Paul Walter Hauser and Greg Kinnear Immediately Felt the ‘Pressure’ Filming ‘Black Bird’
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While “Black Bird” deals with difficult subject matter, Paul Walter Hauser has an easy time listing the reasons he agreed to play real-life serial killer Larry Hall on the Apple TV+ crime drama.
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“All the elements were there. The writing was immaculate, the character I was portraying was going to be a challenge — which I prefer — and it’s exciting to do something that is kind of brooding and gritty,” said the Golden Globe-winning actor. “I get thought of for a lot of silly things. It was cool to get thought of for something that felt like it would be done by [Darren] Aronofsky, or [Frank] Darabont, or in this case, Dennis Lehane.”
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However, as Greg Kinnear shared during his conversation with Hauser for IndieWire’s Awards Spotlight series, their first day on set was far from reassuring. “‘This couldn’t be built any worse. We’re going to start day one where Larry [Hall] is going to sit down for basically a cross examination with my character?’ I just felt like, ‘Oh, my God, we’re so unprepared for this,” said the actor who played Det. Brian Miller in the limited series. “But I felt like Dennis, who writes so, so strongly, but actually is very funny and relaxed, he was there on the set that day and took a lot of the pressure off [of] us, and it actually went surprisingly well.”
“It went really well,” said Hauser. “But I was definitely not thrilled that that was the first scene up, because I really thought if I don’t nail it on this first day– this is the intro to Larry Hall, so if you don’t nail this, then it’s almost like doing an audition tape, where you screw up in the first sentence, and then you just keep going. It’s like, ‘Yeah, this is not going to be good.’”
But then the pair nailed it, conveying how the show exposes the implicit misogyny that contributed to Hall getting away with murder for years. “I actually think it worked well, great for your character, because you were in a slightly different gear in that moment,” said Kinnear to Hauser. “But you needed to be in a slightly different gear [at] that moment than all of the scenes that you’ve developed with Taron [Egerton].”
Hauser agreed. His character goes through a noticeable descent into madness when he moves from interrogation rooms with Miller to prison with Jimmy Keene (Egerton), who is trying to elicit a confession out of him while he gloats about likely winning his conviction appeal. The actor, who also recently won a Critics Choice Award for his performance on the show, added that that first scene with Kinnear, “in a weird way, worked out very well, because [Hall]’s kind of in that incognito ‘I’m still a citizen’ mode. And he hasn’t transitioned into that vile comfortability that he has in prison. So in a way, it really worked out and I was glad that we did it the way we did, because I just got to kind of keep it small and honest,” said Hauser. “And I didn’t have to make too many big swing choices like I do in Episode 5 or 6.”
Watch the full Awards Spotlight conversation between Hauser and Kinnear in the video above.
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