Everybody Wants Some!!
Everybody Wants Some!! Actors Blake Jenner, Tyler Hoechlin and Ryan Guzman sat down for a conversation with Free Press Houston last week.
Jenner was a regular on Glee, Hoechlin was a regular on Teen Wolf and has appeared in films as diverse as Road to Perdition (playing Tom Hanks’ son) and Hall Pass. Guzman has most recently co-starred in The Boy Next Door and Jen and the Holograms. While Everybody Wants Some!! seems to boast a cast of unknowns the truth is these actors have been paying dues for some time.
The newest film by auteur director Richard Linklater captures the joy and innocence of the first weekend of college. The tagline states it’s a spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused but that’s more of an advertising hook than an actual comparison. The closest thing the movies have in common is that they’re named after songs, in the case of Everybody Wants Some!!, track two of Van Halen’s 1980 LP Woman and Children First.
Since Everybody Wants Some!! is set in 1980 none of the main players were even born. Guzman who was born in 1987 jokes “I had three solid years of the ‘80s.”
“We call Richard Linklater, Rikipedia,” says Jenner. “He knew everything there was to know about the ‘70s and ‘80s. Certain high-fives or handshakes weren’t allowed because they hadn’t come out yet. Drinking games. No one did drinking games, they just drank.”
The actors took part in a two-week camp where they studied the era as well as trained for baseball. In the movie the ensemble cast are members of a baseball team at an anonymous central Texas college (that could be Texas State University in San Marcos.) Additionally the actors were given iPods with 100 songs from the era.
“The rehearsal space also had a lot of games so we spent time playing foosball and ping pong, other things we do in the movie,” says Hoechlin. “You get a bunch of guys that are that competitive over anything, whether it be checkers or ping pong, you lose and it’s like you’ve lost everything. You get angry.”
Imagine an Éric Rohmer film that quietly observes a bunch of kids partying for 72-hours straight. People talk, people drink, people smoke out, people get duct taped to the home run wall of a baseball stadium. But no matter how you try to describe Linklater’s film the fact remains that it’s an American original written and helmed by one of the best directors working right now.
Everybody Wants Some!! is currently unwinding at area theaters.
— Michael Bergeron
