The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle on Making His Acting Debut as a Metalhead in Poker Face
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
The post The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle on Making His Acting Debut as a Metalhead in Poker Face appeared first on Consequence.
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Poker Face, Season 1 Episode 4, “Rest in Metal.”]
John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats has a wide-ranging resume, but Rian Johnson’s Poker Face added a new job skill to it: Actor. In Episode 4 of the Peacock mystery drama, streaming today, Darnielle guest-stars as Al, a heavy metal guitarist who conspires with his struggling bandmates to murder their drummer and steal the potential hit song he wrote.
While Darnielle has been performing for decades, he tells Consequence that making television was “a very alien world to me. I had no idea really how giant the shooting of one episode is. It took weeks, and the set moves every day — they move this huge operation, hundreds of people, from one lot to another, with all these trailers, all this stuff. Have you sat in a director’s chairs? Strangest thing to me. The music business is not like that at all. Or if it is, not on my end anyway. It was very unusual in more ways than I could really catalog.”
What brought him to that set? Darnielle says that he and Johnson have known each other for a “long, long time — since 2003… Well, no, before that he had ordered a t-shirt from my old webzine that I did.” Following Johnson’s breakout film Brick in 2005, they collaborated on two music videos for The Mountain Goats: 2007’s “Woke Up New” and the 2010 performance film The Life of the World to Come. “It was him and Steve Yedlin, his cinematographer, who’s a total genius.”
Since that time, Darnielle says, “we have mainly a text-based relationship because he lives on the West Coast. And also, I don’t hang out with people. But we text back and forth and send gifts or ideas or whatever — we workshopped a really cool music video idea for the Goths album, if there was a budget for it. It would’ve been the only video I ever liked, but it didn’t happen.”
At the beginning of 2022, Darnielle reached out to Johnson about his new crime novel Devil House, and “we wound up in conversations about crime fiction and stuff like that. Ryan has a great ear for noir, great ear for genre tropes, generally speaking. So, at some point, he said, ‘Hey, what are you doing in…’ I think it was June, I forget, maybe May. And I said, ‘Well, I’ll be freshly home from tour then.’ And he said, ‘I was wondering if you wanted to have something to do with this episode of this Columbo-type thing I’m doing.'”
Originally, Darnielle says, the idea was for him to just work on the episode’s music, “but it snowballed from there.” That said, Darnielle did contribute plenty to the soundtrack: “I wrote all the lyrics except for the ones that were already in the script,” including the two songs Al performs a cappella in the context of the episode.
Al’s “confession song,” he says, “had its beginning with ‘Satan Cast Your Evil Spell.’ That was in the script. The stuff that proceedes that, I ad-libbed on set to get the song to go somewhere.” For the song Al sings about his divorce earlier in the episode, though, “I’m ad-libbing. I think I had a version of that, that I sent to Ryan when I got the idea — but any folk singer ought to be able to riff on alimony, Tony, phony, that kind of stuff.”
Things got a little more complicated when it came to writing the heavy metal performed by Doxxxology. “‘Staplehead’ was just a song we knew had the word ‘staplehead’ in it. And whoever was going to write the music would write a song that was supposed to have been a minor hit for a metal band at some point in the past,” Darnielle says. “This is one reason that Ryan was talking to me, is because I listen to mainly heavy metal.”
In the context of the episode, “Staplehead” needed to sound like a metal song that would be successful enough to be a crossover hit, which become a challenge for Darnielle, because “it’s already kind of a stretch to say that a metal band had a hit. Metal doesn’t make hits. It did in the ’80s, but there aren’t any real metal hits. But you could probably get mid-chart in the early 2000s. That was the time when metal was actually rising. Avenged Sevenfold was doing good. Lacuna Coil, I think some of those songs charted. So, I started thinking about this stuff in terms of writing the songs.”
Darnielle wrote the lyrics to “Staplehead,” and also fleshed out Doxxxology’s attempt at a comeback hit, “Merch Girl.” “But the thing is, I don’t write heavy metal. I’m a folk singer, essentially, a rock singer. And I’ve always considered it really ripe when people sort of go, ‘Sure, I can write the genre that I don’t play at all.’ I feel like it’s taken work away from the people who toiled in the genre.”
So Darnielle reached out to Hatebreed’s Jamey Jasta for help in writing the music for the Doxxxology tracks. “He interviewed me for his podcast during lockdown, and we hit it off. He’s a great dude. I talk fast, but he’s got this fast mind. So, when we started talking about what this would sound like — I started saying Lacuna Coil or maybe early Arch Enemy — we’re tossing stuff back and forth, and in an afternoon, we had a really solid idea of what it would sound like.”
Jasta wrote and recorded music and sent the stems to Darnielle, who then added vocal melodies and lyrics before sending them back to Jasta to add vocals by singer Dana Brookman — Chloe Sevigny lip-sync’ed during production.
Darnielle says that “genre descriptions are there not for the people making the stuff. Most of the people writing aren’t really big respecters of genre. Genre is for fun. Genre is a way of describing something and developing a bunch of conventions that you could then play with. Half of the fun of the genre is when you pervert or experiment with or, in some way, alter one of the conventions. That’s where a lot of the fun is.”
Poker Face (Peacock)
Thus, when it comes to his own music, “I play rock and roll, but there’s a metal element to what I do. I’m protective of metal because it gets very spoofed or caricatured, but the musicians I know who play it, the lifers, they work really hard and they’re some of the best musicians around. They’re all as good as jazz musicians. Any one of them could have played jazz instead. But they love this music that they make. So, I’m really protective of that.”
As mentioned previously, it’s also one of the genres he listens to on a regular basis. “I’ve been a metal listener since high school. Most of my listening is classical, metal, jazz and ambient. That’s the stuff I listen to,” he says, adding that when he was in his late teens, “I was always the odd man, I liked to wear a blazer to the metal show. It was my deal.”
Plus, he adds, “I would imagine that most firefighters do not come home and watch [firefighter shows] — or if they do, they’re just texting each other the whole time, ‘Why I hate watching this?’ For me, I do like to listen to music played by people where I can’t do what they do. Same as my reading, I prefer to be reading people who I look up to, that I read and I go, ‘Wow. How can I be as good as you?’ That’s the stuff that inspires me. And for me, heavy metal is always going to be that, because I’m never going to be as good a musician as any of those guys.”
One element of the Poker Face episode that Darnielle wanted to push back on was the idea that Doxxxology would travel via RV. “Most bands I know would not buy an RV, but I do know some who do, or they buy a van. Erik Rutan, from Hate Eternal, has a van that’s he converted the back to bunks so the band can tour in the van and then sleep next to the equipment, because so many bands get boosted for the equipment,” he says.
Darnielle says that during the filming of “Rest in Metal,” “the whole time I was doing it, I was like, ‘I’m never doing this again.’ Because again, I’m a musician. I play music at night, I go back to the bus and I go to sleep… On this, your dude comes to pick you up at 6:00 AM and he says, ‘Well, we’re going to Beacon.’ Or, ‘Poughkeepsie. We’re going to Poughkeepsie to shoot today.’ And then, they drive you to Poughkeepsie. You go get the breakfast on set and then you wait three hours and you say, ‘Why am I not back?’ ‘Well, they might need you.’ And this is every single day. And it would be graceless to complain about, it’s a paying gig, so you just sit away. But it’s so radically different from my normal life, and that’s how I felt about it while I was doing it.”
However, he adds, “last week they sent me a screener and I watched it and I went, ‘Hey, that’s not so bad. I didn’t do so bad. I would probably do that again.’ Absolutely, I would do it again.”
Poker Face (Peacock)
He does note that “you have to be very trusting of the people handling you. I’m the boss in The Mountain Goats. I’m there every step of the way, I see how things turn out. And with this, you show up and do what you’re told, and hope it comes out well. I enjoyed that passive position. That was kind of a fun way to think about performance for me, because normally, my performances are really spontaneous. It’s one of the things about us, is that you don’t get the same thing two nights in a row. You get an essential strain, but we don’t have a set list that we nail down and just play that. The whole point is creating a new energy every night. That’s not acting at all.”
Plus, it pushed him way out of his comfort zone, which was something he relished. “In music, I have the most confidence. I’ve been doing this for 20 years and I know what I’m doing. I can do it drunk. And I’ve proven that several times. It’s like any job that you’ve been showing up at for a long time. I can do it with a headache, I can do it with a toothache, I can do it if I’m suffering.”
On Poker Face, though, “I was a total neophyte on set. And creatively, that’s a beautiful thing to be able to experience. I would think a lot of middle-aged guys wouldn’t want to be experiencing that, but I like that feeling a lot, because that’s where growth comes from. I mean, I’m not radical about this. I don’t think you should be always writing the thing that makes you uncomfortable. But you should always be finding some zone where you’re adrift enough to locate new land. And acting is all-new land for me. So, if I never do get to act again, that stuff’s applicable in my writing, to have just been sat in that space for several weeks.”
With no acting gigs on the immediate horizon, Darnielle still has his day job to fall back on, though while he is working on new music, “I always think talking about new material too early is a terrible mistake because then people get all kinds of expectations. You say you’re working on something, then people get a vision in their head of what they want it to be. And there’s no way of satisfying that vision, because visions are infinite.”
However, he does share that “I’m working on a thing — I don’t often revisit old characters in songs, but about a year and a half ago, I got very curious to do that, precisely because that’s not normally what I would do. That’s one way you grow as a writer, is you ask, ‘What don’t I do and why not?’ And in my songs, I realized, it’s a vulnerability issue for me. That I don’t want to be as vulnerable as if you wake up an old character and see what else is in there. And so, I’m exploring that space. It’s all pretty uptempo and has some very raw stuff that I’m super fond of.”
Poker Face Episodes 1-4 are streaming now on Peacock.
The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle on Making His Acting Debut as a Metalhead in Poker Face
Liz Shannon Miller
Popular Posts
Tim Allen Flashes Home Improvement Co-Star Patricia Richardson in Resurfaced Clip
Pamela Anderson Alleges Tim Allen Flashed Her on Set of Home Improvement
Jeremy Renner, a Real-Life Superhero, Was Trying to Save His Nephew When Crushed by Snow Plow
Axl Rose, Billy Corgan, and Alanis Morissette Honor Lisa Marie Presley at Graceland Memorial: Watch
