It’s hard to be the other guy in erotic thrillers, the genre cluttered with the corpses of so-called ‘baxters’. See poor Steven Weber in Single White Female or Bill Pullman in The Last Seduction or Olivier Martinez in Unfaithful. Morris Chestnut does his best to avoid a similar fate in this week’s The Perfect Guy. If anybody can avoid the deadly tropes of the genre, it would have to be the effortlessly charming actor.
In The Perfect Guy, Chestnut co-stars as nice-guy boyfriend Dave – his biggest flaw: his inability to commit to marriage to his longtime girlfriend Leah (Sanaa Lathan). When Leah leaves him for the seemingly perfect Carter (Michael Ealy), Dave realizes the error of his ways and seeks to get her back. Poor Dave doesn’t realize though that Carter is psychopath and will end anything or anybody that comes between him and Leah. Whether or not Dave gets the girl back becomes a moot point. The big question: can Dave buck the odds of the genre and somehow make it to the end credits intact?
In the following interview, Chestnut discusses if nice guys can survive a thriller, understanding the tropes of the genre and adding nuances to his role. Of note: the actor tiptoes around Dave’s ultimate fate in The Perfect Guy. There aren’t any spoilers per se – but just fair warning… The Perfect Guy opens in theaters this Friday.
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Morris Chestnut:
- Morris Chesnutt on his most traumatic experience watching a horror/thriller
- On whether the nice-guy boyfriend can make it out alive of a thriller
- On how he would react if he found himself in particular scenarios in The Perfect Guy
- On how much his character changed from page to the screen
- On bringing nuances to his character
