Daniel Schlachet’s ‘Swoon’ Role Makes Believers of Casting Agents

Daniel Schlachet has been getting a lot of job offers since the release of “Swoon,” Tom Kalin’s acclaimed film about the infamous Nathan Leopold-Richard Loeb kidnaping/murder case of the 1920s. Schlachet, 25, makes his film debut in the black-and-white drama as the psychopathic Richard Loeb.

All the attention has taken the native New Yorker by surprise. “It’s really funny,” Schlachet says. “This is a low-budget, independent film, and I don’t really think of it as, ‘I did this film and now I will get other films.’ But my agents are swamped.”

Schlachet, though, still hasn’t quite given up his night-time bartender job. “I am kind of on a leave of absence,” he says. “It’s like when anything goes really bad I can go back there.”

He was still working at his old job at a bar on Second Avenue earlier this year when “Swoon” premiered at the New Directors/New Film Festival in New York.

“The day after the film opened, (the review) was in the New York Times, Newsday--all the local papers,” he says. “For the Times, they used just a shot of me from the film. I was actually tending bar that day when all my regulars (were there). One of the guys was looking at the paper and he looked up at me and back down at the paper and looked up at me and said, ‘Dan, isn’t that you?’ I said, ‘Yeah. That’s me.’ He said, ‘What are you doing here?’ ”

Schlachet, which is pronounced schlocket, knew very little about Leopold-Loeb. In fact, he says, he kept getting them confused with Sacco and Vanzetti.

People, he says, are always asking what it’s like to play “such a bad person. I can’t imagine why anybody would want to play the nice guy. It seems like there is so much more to somebody like this. Part of the fun of doing a part like that is figuring out what makes this person different from anybody else.”