The question I have gotten most from my fans since the THR piece is this:
Why don't you play yourself?
There are three main reasons for this:
1. I am not a good enough actor: Make no mistake about it, acting is very hard. It is an art and it takes time and practice and dedication, and frankly put, I am not very good at it. I read the sides with the actors during casting, and though I am better at being Tucker than some of the guys who came in, I am not very good. If I came in as a random actor, I would not get the role.
Acting also takes an ability to be artificial that I don't have. In the moment, I can be myself easily, but on command, I can't just conjure up my emotions or facial expressions or attitudes. I know it seems ridiculous to say that I can't act like myself well enough to play myself in a movie, but it's true. Try pretending to be yourself sometime, scripted lines and all, and you'll see how weirdly hard it is.
But even if I was pretty good, I wouldn't want to do it. A great actor can still do a better job; he can take the character places I couldn't. When Val Kilmer played Jim Morrison in THE DOORS, all the original members of the band said that he was more Jim Morrison than Jim was in real life. How could he do this? What Val did was distill and compress the essence of Jim into himself, and strip away all the boring day-to-day stuff. Thus he became a bigger, more condensed and intense version of Jim.
2. I am not hot enough: The camera is altering and unforgiving. Things your eyes don't notice or see in three dimensions become huge when played in two dimensions. This is why sometimes when you see movie stars in real life, they don't look hot at all--they are that rare breed of person who looks better on camera. I am not one of those people--I am OK looking in real life, and look worse on camera.
This might be OK, except that for this role, I want the person playing Tucker to be attractive on camera; the way the character plays, he needs to come off as charismatic and likable, and part of that charm is his looks. That's just not me on camera. I know--how ridiculous is it that I am not hot enough to play myself. Welcome to the movies.
One more issue: I'm 32 now. The characters in the movie are 24. I can maybe pass for 27ish, but that's it. How lame would it be to see a movie with a 30+ year old guy pretending to be 24, doing shit that only 24 year olds do? Doesn't everyone groan when 36 year old Dane Cook tries to play a hip mid-twenties guy? Yep. I don't want to be that guy.
3. It limits the options: I am not doing this movie to make a documentary of my life. The movie is a fictional story based very heavily on my life, but it's NOT supposed to be my exact life. If I decided to do a documentary, then of course I would play myself. But that's not what I want. I want to make art and to tell a great story. For writing short stories, it's possible to just stick to my real life and do that, for film, the medium requires a different approach. It requires you to fit a complete story into 90 minutes. Life doesn't work like that, thus the movie being only "Based on" my life and not my real life.
Beyond that, by making it fiction and making someone else Tucker Max, we can do anything we want with the character. It grows beyond me, and can become a separate, distinct entity. If the character is tied to me as a person, there is only so much it can do or be. But by separating it, we can go all kinds of different places and do all kinds of different things.
Don't get me wrong--virtually everything in the movie is based on something that happened to me in real life. It's just that fiction frees us to make a movie that is, well, better than real life. It allows us to take my real life stories--which by themselves don't fit into a movie format--and make them work on screen. To do that, I think you need an actor to be Tucker Max. It allows people to have a divide in their mind about the "fake Tucker" and the "real Tucker." That includes me.
Honestly, I never really considered playing myself. To me, it seemed like the height of hubris. Yeah, I am arrogant, but I really REALLY want to make this movie as good as possible, and to do that requires a real actor to play me. In order to make the best movie possible, I'm willing to put my ego in check.
All this being said, I am going to have a pretty cool bit part. I don't want to divulge anything about the character I play or what he does, but you'll like it, I promise.
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