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James Marsden Interview, HairSpray
Source: moviesonline.ca
By: Sheila Roberts

MoviesOnline sat down with James Marsden at the Los Angeles press day for "Hairspray” to talk about his new movie. Marsden, along with John Travolta, the movie star veteran, and Nikki Blonsky, the new "discovery,” are just the beginnings of what would become a truly all-star "Hairspray” cast. Singing and dancing their way through the film are an unprecedented collection of talent that range from Hollywood’s biggest names to its hottest young stars. They include Christopher Walken, Michelle Pfeiffer, Queen Latifah, Zac Efron, Amanda Bynes, Brittany Snow, Elijah Kelley, Allison Janney, Taylor Parks, Jerry Stiller, and Paul Dooley.

One of the surprises the filmmakers had up their sleeve was the revelation that actor James Marsden, who portrayed Cyclops in the three blockbuster "X-Men” films, can sing. Marsden makes his feature film musical debut as Corny Collins, the host of Baltimore’s American Bandstand-style show that gives a whole new meaning to black-and-white television.

"Hairspray” is not, however, the first time Marsden has sung professionally. For 12 episodes during the 2001-2002 season, he played Glenn Foy on the hit TV show "Ally McBeal.” Years later, Marsden was hired to be the voice of the commercial jingle for Sarah Jessica Parker’s perfume, Lovely (with music produced and arranged by, coincidentally, "Hairspray” composer-lyricist Marc Shaiman).

"Marc and Scott (Executive Producer Scott Wittman) have been friends of mine for a couple of years now, and Neil Meron and I are friends, too,” says Marsden. "They all knew that I had been looking for some sort of musical project for the last few years. They used to tell me, ‘Throw the superhero guys aside and sing something!’ So, when we found out that this movie was a go, they said there was a great role for me, and it all just kind of came together and the rest is just Corny.”

Corny, indeed. Marsden decided the character’s name was "a free pass to be over the top,” but credits director Adam Shankman for keeping it from becoming "a total cheese fest.” "Adam’s vision is so cinematic. He wanted all these seemingly crazy characters to feel very real, to have a real emotional center,” says Marsden. "It’s that emotional core of the characters that makes the music and the message ring through so beautifully and with so much humor and heart.”

"Jimmy was never on my radar as someone to play Corny Collins,” admits Shankman. "But once I saw 30 seconds of tape of him singing on ‘Ally McBeal,’ I said to our casting director ‘That’s my guy…that’s my young Dick Clark…that’s my Corny.’”

In addition to the musical number ‘Hairspray,” which he says reminds him of an old Busby Berkeley-type production, Marsden also performs "Nicest Kids in Town,” a song which introduces the film audience to the televised segregation of the early 1960s and re-introduces the Baltimore audience to the Corny Collins Council Members every day after school.

James Marsden is a very talented guy and we really appreciated his time. Here’s what he had to tell us about his new film:

JAMES MARSDEN: Oh, thank you. It’s frightening how easy it comes to me all the cheese. Well, I watched some old tapes of Dick Clark and then I just turned it up to 11. No, I just thought the tone of the movie and the tone of the Broadway musical was obviously heightened and so I would always cite the example of Dick Clark mixed with a little Ryan Seacrest and then some extra cheese ladled on the top for good measure. No it was I guess a hybrid of those two with a little Johnny Carson.

I look back at the 50’s and 60’s and the radio announcers and the talk show hosts and the game show hosts and they had like these perfect smiles on their face because they felt it was their duty to lift the spirits of the American people and they tune into us every day and they work hard and they come home and they want to be entertained. So the purity of that—I loved it and with such conviction to play that corny-ness I guess, there’s no better adjective I guess or noun. So, I had fun doing it. It was nice to take the X-Men image and do a 180.

JAMES MARSDEN: I don’t. The last proper musical I’ve ever done was in high school. It’s always been a hobby of mine the singing…not so much the dancing, but the singing has been something that I’ve tinkered with and played with throughout my career and I was always a fan of the standards like Sinatra and the song writers like Rogers & Hart and Gershwin and all that. I would sing these songs because I enjoyed listening to them and I met Mark Shaiman 3 or 4 years ago and I knew that he was Harry Connick’s music arranger and I was a big fan of Harry Connick and sort of sang like him a little bit and I ran into a bar and I think I’d had a few martinis and said, "We’re going to work together someday.”

It’s just been peppered throughout my acting career so I sang on Ally McBeal doing Frank Sinatra tunes and I think Adam Shankman, the director of "Hairspray,” saw that and the way he described it he says, "That’s it. That’s Corny.” [laughs] Is he critiquing me or I don’t know. But it was never anything that I aggressively pursued -- the music stuff. But now I feel like the climate has changed a bit and we’re sort of being a little more friendly towards the musical revival.

JAMES MARSDEN: Oh, I’d love to do it. There’s something very terrifying about doing it live on Broadway and eventually I think I wouldn’t do it. Undoubtedly, I would enjoy it but something’s keeping me from diving into that right away.

MoviesOnline: We were just joking about Hugh Jackman sings and you… X-men the musical?

JAMES MARSDEN: I’m sort of like his echo, sort of following his path. It’s certainly worked for him. We joke about it all the time. There are more people in that cast that have actually very nice voices. Patrick Stewart has a beautiful singing voice, Halle can sing, Allen Cumming in the second movie, so we really could have done it. I tell people that "Hairspray” is really… It’s "X-Men” just instead of retractable claws and laser beams, it’s mashed potato and the Twist for people who are different, the freaks and they sort of become the heroes in the movie. It’s the same thing.

MoviesOnline: Have you talked to Hugh Jackman at all since he’s such a Broadway guy himself since you’ve done this?

JAMES MARSDEN: Oh, he was thrilled when he heard that I was doing this because we would sit in the makeup trailer during "X-Men” and we’d sing like…we have children that are the same age so we would sing like the theme song from "Elmo” and harmonize and "Bear in the Big Blue House,” you know. He was always like, "Mate, you’ve got to do some sort of musical. Mate, you’re dying to do it, obviously you’ve got to do it. You’ve got the chops.” So, he was very nice. At one point he mentioned to me before he did "Boy From Oz” about seeing if I’d be interested in playing his lover or boyfriend in that and I don’t remember why that didn’t happen. I think it was because I was doing something or I don’t know what it was but I would love to do something with him actually. He’s just like the nicest man in the world.

MoviesOnline: He hasn’t talked to you about "Viva Laughlin,” his new TV series.

JAMES MARSDEN: No he hasn’t. No. That got picked up right? No, I haven’t seen it.

MoviesOnline: Can you talk about Adam Shankman and working with him and seeing how he directs and choreographs?

JAMES MARSDEN: You would be hard pressed to find somebody I think more fit for this job than Adam. I think everybody’s in their wheelhouse in this movie, but I think mostly it’s Adam from his experience with being a choreographer for so many years and now becoming a very successful film director. He was made to do this. It was astonishing to me the level of commitment he has to this movie, but also the work that he put into this movie. Every move that was in the movie was choreographed by Adam and every director’s choice was made by Adam and he did it with such poise and he had such a good time doing it that he really set the tone for everybody on the set.

I’ve never done a movie that was more fun to work on than this and I think it was because of Adam because you can see how much he enjoyed the process and felt like he was at home doing this and really he would always say, "Go big or go home,” you know? So we were like this isn’t the movie for subtle performances, so he really encouraged us to dig into these characters and go for it. Talking about a movie that’s, I think, all about courage. You have a cast that’s so courageous to transform themselves in many different ways and I think that’s what people… When I saw the movie, what appealed to me about it was seeing these legendary actors enjoy themselves so much. You can tell how much John and Chris and Michelle and Latifah and everybody just enjoying the hell out of the process, and I would attribute that to Adam because that’s the tone that he set on the movie and he’s really a phenomenal talent.

MoviesOnline: Was it easy to forget that John was underneath all that makeup and costume?

JAMES MARSDEN: Yeah, it was. It was frightening at first. I wasn’t scared but when he came out, it was my brain didn’t know how to process it because I immediately summoned up images of him as Danny Zucko and his character in "Saturday Night Fever” and "Pulp Fiction” and now he’s a woman. But more remarkable than just the physical transformation was this internal transformation that happened. When he came out for the first time, it was during a table read through and he came out and everybody saw him and he was a woman. He was pretending to be a woman. It wasn’t John Travolta in drag. It was like he was Edna Turnblad and he just became this person. It was really pretty impressive and tremendously courageous and the conviction with which he plays the character. I just take my hat off to him and everybody really goes for it in this movie, but yeah, it was strange at first because you can see his eyes and you go those are John’s eyes but I don’t see anything else. Then they’d yell cut and he’d go, "How was that take?” and his voice would come back, but it was just strange.

MoviesOnline: He wasn’t ever out of costume so when he was voicing Edna there was never like John just being John voicing Edna? He was always in character?

JAMES MARSDEN: Well, no. At the read through—it was the most bizarre read through—because normally at a read through everybody sits around a table -- people from New Line, the producers, the cast, the singers, the dancers, everybody -- and you read through the script for the entire movie. Every three minutes we were getting up, grabbing a live microphone and singing live while the dancers performed the numbers in the background.

So, at the read through John was not—oh there were two read throughs—the first one was just for the cast and that’s when John came out in his makeup and he sat there for the read-through and essentially he was basically Edna for the whole read-through, and then the next day he was just John. But on-set he would come out—if was in the prosthetics he was Edna, he was not John. But after some of the dancing that was so labor intensive moving around in that suit and everything, the lights were so hot that he would stop and it would be almost impossible for him to go on in the same character and be Edna, so he would have to come out and be John for a second. But it was pretty phenomenal what he did in heels, too.

JAMES MARSDEN: I’m so impressed with everyone in this movie. I’m mostly impressed with Nikki. She was 17 when she started, was scooping ice cream. It’s like a classic Cinderella story, you know. I was nervous acting with Michelle Pfeiffer, who before I was even an actor [I was] watching in films and with John who was an idol of mine growing up and I was nervous and I’d been doing it for 14 years. She comes in and gets thrown into not only a cast with these people in it but [she’s] the emotional core of the movie. I mean, she is the protagonist in the movie and everyone follows suit. She was just tremendous sharing these scenes with Walken and them and not skipping a beat. She was completely calm and what I found interesting was how much inspiration John drew from Nikki and some of the veteran actors drew from the newness from her, her boldness, her courage and she’s just a remarkable talent. I think she’s going to be around. She’s made to do this. She is Nikki, I mean of course she is Nikki—that’s her real name, [laughs] she is Tracy Turnblad. She’s a young actress who’s trying to succeed and follow her dreams and she has this very fresh clean slate approach, a very open mind to things, and she was just born to do it, you can tell.