Brian Geraghty, ‘Easier With Practice’
He still gets carded at bars, says Brian Geraghty. Sure enough, the remarkably fit actor looks about a decade younger than his 34 years (not the 35 he’s listed as being online): “IMDb’s wrong,” he says. “I tried to change it but they wouldn’t let me.”
As a struggling writer in an unconventional romance in “Easier With Practice,” he plays late 20s. He also convincingly appears as a 21-year-old veteran in the current revival of “The Subject Was Roses” at the Mark Taper Forum. And his recent turn as the least hardened of the soldiers in the Oscar-nominated “The Hurt Locker” pretty much cements the twentysomething everyman niche he’s settled into.
With 12 years in the business, the actor comes across in person as an odd mix of experience and naiveté, as when he says of the current run of the 46-year-old “Roses”: “I didn’t realize we were going to get reviewed . . . that’s scary. This is a hard play. It’s a very specific play; it’s not like Tennessee Williams -- I mean, people love the play, people laugh, you can feel it in the audience. But. . . . “
What Geraghty doesn’t project is vanity. The lifelong surfer and former personal trainer has repeatedly dropped muscle to look more plain for roles, as he did to play the unlucky-in-love Davy Mitchell in “Easier.”
“I was talking with a very famous, manly actor,” he says, incredulously, “and he said, ‘I don’t know how you could do it sometimes, those roles. I could never do what you do.’ I was like, ‘I’m an actor!’ ”
“Easier” director Kyle Patrick Alvarez says, “We needed someone who had that ‘It’ movie-star quality who can hold the screen, but who’s also a character actor.
“Brian’s half-Method and half-not-Method. He doesn’t become the person, ‘Don’t call me my name,’ it’s never that extreme,” Alvarez says. “But by the end of the first week, all these natural things, these improvisations, were coming out of him.”
The film concerns the relationship that develops between Davy and a random phone-sex caller, based on writer Davy Rothbart’s confessional GQ article. The actor’s nakedness -- of the emotional sort -- is displayed as early as the first call from the mysterious “Nicole,” captured in two 10-minute takes.
“We never rehearsed that scene. [Alvarez and I] did a lot of tweaking; we worked at my house a day or two a week for the month before we got to Albuquerque. I’d get up and walk around,” which the actor demonstrates here in this lower lobby at the Taper, compressing his lean body into the movie’s downtrodden schlub.
“I got into this walk, hunched over a little bit; I started talking really slow. Why can’t this guy have a relationship with a woman? How do people walk when they’re closed off? So we started to find this guy, and that took care of the whole story.”
Geraghty alludes to a trauma he created for his character’s past that clarified much of his inability to work out relationships with flesh-and-blood women; it’s a detail the actor keeps private, but it informed the performance.
“You can’t just go, ‘He’s afraid of women!’ It was a very simple adjustment. He protects himself. So from the beginning, it’s safe to have a relationship over the phone.”
One thing Geraghty has been relatively insulated from is the awards season madness surrounding the Oscar favorite “Hurt Locker.” After years of living the struggling actor’s life, he’s still more accustomed to the workhorse role than the gold derby. Completing “Easier” and rehearsing “Roses” have happily kept his blinders on.
“It’s been good to do this play because I’ve been scared. This was hard. Working with these two terrific actors [Martin Sheen and Frances Conroy], it was very difficult to do,” he says of playing the jaunty peacemaker in the stage family. “So, it kept me out of talking about myself for a movie . . . that movie doesn’t need any more promotion from me. They got enough, man!
“For me, it’s really grounding to be working.”
