Late Night With the Devil’s David Dastmalchian Was “Terrified” to Play a Talk Show Host
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The post Late Night With the Devil’s David Dastmalchian Was “Terrified” to Play a Talk Show Host appeared first on Consequence.
For star David Dastmalchian (The Suicide Squad, Oppenheimer), the scariest part of making the post-modern horror film Late Night With the Devil wasn’t grappling with the intense stunts and possession sequences. “It was honestly the fear of trying to capture the magic that a really good late night host possesses,” he tells Consequence. “So I was terrified, literally terrified, of that part of my job.”
You wouldn’t know it from watching his smooth, confident work as Jack Delroy, the host of a 1970s talk show whose Halloween episode becomes a true nightmare thanks to an outbreak of demonic possession. “I’m so proud of the movie. I think it’s like one of the coolest things I’ve ever done,” Dastmalchian says of the found footage film, written and directed by Colin and Cameron Cairnes.
Late Night With the Devil begins as a note-perfect recreation of shows from that era, with a full set, a studio audience, a live band, and jovial sidekick — all of which helped the well-established character actor find Jack as a character. “I just tried my very best to create the illusion that I had the swagger, the charm, the quick wittedness of a great late night talk show host. Because I don’t, as David,” he admits. “That was a really hard skill to try and hone.”
However, it was in the process of developing that persona that Dastmalchian learned a lot about the character of Jack, “because that is fully its own kind of performance. It’s like you’re wearing a mask. You’re going to be this version of yourself that is just charming and fun. We’re going to have celebrities on the show. We’re going to talk about music, we’re going to talk about spooky things and sell a lot of ad time, and we’re going to be a hit.”
Then, he continues, “We cut to commercial, and I’ve got to let that mask down. I’ve got to start being the scared Jack Delroy. And the similarities between David and Jack were actually quite stunning. I found a lot of inspiration from my own journey as somebody in the public eye, and how strenuous it can be sometimes, to keep up the illusion of whatever it is that I’m trying to present at that time.”
There’s a juice to Late Night that comes directly from its 1970s setting, though while Dastmalchian very specifically studied talk show hosts of the era for his performance, he says men like Dick Cavett and Johnny Carson and today’s hosts are actually very similar — what unites them all is that “they are quick-witted, and they’re funny and they’re charming. And you have to feel comfortable with them — you’re inviting them in your living room every night.”
The biggest difference Dastmalchian found between hosts then and now is “maybe just in the period elements, of the rhythm of the way that comedy used to be delivered. The setups and the punchlines. But even so, to this day, I feel like some of our awesome late night talk show hosts still have a really fun rhythmic musicality to the way that they set up and deliver their jokes and do their bits.”
Part of a talk show host’s confidence may come from the fact that he’s got either cue cards or a teleprompter to read his next line off. For Dastmalchian, though, that unfortunately wasn’t an option available for filming his longer scenes as a host.
“Colin and Cameron had a guy holding cue cards [on set], because that’s what would you would have on the show,” he says. “But they didn’t actually have my lines on them. I memorized those long monologues and I loved doing them — it ended up being very fun — but I was a little scared at first. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s been so long since I’ve had to do a three-page, four-page speech.'”
The studio audience and band were real, though, which meant that in many of those scenes, Dastmalchian is “getting to just riff off of the experience. It was so informative to the performance.”
The screenplay also allowed him room to keep things loose, while in full host mode: “The lines were written so well — they really did a great job studying late night talk show host monologues — so I stuck to the script. But what I would discover is little moments, like pointing to somebody in the audience and being like, ‘Oh, I knew you’d like that one.’ Or ‘Really, are we going to do this joke now? Come on!’ That kind of fun stuff.”
Something else Dastmalchian got to improv was a shoutout to Berwyn, Illinois, “which any faithful late night horror fan knows is the home of Svengoolie.” It’s a reference that speaks to his passion for classic horror: “I grew up wanting to be a horror makeup effects, special effects artist, and I used to smuggle copies of Fangoria Magazine and pour over them.”
Late Night With the Devil (IFC Films)
Thus, Dastmalchian was extremely excited about Late Night With the Devil’s emphasis on practical effects over digital, when the action of the film tips into nightmare territory. “There was always an element of practicality,” he says. “There was not a single gore or horror effect that didn’t at least involve some elements of practical. So that meant sometimes big latex head masks being split in half, or head casts having things ripping out of the eyes. Even if they had to use a little bit of green to VFX some stuff in, a lot of it was just practical.”
Adds Dastmalchian, “When I’m on set and I’m getting to see our awesome makeup team applying latex and fake blood and there’s blood pumps and all that stuff — the little kid in me gets all giddy, like every time new comics have been delivered to my comic shop on a Wednesday. When I’m on a set and there’s a bunch of cool, practical effects… Ugh, it’s the best.”
The fact that Late Night With the Devil is a simulated TV show might make you think it’s a film better suited to being watched at home, as opposed to in theaters. Dastmalchian, though, has been able to watch it with large audiences at festivals, and “watching it with a group of people, as they’re screaming, laughing, gasping — you feel like you’re part of the studio audience watching this live broadcast take place. So that in and of itself is a very singular and special experience.”
The film will be making its AMC+/Shudder debut this April, though, allowing you to experience the film from the point of view of an at-home viewer. And for the record, even if you’re watching at home, it’s still spooky as hell: Dastmalchian would like me to mention in this piece that, as I confessed to him, my first attempt to watch Late Night With the Devil ended with me getting too freaked out to finish the movie properly. (I admittedly made the mistake of watching my screener late at night, right before bed — when I watched it a second time, I did so in the middle of the day, with all the lights on.)
“That makes me very happy,” he says. “I like to know that we scared you. We made you shiver in your boots.”
Late Night With the Devil is in theaters now, prior to its AMC+/Shudder streaming debut on April 19th.
Late Night With the Devil’s David Dastmalchian Was “Terrified” to Play a Talk Show Host
Liz Shannon Miller
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