Cory Michael Smith on ‘Mountainhead,' Millennial Jeans, and Jim Carrey
Let me ask you about comedy. Were there any comic actors that you watched growing up in Ohio that you thought: God, I'd like to be able to do what they do?
The actor I grew up imitating the most was Jim Carrey. Maybe the first movie of his I watched was Ace Ventura—the second one: When Nature Calls. And Liar Liar was a favorite of mine. I did a lot of imitations of that. But the movie I watched over and over and over again was What About Bob? I loved that movie so much, and I had one friend in high school who also loved it and we would quote it back and forth to each other all the time, and no one knew what we were talking about. There was something about Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss's performances that, you know, ride on the edge a little bit. And so, I guess I have some of that inside me because I imitated these guys for so long.
There's a lot of theater experience on your CV. Did all that stage work teach you something that you carry with you now into film?
I went to college to study drama and piano. And I started in the theater because it's all I had done—and, frankly, it was all I really had aspirations to do. I had my first starring role off-Broadway in a Mike Bartlett play called Cock that Ben Whishaw had done in London, and I was cast by the same director in New York, which to me was a crazy coup because I love Whishaw. He's an incredible, special talent. And having the director that hired him, hire me—it's like these little moments in a career where there's validation that you're on the right path. Then, I had my Broadway debut at 26 [in Breakfast at Tiffany's], which was not a great experience. I mean, it was not a great production and it didn't do well. And that was really hard. It was a moment when I decided to try going into screen work. There's a certain rigor to theater, a study of language and body—things you don't necessarily learn when working on camera. It's really helpful to understand how a full body is used to tell a dramatic story.
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