‘Last Kiss' shows another side of Bettendorf’s Olsen

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By Sean Moeller | Sunday, September 17, 2006 1:13 AM CDT | () comments

Back in 2004, Bettendorf-raised actor Eric Christian Olsen was in the theater for the premiere showing of Zach Braff’s directorial debut film “Garden State.”

This was before the movie was getting recognized as the stunning voice of a generation movie it’s now seen as just two years later. This was when Braff was just the guy from “Scrubs” and Natalie Portman hadn’t yet told anyone that The Shins would change lives. It was just a movie, but from that first screening, Olsen was taken.

“It was heartbreaking is what it was,” Olsen said Friday, about the experience of watching “Garden State” for the first time. “It was a film I wanted to be a part of.”

Starring in “The Last Kiss,” out this weekend across the country, Olsen acts alongside Braff in the followup to the hugely successful film that made an impression on the native Iowan and has made it possible for Braff to consider this current season of “Scrubs” his last. Olsen feels, in “The Last Kiss,” that he has a role in a film that will be considered another movie for those of his generation.

“I consider this our generation’s version of ‘Sideways,’” he said of the movie filmed entirely in Montreal, where he enjoyed the Canadian city’s great restaurants and wine. “There’s a belief that the world is moving so much faster that people are having a mid-life crisis a lot earlier than they used to. In ‘Garden State,’ Zach played a character that was so incredibly lost. Everyone turned in unbelievable performances and it’s the same with this movie. Every person went to bat. It’s definitely that dreamscape I was heartbroken with in ‘Garden State.’

“If there’s one success in film, it’s in altering perspective. You walk away from that journey you just took with a different perspective.”

He compares the experience to how one might feel reading Charles Bukowski. It’s not the same effect that someone would get watching Olsen’s other film currently in cineplexes around the world — Broken Lizard’s “Beerfest,” an exploration of the hijinks surrounding the discovery of an Oktoberfest-based romp of secret drinking games, a la “Fight Club.”

“That was awesome. (‘Beerfest’ director) Jay Chandrasekhar did two episodes of ‘The Loop.’ He’s really funny and wicked intelligent and I said, ‘If there’s anything you ever want me to do, just let me know,’” Olsen said. “He called me up and asked, ‘Can you do a German accent?’ Me, in all my infinite wisdom, said, ‘Yeah, I can do a German accent.’ When I got to the set, he said, ‘Let me hear your accent,’ and I told him, ‘I’m still working on it.’ He said, ‘You realize we start shooting tomorrow, right?’”

He based the accent off of multiple viewings of “Dr. Strangelove” and “Downfall: Hitler and the End of the Third Reich.”

“With a movie like this, though, all it has to be is funny,” he said.

Olsen said that “The Last Kiss” is not his effort to move into more dramatic roles.

“I’m never, ever going to stop doing comedy, but I think I’ve spent a lot of time trying to do constrasting work,” he said. “When an agent sends off a demo reel, it usually takes someone a couple seconds and they go, ‘OK, I get it.’ My reel isn’t like that. It’s got something from ‘Dumb and Dumberer,’ something from ‘Not Another Teen Movie,’ my ‘24’s and then it’s got that scene from ‘E.R.’ where I’m on a gurney dying, crying my eyes out.”

The Fox series “The Loop,” which premiered earlier in the year, began shooting episodes for its second season last week. While the network is shifting the focus of the show, Olsen’s character Sully was retained.

“They decided to concentrate more on the office this season. I think that stuff did really well and the way it was, it was really two different stories,” he said. “They got rid of the two girls, but they’re still trying to figure out how to work Sully into the office.”

Sean Moeller can be contacted at (563) 383-2288 or at smoeller@qctimes.com.