No More Mr Nice Guy
Famous for his turn as the manipulative villain in Hollyoaks, Emmett Scanlan is no stranger to sinister roles – but his current project sees him really plunging into the darkest depths of the human spirit. He tells Roe McDermott about playing evil in the hugely controversial film, Charlie Casanova.
Roe McDermott, 29 May 2012
Sitting in a lovely room in The Residence Bar In Dublin, Emmett Scanlan is wearing a blood-spattered T-shirt – a marketing tool, he assures me, not evidence of murdered critics. He is musing as to whether his intense nature led to him being cast as Charlie Casanova, the homicidal, sociopathic Dubliner who lives his life by a deck of playing cards.
“I dunno if I am intense really. I just get typecast as a bad guy a lot.”
When I ask him why he thinks that is, there’s not a second’s hesitation.
“Because I have a dickhead face!” he laughs.
“I have a face that you look at and say, ‘He’s a dickhead.’ I got it from my dad, it’s genetics!” says the Marino native. “The funny thing is, I grew up idolising Sylvester Stallone in Rocky, I just wanted to be that underdog hero. The irony is, I’m the Dolph Lundgren of all my movies, I’m the Clubber Lang, I’m the bad dude. But that’s fine, I don’t mind being typecast, I mind not being cast at all!”
Despite earning international accolades for his role as Charlie, including the ‘Best Actor’ award at the prestigious ECU European Independent Film Festival, Emmett very nearly wasn’t cast at all. Although he’d worked with director Terry McMahon before on McMahon’s screenplay The Dancehall Bitch – “it was the best script I’d ever read, he’s the Aaron Sorkin of Ireland” – Scanlan wasn’t the first choice to play Charlie. He was a last-minute replacement when the desired actor wasn’t available for a screen test. When he auditioned for the lead, his very specific type of – ahem – “charm” quickly shone through.
“As Terry says, I auditioned for Charlie and 40 women lined up to slap me – some of them didn’t want to be in the movie! When we sat down and went through the script I realised I knew fuck-all about how to play Charlie. I knew fuck-all about acting. And if the movie went badly, it was my fault. So it was quite humbling and quite terrifying.”
Though it was probably more terrifying for the rest of the cast and crew, as Scanlan began to embody Charlie both on and off screen, even playing Charlie’s often lethal game of deferring to a deck of cards to make his decisions.
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