. We could talk about theater or he introduced me to his friends. It was like he was a cool regular dude, but he’s Liam Neeson. [Laughs]
How was it shooting that fire fight scene? Is that something you shoot in a practical location or do you have to build it?
COMMON: We shot some of it in the actual projects and then we shot some of it on a studio set. It was fun. It was hot, it was fun, it was a lot of energy, high energy. I was looking forward to doing a fight scene with Liam Neeson, you know, man to man.
How’s your aim? Did you do practice?
COMMON: We had fight training so that was part of the practice, and then weapons training I didn’t have as much. Thank god on previous movies I dealt with guns because they were asking me to do tricks that I was like, ‘Man, I’m glad I’ve had some practice because this is not regular just point the gun and shoot,’ but it was fun. All that stuff is fun. I love those challenges. When I told my friend I was going to be in a film with Liam Neeson, he was like, ‘Ah, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.’
He’s notorious for that. You always know he’s gonna kick someone’s ass, and not just kick someone’s ass, like murder someone. In the woods, you’re practically in a maze of death with him and Joel Kinnaman. How was it shooting that?
COMMON: That was fun because I was the predator. I was the one going after them. Price, in his mind, he’s about to accomplish what he wants. He’s hunting them. And that’s what I like about Run All Night, it definitely has the action that you love from Liam Neeson, but it’s not just him charging and hunting people because he’s being hunted now. And actually, you don’t see him really gather his true strength, like what you said I got after Happy Feet 2, until a certain part of the movie when he told Shawn, ‘You sure you want to do this because we’re about to cross this line together,’ and that’s when he went in that
zone and started shooting everybody and you saw him in that way that you see him. But, before that, it was like a journey to watch him try to get his strength and confidence because he had that bad relationship with his son, he also was down and out with alcohol. Those dynamics were cool for me to see because it made me enjoy the movie more. I could watch it and be like, ‘Okay, this is a story.’ I’m not a person that just wants to watch an action movie and it’s just cars flipping and that’s it. I like to see some action with story.
Can we revisit “Glory?” After that, you must see things differently, the merging of movies and music. What do you hope to do? Do you have any other projects like that?
COMMON: I really love getting to create songs for movies because a movie will take you some place that you naturally may not have thought about. Say a movie is about a love story about a family that got broken up and then they’re trying to build it back together. Now if I have to write a song based on anything dealing with that movie, that’s probably something I wouldn’t just pull out of my imagination. So I love the fact that I get to write songs for movies and I am looking forward to doing more songs for films and also the next music project I work on will be accompanied by a film. One of our plans is to create music, but also have a short film to accompany it just to keep exploring different ways of expressing music and film and show the connection, too.
You’ve got that in your portfolio. You can now go back on everything you’ve done and you can set it to pictures. And now that you have the gravitas of an Oscar, you can do that.
COMMON: Yeah, I am. I’m gonna do that. I’m with you. [Laughs] I’m going to do that. I need to go back and listen because we might have some stories already.
You’ve got Liam and Ed [Harris] in this, and they’re both in their 60s. How inspiring is it to see these guys still kicking ass?
COMMON: That is very inspiring because obviously when you get into acting, you’re always told these certain things like, ‘Man, you can’t get too old. If you get old, you’re gone.’ You want to get old and be living. My thing was, watching these guys you’re really watching people that are masters and like I said, shining and still doing great work and it’s fun because it’s relevant. My 17-year-old daughter will go see a Liam Neeson movie. To me it shows that quality has no age to it and high-level things don’t have boundaries. It’s like, ‘Okay, if it’s great filmmaking or a movie star, they can continue to be that if they keep doing great work.’ And that’s what Liam is doing and Ed Harris. To see those two in that movie, it became one of my favorite movies I’ve seen in a minute because of that gangster element. But, like I said, it still had an emotional story.