Here’s a podcast q&a with the star of the Duplass brothers’ new film Cyrus, John C. Reilly. The interview was held after a Philadelphia screening of Cyrus. There’s nothing mindblowing about the questions, they cover the expected topics like working with Will Ferrell, Marisa Tomei, and the differences between playing comedy and playing drama. However, what is amazing is Reilly’s timing and how sharp and witty he is, especially in the face of promotional idiocy. You’ll hear a moment where someone offers Reilly a Smirnoff Ice, and walks all the way to the front of the theater to hand him this room temperature bottle, insisting that “it’s a thing, they talked about it on CNN.”

Now after the q&a, as we were leaving  the theater, I happened to be walking right behind “Mr. Smirnoff” and despite Mr. Reilly’s previous rebuke, I heard the young promoter say, “he was just pretending, everyone knows about the Smirnoff thing.”

Please keep that in mind the next time someone ambushes you with a warm bottle of teeny-bopper alcohol.

No real spoilers in the questions or answers, but it might help to know that in an early scene, Reilly drunkenly breaks out in song during a rather tension-filled party. For those who want clarification on the scene mentioned regarding improvising singing, click on the NY Times article here which has a clip.

Keep listening after the applause dies down at the end of the podcast for a special bonus, which relates to one of the two questions I asked Reilly (both of which he deflected ).

You can listen to the podcast by clicking below or downloading it to your computer.

Download the full interview.
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This entry was posted on Monday, June 21st, 2010 at 3:04 am and is filed under Comedy, Drama. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.