“I like it here. You get to do what you want. Nobody f**ks with you. The only worry you got is dying. And if that happens, you won’t know about it anyway.” So says Bunny in Platoon, the breakout role that Kevin Dillon plays with mischievous bombast, and he’s been acting with a similar devil-may-care attitude ever since. From The Blob to The Doors and Poseidon to Entourage, Dillon has a kind of bull-in-a-china-shop presence that often steals the scenes he’s in.
The actor is playing a bit against type, however, in the new film from James Cullen Bressack, Hot Seat. In it, Dillon plays a former top-tier computer hacker who is trying to put his past behind him and struggling to be a family man, until he is taken hostage and forced to perform complicated hacks. He is stuck in a chair rigged with pressure-sensitive explosives and surrounded by an electromagnetic fence of sorts, so the actor faces the challenge of trying to be an action star all while sitting still.
Kevin Dillon on the Challenges of Hot Seat
“There’s no doubt that being a computer hacker is something that I’m nothing like,” Dillon laughs, “I’m terrible with any kind of technology. But I thought it was a really cool part to play.” Dillon plays a much more reserved and subtle character in Hot Seat than the cockier and confident Johnny Drama of Entourage or the aforementioned Bunny. Sitting in his office, listening to his captor over the intercom, and doing whatever he can to buy time, the largely stationary role is not just different for Dillon, but would be different for any actor.
“It was really tricky, but I took that as a challenge, and it was,” Dillon says. “I was also acting against no one real. I didn’t really have an actor to bounce off of. I had like a script lady off to the side saying the dialogue, and I had to react and talk to basically a speaker, a camera, or a security camera, and while being kind of tied down in this chair the whole time, since I can’t move or the bomb will go off. So I mean, it was definitely really tough, as far as acting goes.”
Another wildly challenging aspect of the production was its majorly condensed schedule, with the whole film being shot in a week. “It was crazy, with the seven-day shooting schedule,” Dillon says. “We had 24-page days of dialogue. A day,” he emphasizes. Perhaps all of these challenges helped Dillon tap into the tension in the scenes and the pressure his character felt. “I just tried to keep it as real as possible and keep the situation of what’s going on there. You know, if you’re talking to someone, you still want to feel, like, where are they come from? Where’s the speaker coming from? That’s why I would address [the captor] with security cameras, because I feel like this guy’s definitely watching me.”
Hot Seat Finds Dillon Working With People He Respects
Despite all the challenges (or maybe in addition to them), there were several pluses to Hot Seat for Dillon. “The script was good, that was a big plus. Knowing that Mel Gibson would be in it, and to get to work with him again, because we just did a movie called On the Line, which was cool, so that’s two big pluses,” Dillon says. “Also another thing, too, is that I got to work with Shannen Doherty again after all those years. We did something a long time ago called Gone in the Night, so it’s great working with her again on this. I also thought James [Cullen Bressack, the director] killed, he was really good, kept the suspense up even though I wasn’t able to move around a lot.”
“[Bressack] was great, we’ve been good buddies since,” Dillon continues. “We can really communicate well, I mean, this was such a tough shoot, doing it all seven days, and he has a certain confidence, because I didn’t know if we can even do it seven days. It was so tough. But he had confidence the whole way, and he delivered. I’m very impressed by that, and we’re gonna work again. We’ve got something in the works, I don’t know if I’m supposed to announce it yet so I better be quiet, but me and James will be working together.” The veteran performer and the young but experienced filmmaker could become quite the actor-director duo.
Comedy, Action, and the Future of Kevin Dillon
Bressack has talked about wanting to shift from action films and into comedies, the same way the director moved from horror movies into action, and Dillon would make a great comedic star for one of Bressack’s proposed comedies. Dillon has obviously garnered acclaim and awards for his often very funny work in Entourage, but has been honing his comedic timing for decades, in addition to his skill at leading a great action sequence.
“I love both. I love good drama, and I love some action,” Dillon remarks, “but I would say I love comedy the best. Yeah, if I have a funny line or when I’m reading a script and I see a funny line, I just get very excited about delivering that line. We used to do these premieres for Entourage that were often in front of a huge crowd. You would hear the laughter, and it’s a much better feeling when you’re in the theater. You can hear all that in the line, if you delivered it right, and it worked. There’s no better feeling than that. That really feels good.”
Hot Seat has some of that delightful humor in Mel Gibson’s character, but the action is all Kevin Dillon’s. From Lionsgate, Hot Seat was released July 1st in select theaters, digital, and on demand, and will be available on Blu-ray and DVD August 9th.
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