I play Davis Green. He’s a chef in Boston dating a woman who’s a ballerina. They’re having problems in their relationship and a woman shows up played by Adelaide Clemens, kind of out of nowhere, claiming that she’s his cousin and that his father actually has a brother that he has never told Davis about, and that’s kind of the beginning of the adventure you go on with this character.

A challenge of working with Adelaide Clemens is just keeping up with her. I mean she’s so talented and has so much energy and she’s so smart. Well, hats off to our filmmaker Justin Lerner because he’s not afraid of, if something is not working on the day, just throwing it all away and starting from scratch. Actually, the first scene where they talk to each other, when Adelaide shows up in her truck, was written completely differently and we were struggling with it and we all took thirty minutes to kind of figure out how it could be better and we changed it right then and there. And that’s sort of kind of a good example of how Justin, Adelaide, and I would work together. We would work together really closely and we wouldn’t shoot anything unless everybody was happy.

It was all very challenging. We were a small movie shooting in upstate New York. And thankfully we had a wonderful first A.D. named Scott Kirkly and I never felt pressed for time. I never felt rushed or forced. But some of the more challenging scenes were when the whole family’s gotten together at the cabin and Davis is cooking dinner for everybody upstairs and first he’s with Deborah Ann and then Adelaide comes in. That was a very challenging scene to do, I’m not exactly sure why but it was challenging. And then the final scene between Adelaide and I at the truck was challenging. For the second portion of the scene, it’s just one long shot but we were able to do it 12, 13 times. Same with the final shot of the movie we were able to do 12, 13 times, so it was all very challenging but thankfully we did have enough time to shoot the hell out of those scenes.

The complexity of the character and the complexity of the story and the depth. I thought it was just a very rich world that they had created. And I thought it was a very conflicted man, Davis. And I wanted to play that and when Justin and I first sat down together something that we agreed on very quickly was that you don’t need to like him. You don’t need to think you would do the same thing. You don’t need to identify with him and he can be ugly, and he can be strange, and he can be a liar and a cheat, and all those things and we wanted to embrace that.

I don’t really find him that unsympathetic, so I guess for me it wasn’t too difficult. I don’t have too much interest in playing a character that is super sympathetic and that everybody can universally love and agree with. I think that we are complex. People have their shadows and exploring that to me is more interesting than anything else.

I did a film with a wonderful actress named Julia Garner called ‘Everything Beautiful is Far Away.’ First time filmmaker team, husband and wife, Peter Ohs and Andrea Sisson. And we shot that in Glamis, California all out in the desert and it was really really nice.