The Men Who Stare At Goats is a hilarious new film starring George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor and Kevin Spacey. Unfortunately, the true story it's based on is no laughing matter, especially if you happen to be a de-bleated goat housed in the U.S. Army's top secret Goat Lab or a guest... more

The Men Who Stare At Goats is a hilarious new film starring George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor and Kevin Spacey. Unfortunately, the true story it's based on is no laughing matter, especially if you happen to be a de-bleated goat housed in the U.S. Army's top secret Goat Lab or a guest of our government at Guantánamo Bay or Abu Ghraib.

The screenplay for the movie is woven around cold, hard -- and quite frankly bizarre -- facts uncovered by British author, journalist and documentarian Jon Ronson during his investigation into the U.S. Army's all too real paranormal activities, which he chronicled in a book first published in 2005. Though fictionalized, the script features whole chunks of dialog lifted directly from actual interviews Ronson conducted for the book with high ranking army officials and those who were trained by them as psychic spies.

Major General Albert Stubblebine III, who in the early '80s headed up the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command, a joint Army and N.S.A. clearing house responsible for gathering and disseminating intelligence, was one of the military's highest ranking proponents of supernatural techniques. Stubblebine, who was frequently frustrated by his lack of aptitude in the walking through walls department, was eventually forced out, but his dream of creating a superpowered army to defend the world's greatest superpower lived on thanks to the work of a Lieutenant Colonel called Jim Channon.

Disillusioned by what he'd seen and experienced in Vietnam, Channon had wanted to find a better, less lethal way of engaging in war. In 1977 he persuaded the Pentagon to fund a two year fact finding mission. During this time he visited numerous establishments that claimed to offer methods for enhancing human potential (including one in Big Sur that did this with naked hot tub encounter sessions). Upon his return, Channon wrote a blueprint for the next generation of soldier, or "warrior monks" as he called them, in a document entitled The First Earth Battalion Operations Manual.

The report detailed his ideas for the military application of a variety of new age techniques including telepathy, remote viewing, hypnosis, neuro-linguistic programming, and the use of music and subliminal sounds to alter mood. Channon's hippified vision of how to go about war, which included the use of special "sparkly eyes" greetings to disarm the enemy, was intended to create positive change. However many of the more tangible mind-bending techniques that Channon outlined were ultimately subverted by the military and used for torture and psychological warfare.

One of the army's more laughable attempts at co-opting Channon's ideas for darker purposes was their program to create telepathic assassins. The soldiers selected to hone their psychic powers in this way practiced their skills on a covert goat herd based at Fort Bragg that had been de-bleated to avoid rousing the suspicions of the local branch of the ASPCA. Though killing with a stare proved to be a somewhat challenging task, legend has it that a man named Guy Savelli did actually down a goat. But when Ronson caught up with Savelli, a civilian who was initially contracted by Special Forces to teach the mind over body martial art Kun Tao, the only proof of his skills he was able to offer was a somewhat dubious DIY hamster snuff video.

However, disturbing images leaked from inside Abu Ghraib and news reports of interrogation tactics used in Iraq and at Guantánamo Bay, involving loud music and fit-inducing strobe light inflicted over excessive periods of time, indicate that other psi ops methods, originally presented in a far different light by the likes of Stubblebine and Channon, have caused very real harm. Highly experimental mind-targeted tactics have also been deployed in a shockingly disorganized, cavalier and ad-hoc manner during various domestic sieges including the ill-fated 51-day stand off at Waco which resulted in 76 deaths. And it's not just terrorists and religious extremists that are a casualty of our rogue psychological warfare, which has caused a crisis of consciousness at home that has over-shadowed the Bush presidency and threatens even that of Obama's.

SuicideGirls caught up with Ronson by phone to find out more.

Nicole Powers: In your previous book, Them: Adventures with Extremists, you covered a wide range of wack jobs of various religious and political persuasions. British fruitloops seem to be mostly confined to disseminating their ideas by standing on boxes and shouting at Speaker's Corner in London's Hyde Park, but what's so scary about American nutcases is that some of them are actually high up in the military and government and are running one of the country's two major political parties. How would you compare and contrast nutters on either side of the Atlantic?

Jon Ronson: I remember asking this CIA guy called Ray Hyman why there's so much nuttiness within the highest places of the CIA and military intelligence in America, and his answer to me was, "Because people are basically nuts, which means you're going to get a lot of nuttiness outside of the CIA and a lot of nuttiness inside the CIA." And that's the conclusion I've come to, that we're just mad, and our madness is what rules the world.

NP: But there's something about America and crackpots that means they can rise higher in the ranks of power.

JR: That is odd isn't it? That it happens in such high places in America. And it's true, in Goats I had a look to see if I could see anything like that happening in the British military and I couldn't at all. The only place I found that level of extreme out of the box thinking was in the American military.

What's really interesting is there's a bit in the book where General Stubblebine has tried and failed to walk through this wall, and has had all these spoon bending parties, and his fellow chiefs of staff get really worried about him and want to force him out. But it turns out they're not worried about him because they think he's irrational and they're rationalists, which is what I would have assumed, they're trying to force him out because they're all fundamentalist Christians and he has possibly been infiltrated by Satan. That was kind of the moral battle that was playing out at the top of the United States Intelligence Service - like wizards throwing thunderbolts at each other. And that's uniquely American I think.

NP: The prevalence of religion does add to the nuttiness out here.

JR: Yeah. It certainly does. Because when we get deeply religious people in positions of political power in [the U.K.] they tend to underplay it. For instance there's that famous line of Alistair Campbell's. [Campbell held the equivalent post to that of the White House's Press Secretary at No. 10 Downing Street from 1997 to 2003 and was Tony Blair's spokesperson.] When Tony Blair was asked if he prayed with George Bush, Alistair Campbell's answer was, "We don't do religion," whereas in America you really do do religion. So it did make me laugh that that was the intellectual battle going on at that moment in American military history: Is General Stubblebine Satanic? Rather than has he just gone crazy?

NP: In your book you portray the army as an organization still recovering from Vietnam, with much of the top brass suffering from PTSD. And you allude to a level of self-selection in today's voluntary army when you talk about how past research done at the end of World War II concluded that only around 15 to 20 percent of American infantry men shot to kill during battle, and that 98 percent of those that did were deeply traumatized by it and the remaining 2 percent were classified as "aggressive psychopathic personalities."

JR: Absolutely.

NP: There really is this sense that the lunatics have taken over the asylum, which also happens to be the most well armed institution in the world. It's a little worrying.

JR: Well, yes. That statistic by the way brings up a really interesting sub-point, which is what the American military tried to do is try and create psychopathy in ordinary people. That's the reason why American soldiers, and soldiers all over the world, are better at killing now than they were during the Second World War -- their trainers have taught them how to be psychopathic. They're not actual psychopaths, because I think you're born a psychopath, but they train to dehumanize somebody so they become psychopathic militaries.

But you don't just find it in the military; I think you find it in the medical services [with] doctors. It's almost like good psychopaths. Brain surgeons are very good at thinking of the people they're operating on as just slabs of meat, and it actually makes them better doctors. I think that's kind of interesting. It's sort of a positive point in a way.

NP: What's also incredible about your book is the number of dots it connects. You go from The Branch Davidian siege at Waco, to the Heaven's Gate suicide pact in San Diego, to the 9/11 hijackers, to torture tactics used at Abu Ghraib. Even though The First Earth Batallion was such a small unit, it's had a massive reach and an inordinate level of influence even after it's demise.

JR: Yes, I think so. Certainly what the First Earth Battalion stands for, and the idea that the way ideas permeate throughout the military is in this way. I mean I'm not saying that what happened to the Branch Davidians at Waco was [brought about by] First Battalion ideas, but I think what definitely is the case is, you can see this historically with America, whenever they've got the opportunity, they've got a bunch of people surrounded, what they do is treat those people like guinea pigs. The Weaver family at Ruby Ridge, the Branch Davidians at Waco, and then the prisoners at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib were treated like guinea pigs and I think that's inexcusable.

The kind of interrogation techniques that were being employed at those places were esoteric experimental techniques. I think there is something fascinating and chilling about that mentality. It's like we've got a bunch of people surrounded, let's try out all the crazy shit that's been floating about in think tanks for years. It's extraordinary really.

NP: As you speculate in your book, do you actually believe that Gitmo was just "Experimental Lab Mark 1" for the army's Psi Ops - essentially an extension of Project ARTICHOKE which tested out new torture techniques on "expendables" back in 1950s.

JR: I really believe that. I think one contribution that my book has is to look at the military in this way. I agree. I think Abu Ghraib [was used in this way] too. I am a bit of a conspiracy theorist when it comes to the Abu Ghraib photographs. I don't think what you are witnessing in those Abu Ghraib photographs is just random hick cruelty, which is basically what people would like us to believe. I think there was something a lot more organized and a lot more thought out going on there.

NP: If those Lynndie England photos were Psi Ops "products" that were meant for viewing by Iraqi POWs / enemy combatants only, if they were staged for propaganda purposes it certainly explains Obama's subsequent behavior and why he's refused to prosecute those responsible for war crimes.

JR: And indeed, I think I'm right in saying, release all the material as well. Aren't there a huge number of extra photographs that still haven't been seen? [Obama] said he was going to show them, and then he didn't.

NP: Reading that chapter in your book made Obama's actions make sense for the first time.

JR: Yes, I think so.

NP: One of the things that people have latched onto in the book is how the army used the music of Barney and Friends for torture. Music from Metallica, Avril Lavigne, Celine Dion, and an unnamed all-girl Fleetwood Mac covers band also made the cut and has been used for nefarious purposes. You allude to the fact that this information may have been deliberately brought to light, perhaps to take the focus of less palatable techniques such as waterboarding.

JR: Yes. I really believe that to be the case. I think what happened was Psi Ops saw an opportunity. I don't think you need to be a conspiracy theorist to believe that is true. Just today by coincidence I saw that original Newsweek article that first broke the Barney story back in 2003. I think that Psi Ops could see that Newsweek wanted it to be a funny story, the idea of musical torture, and they just jumped on it as a possibility because when you've got a funny, slapstick story about torture that's so enjoyable nobody's going to want to try and find a darker story about torture.

I think Psi Ops seized on that opportunity and did a bit of psi ops on all of us. Everybody thought the Barney story was funny at the time, and it was only when Abu Ghraib happened a few months later -- I think there was about six months between the Barney story coming out and the Abu Ghraib story coming out -- and for those six months American Psi Ops had completely won. Torture was funny and poor old groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were trying to convince people that actually torture wasn't quite as funny as everybody thought it was. But then nobody wanted to hear that because everybody wanted to have a good laugh.

It was only when you were confronted with the full horror of the Abu Ghraib photographs that the torture stopped being funny. It was a brilliant Psi Ops success that they had there, and the movie does go into that. There's a nice, sort of dark ending which reflects that.

NP: Do you get a sense that you've hit the bottom of the rabbit hole, or, to shamelessly mix metaphors, that you've only hit the tip of the iceberg with this book? I mean in one chapter an army guy even talks about how units showed up at Abu Ghraib that even he didn't know existed. I mean what's a clandestine, all-Mormon unit from Utah doing at Abu Ghraib for god's sake?

JR: [laughs] There were Brits there as well. Absolutely.

I think what I did in the book, I definitely got further. I mean the tip of the iceberg was the psychic spies, that was declassified in 1995, and I think I did manage to go further down the iceberg. Undoubtedly most of the stuff in this book is stuff that hadn't been revealed before, the goat staring, all that kind of stuff. But what I don't know is what's happened since I finished writing the book in 2003/2004. I assume there's a whole bunch of stuff still going on. I've no doubt that there is.

NP: With all the publicity surrounding the book and film, have more people crawled out of the woodwork to talk? Have you discovered anything else relating to this subject since?

JR: Nothing major. I've had a few people say to me they saw this stuff going on and I got it right, but I haven't had any fabulous new chapters come my way. If I'm being completely honest, a few people in the past week or two have emailed me to say "you don't know how far this goes, it goes a lot further than this," but I haven't got back to them, partly because I've been unbelievably busy promoting the movie, and partly because I'm always slightly worried when I get emails like that that the people are just nuts. I've been burnt a few times getting back to somebody and just finding out that they're mentally ill and it's nothing to do with reality. But I've kept the emails so I might go back to them.

NP: In your book there's speculation that the First Earth Battalion was the more public of perhaps two psychic units, and that it was disbanded so the military could accurately state that it had ceased the psychic activities of the First Earth Battalion while secretly pursuing similar ideas with another more covert unit. Do you think that's the case?

JR: I don't think that's true. I think that was a psychic who thought that being a secret psychic spy for the U.S. military must be so cool, and then he becomes one and realizes that it's not that cool, it's a bit crap. So he starts thinking, "Well we must be the crap psychics and there's really brilliant psychics somewhere else." That's human nature.

It's a bit like, I went to Puerto Rico to watch them filming the movie, and I think it's going to be the most exciting thing in the whole world. In fact, it's just hard work. It's just people working. So I'm thinking there must be another movie set somewhere else where they're all being fed grapes by virgins. There's probably no film set in the world where that happens. If that's happening anywhere it's happening in the SuicideGirls's offices.

NP: Did you actually pick up any new abilities, any sparkly eye or invisibility techniques from all the experts you interviewed for the book.

JR: None. Absolutely none. I tried staring at my cat Monty and it didn't fall over.

NP: Well I'm kind of glad about that.

JR: So am I because I really like my cat. I was really dancing with danger actually -- or I would have been had there been any possibility that anybody could kill anything with a stare.

NP: And you can reassure readers that no hamsters were killed in the making of this book?

JR: I can absolutely assure you because the hamster death video that I saw definitely culminates with the hamster getting up and brushing itself down. Your readers needn't worry about that.

NP: Our Animal Rights group will be reassured by that I'm sure.



Photo: Jon Ronson, pictured right, on the set of The Men Who Stare At Goats in search of virgins to feed him grapes.

The Men Who Stare At Goats movie opens in theaters nationwide this Friday, November 6. The book, The Men Who Stare At Goats, is available from Amazon.com and all fine booksellers. For more information on Jon Ronson go to JonRonson.com.

HI!!! oh my goodness I'm so excited, I have a set going up in MR in ... 4 days!!! Craziness!!! I also am soooo overwhelmed with school I just mapped out the next month and a half before break and I have 10 different performances!! well 9 and one's a double in a day, oh. my. god. and I'm... more

HI!!!

oh my goodness I'm so excited, I have a set going up in MR in ... 4 days!!! Craziness!!!

I also am soooo overwhelmed with school I just mapped out the next month and a half before break and I have 10 different performances!! well 9 and one's a double in a day, oh. my. god. and I'm not even a music major!! I'm so excited to be a part of all these things~ it's just what I've always wanted and I've finally gotten a little better at being less nervous but 10 eeeek!!! (1 out of the 10 is a paid gig lol!) wish me luck one is tomorrow

soon you will get to see me naked... here is slight preview of me in my dorm room, haha....

10 minutes is hardly enough time to interview Nick Frost. He’s got so many stories to tell, it seems like he’d just go on and on, and we’d listen. He was just getting warmed up when time was up. Just follow his cake flushing antics on the DVD extras from Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz to get a sense... more

10 minutes is hardly enough time to interview Nick Frost. He’s got so many stories to tell, it seems like he’d just go on and on, and we’d listen. He was just getting warmed up when time was up. Just follow his cake flushing antics on the DVD extras from Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz to get a sense of how he finds comedy in daily situations.

Frost costars in Pirate Radio, inspired by the true story of boats that broadcast rock n’ roll music off the coast of England in the early ‘60s. The film shows the daily lives of the DJs as the sort of slice of life dramedy of the British romantic comedies. Richard Curtis (Love Actually) directs. Fans of Frost will get to see the Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz star swap girls with a shy shipmate, baring all for a nude scene and tell a story about sh*tting the bed to his crewmates.

“I think it’s pretty brave of Richard to cast a 20 stone man in a romantic role,” Frost told a small press conference earlier in the day. “It was great to shoot those scenes. It’s not every day you get to do a job where you can just wander around naked and people don’t give a sh*t. I think if you had to show an alien race just how different the human form could be, I think Tom [Sturridge] would be at one end and I would be at the other.”

On a Monday morning in London, Frost sported shoulder length hair and stubble that would have made him a rebel in the era of Pirate Radio. These days, it’s standard for a movie star. His “Blood and Ice Cream” films with Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg have made Frost international. The trio are gearing up to complete their trilogy with The World’s End.

SuicideGirls: I think Danny Butterman, your Hot Fuzz character would liken your hair to Nicolas Cage in Con Air.

Nick Frost: Yeah, absolutely. I think my next film, my hair is going to be greased back like that as well.

SG: In the ‘60s, they protested rock n’ roll music, in the ‘80s violent horror movies, now video games. Don’t they ever learn that it’s never the thing they’re so worried about?

NF: I don't think we ever learn, right? On any level, really. Everything seems to be cyclic.

SG: Why can’t people just look back and see we’ve already been through this?

NF: I have no idea. I think that’s a bigger question than Pirate Radio. You’re right. Why can’t we just look back? I don't think necessarily people change so the things that those people are railing about will not change either, you know what I mean? It’s easy just to forget. Considering how many of us there are, all our problems are kind of the same all the time. Throughout history, nothing changes really.

SG: The scene where you swap with Tom’s character for the groupie could’ve gone in a dangerous direction. Is it all in good fun?

NF: Absolutely. It absolutely is and I think the way we justified it was that it was the ‘60s. I don't think we were condoning anything bad there. I think it was just Dave being a bit of a sexual animal and trying to do a buddy a favor, but absolutely it could’ve gone either way.

SG: Playing a ladies man, is that comfortable to you?

NF: Absolutely. I think when you’re not a conventionally beautiful person, I think you need to try and find some way to charm women. Otherwise, you’re going to be very lonely. Comedy and making girls laugh was always, I don’t want to say a way in, but it’s a way to start a conversation, isn’t it? If you can make a girl laugh, you’re certainly halfway there.

SG: Between Spaced, Shaun, Fuzz and this, which of your characters is most like you?

NF: Probably Danny Butterman. Out of all of them probably Danny.

SG: Because of the film obsession?

NF: The film obsession but also, I’m not saying I have that kind of puppyish devotion, but I’m kind of more like Danny than Ed. I mean, I think Simon and I were both Ed at one point. At different stages in our lives, we’ve both been Ed but I kind of relate a bit more to Danny.

SG: You tell the sh*tting in the bed story as your embarrassing story in the movie. What are your real life stories?

NF: I’ve got a few. I think when I was a kid, I was walking, I came out of the sea and I was walking along the beach to get back to my parents. It was a very packed beach. I think I was only eight and two girls ran up behind me and pulled my trunks off in front of everyone which was terribly embarrassing. Another one was I lived in Israel for a long time and I was at a bar one night drunk and I ordered French fries. They came along and then there was a packet of condiments. What I thought was salt was in fact sugar and I put loads of sugar all over my French fries and the Israeli guy was saying, “You know you’re putting sugar on your fries.” I didn’t want to seem like I was an idiot so I said, “Oh, yeah, that’s how we do it. That’s what we do in London.” There’s been a few. I remember there’s a place near here and I live there now called Twickenham which is the center of British rugby and there’s a very big stadium there, kind of 85,000 seat stadium. When I was 12, we went on a school trip to watch a match and I was right in the front. I thought it would be good to just a moment before the match ended to actually run onto the pitch and try and get the ball. There was a very high step going onto the pitch and as I put my leg up, my trousers literally blew up from crotch to anus. Everything fell out and I was terribly embarrassed. I think there’s quite a special feeling having 20,000 people laughing at your nads.

SG: Millions after Pirate Radio.

NF: Yeah, sure. You don’t really think about that when you’re just doing it.

SG: Can we assume that The World’s End is your guys’ take on apocalypse movies?

NF: I don’t want to say anything. I think we’re quite a way actually from getting started.

SG: Will it really just be a trilogy with Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz or could you do four or five like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy?

NF: I don't know, I think the sense I’m getting off the fellas is we’ll leave it there.

(video) Friend of SuicideGirls Gavin Rossdale and SG's Rigel and Rambo, among others, are featured on tonight's episode of Criminal Minds (Weds Nov 11th, 9PST/8C). Be sure to set your TiVos! more

Friend of SuicideGirls Gavin Rossdale and SG's Rigel and Rambo, among others, are featured on tonight's episode of Criminal Minds (Weds Nov 11th, 9PST/8C). Be sure to set your TiVos!

There was a peculiar notion going around my high school in the white bread and meatloaf suburb of Akron, Ohio where I grew up that said that bands like DEVO were “wimp rock.” But seeing DEVO at the Music Box Theater in Hollywood where I had the privilege of sitting in on the final rehearsal for their... more

There was a peculiar notion going around my high school in the white bread and meatloaf suburb of Akron, Ohio where I grew up that said that bands like DEVO were “wimp rock.” But seeing DEVO at the Music Box Theater in Hollywood where I had the privilege of sitting in on the final rehearsal for their current tour gave the lie to that. Even with several members of the band having passed sixty years old and the rest closing in quick, DEVO rocks like no other band on Planet Earth.

It’s easy to forget today just what a revelation DEVO’s first album was when it came out. For a lot of people in those days, seeing the band on Saturday Night Live on October 14th 1978 (Fred Willard was the host!) was akin to the previous generation seeing The Beatles live on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964. DEVO’s appearance probably launched a thousand bands that night. It literally gave me a reason to live. The soul-less imitation of “rock and roll” we were force fed in the Ohio suburbs in those days was pretty much Muzak with a beat. Then along came DEVO and nothing was ever the same again.

In 1980 they even cracked the mainstream with their top ten hit Whip It. But just a few short years later their career took several wrong turns, including co-writing a song with would-be Reagan-assassin John Hinkley Jr. and signing with a label they likened to the Titanic the way every band on it sank without a trace.

In 1995, though, a funny thing happened. Girl U Want, an obscure album track from the same LP that had produced Whip It was featured in the movie Tank Girl and all of a sudden the kids wanted to know about DEVO. The band once again donned their trademark yellow industrial waste clean-up suits (originally purchased at the MF Murdock Janitorial Supply Company in Akron, Ohio) and showed them what de-evolution was all about. For the past 14 years DEVO have been playing shows consisting mainly of their earliest material.

But now something new is on the horizon. Their first and third albums are at long last available in re-mastered versions and DEVO is on the road promoting these with a series of two-night stands across America playing the first LP in its entirety on the first night and the third LP the following evening. But what’s even more exciting DEVO is recording their first album of new material since 1990’s Smooth Noodle Maps. The results are set to come out some time next year with an even more extensive tour.

I spoke to DEVO’s front man and fellow Akron-ite Mark Mothersbaugh about all this stuff and about getting spit on by John Lennon.

Brad Warner: I’m about ten years younger than you and I grew up near Akron in Wadsworth, Ohio…

Mark Mothersbaugh: Oh! Where are you now?

BW: Right now I’m in St. Paul. But I live in Santa Monica.

MM: You made it out at least!

BW: Seeing you guys on Saturday Night Live in 1978 was a big deal for me. I’d already started playing guitar at the time. But I thought rock music was over. I thought I was working in a dead art form. And DEVO was something that was cool again. It really meant a lot to me.

MM: Well thank you.

BW: So I’m pretty excited that you guys are doing a tour and you’re reissuing the first album and Freedom of Choice. Is that right?

MM: Affirmative. They’ll probably reissue more of the catalogue. Those are just two that are linked up with some shows we’re gonna do.

BW: That’s cool. That first album I actually wore out. It got to where the record sounded like shit because I’d played it so many times. So what’s different about this new version? Is it re-mastered?

MM: Now that it’s almost absurd to put out records, they have some little extras that come with it. I think even the regular one’s gonna be yellow vinyl and red vinyl. They’re very high quality vinyl compared to what they used to make records out of in the old days. So they’re definitely collector’s discs. And the packages are enhanced. On some of them you can get different versions of it, DVD footage and stuff like that. (NOTE: The CD reissue of the first album contains a bonus live recording of the entire album played at London’s HMV Forum in May, 2009. The CD reissue of Freedom of Choice adds the contents of the DEVO-Live EP originally released in 1980 shortly after the LP. You can also order an Ultra Devo-luxe edition from their website that contains both re-mastered CDs, plus 2 bonus DVDs and a colored vinyl single.)

BW: Sounds great. So why are you doing this now?

MM: I think for DEVO we’ve decided that we’re shocked that no one came along to take our place. So we have to go back out there and start talking about de-evolution again and remind people what’s really wrong on planet Earth. So early next year there will be new music coming out. But for the uninitiated and those who were somewhere else when it happened we’re putting out some of the essential listening material to help bring them up to speed. And we’re doing shows to accompany the releases in a number of cities around the US. We’re literally doing album one on the first night starting on side one track one of the vinyl. Almost like you’re hearing live vinyl. We’ll play through the first side of the album and we’ll flip over and play the second side of the album.

BW: Cool!

MM: And the next night we do the same thing with Freedom of Choice. If you would’ve asked me a year ago if that sounds like I good idea I would’ve said that doesn’t sound like a great live show. What changed my mind was last May we played All Tomorrow’s Parties in London at the Forum and we did album one. I just thought, we never put them in this order and that vinyl was supposed to be act one and act two of a listening experience. It doesn’t have the same build as a live show. It’s something different.

BW: Right.

MM: I thought this is gonna have weird energy to it. But it was really great! It’s not a new concept. All Tomorrow’s Parties started a long time ago. And a lot of people are doing their albums live.

BW: Yeah, I saw Brian Wilson do Pet Sounds live.

MM: There’s a lot of people doing that. Now I finally understand it. I had never thought about it. But once I heard us do it I could think of a couple dozen bands I’d love to hear do their first album live. It made me think of when DEVO played Inland Invasion a few years ago. And Billy Idol came out and he played "White Wedding" and "Rebel Yell" and everybody was going crazy. Then he said, “Now here’s my new album!” And everybody’s kinda like… the wind went out of the sails. And the audience was kind of polite. Then after about 40 minutes of that he played "Dancing With Myself" and everybody went crazy again.

BW: That’s gotta be a weird experience, though. Cuz for you or for him it’s like this is what you did 20 years ago and it must not seem that relevant. But if the audience is into it…

MM: Yeah. But there are some things about doing that that are interesting. We play every year, though. The last 13 years we’ve done festivals, a lot of European and Asian shows, Australian shows, and a lot in the US. We played Lalapalooza a few times back like ten years ago. We’d do like three weeks a year, four weeks a year at the most and then that was it.

BW: And this time you’re putting it back together.

MM: Yeah. But there is an element where you’re going, I remember the first time we put on these yellow suits. I proudly felt like I was a McDonald’s cheeseburger in that yellow plastic box. And now 30 or 35 years later, I still feel like a McDonald’s cheeseburger. But now maybe it’s like a double patty cheeseburger!

BW: I was gonna ask you about that. Cuz it kind of surprised me. I was living in Japan in 1996 and I read about you guys putting on the yellow suits again and that was the last thing I ever expected to see DEVO do. But on the other hand it sort of made sense. Cuz you guys were never anti-commercial as such. You were trying to do it your own way.

MM: In defense of that, there aren’t any other bands that come to mind that all wear plastic yellow suits unless they’re DEVO tribute bands.

BW: That’s true!

MM: Everybody wears blue jeans. That’s the uniform of the last 50 years. People wear it and they don’t even know they’re wearing a uniform, but they are. That is the uniform. I think our yellow suits, when people call ‘em a uniform it makes me smile. Because at least ours was creative. We created it ourselves as opposed to just buying into Levi’s ads. DEVO wasn’t really about being sexy. We weren’t really anti-style. But style meant something totally different to us.

BW: Sure. That’s pretty evident.

MM: We wanted to look like a machine. We wanted to look like a team. At the time it was like Kenny Rogers…

BW: I remember! God, that was awful. Talk about denim uniforms!

BW: Or it was like Elton John and his band, or Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. We wanted to look like parts of a machine on stage. We were more influenced by Agit Prop from Germany and Europe in the late 20s and 30s and Bauhaus, geometric shapes and the Italian Futurists and the Russian Suprematists. We were interested in pure art. And the yellow suits always felt to us like we were art. We thought we were in some ways much less commercial than anybody else because of that.

BW: Yeah. It’s funny that it became commercial. That’s interesting to me. You did "Whip It" and all of a sudden everybody was into it. But there was always that problem of did the mass audience really get it. Or did it even matter if they got it? There was that whole thing about "Whip It" being taken as sexual innuendo and all that.

MM: It’s only fitting that that would be the song that was most remembered in the United States and had the most airwave success. But that’s OK. People by nature don’t come to art or music to get educated or to get vitamins. They’re there cuz they’re trying to escape from the world. But DEVO managed to sneak in some vitamin-enriched information as a side feature and that was kinda good. Some people probably never got it and never would get it. But there were always those kids out there who wanted to know what it means. You might’ve been a fan of some band like that when you were a kid. Where you look at the album cover for every bit of information you can get. You’re looking for every clue. The posturing in the photographs, the type that’s picked for the title of the band and the album. All that stuff is really important to you at a certain age. It was to us too. We designed our own album covers and designed our own merchandise and costumes and stage shows. We totally understood the importance of all the areas of the aesthetic. It wasn’t just about sonic music or just trying to get on the radio. It was a lot bigger.

BW: The most brilliant piece of DEVO merchandise I saw at that shop Wacko in Los Feliz, the DEVO doll with the interchangeable heads.

MM: The company that did those, I wasn’t really into the style that they were doing the artwork in. I had plenty of arguments about it. But the big blow was that they weren’t doing a set of five. Because that’s what DEVO is. It’s a set of five guys. We went around in circles. And finally I said, we’re allowed to have accessories, right? They said, yeah. So I said I want it to have five heads so pole can change the heads on the dolls. A true DEVO fan would take the hit and buy five of them.

BW: Talking about other bands, I’m sure you must know Polysics from Japan.

MM: Yeah. We played with the last time we were over there.

BW: What do you think of them? They’re so DEVO.

MM: They are! And they do some of our stuff better than we do it. It kind of freaks me out. And their fans love it. I don’t know what their fans think of DEVO. They’re so into Polysics maybe they don’t even know. And they’re a great band live.

BW: Oh yeah. I like them a lot. One other thing I wanted to ask you about because I’m from Akron. You guys did a show at the Akron Civic Theater last November in support of the Obama campaign. How was that to go back there? I know Chrissie Hynde from The Pretenders was there and The Black Keys played too.

MM: That was appropriately unpleasant and also had a lot of pleasant moments too. Of course there were members of my family who were really upset that DEVO was supporting Obama, which I could not believe. I said, you guys are in the most most depressed butt fucked part of the country. Why would you be against getting rid of blood-suckers? They could not see it.

BW: I know. I never understood how Ohio people could support the very forces that were oppressing them.

MM: But it works. On the other hand we played at a place we hadn’t played in, in 30 years. It was almost 30 years to the day of the last time we played at the Akron Civic Thetare. And we wrote a lot of our early songs in less than a mile radius from that building. So it was kind of interesting to be back there. And Chrissy, who was kind of freaky on the phone before then, when we got to the show she was a total pro. It was really pleasant to work with her. And The Black Keys, I’ve always liked them. It was my wife’s idea. She said why don’t we do something for Obama. She was worried because Ohio was a swing state in the last two votes before that and had gone Republican at the last minute. So we went back there to say, come on exert your freedom of choice. And I think that that’s what won Obama the campaign, the DEVO concert.

BW: It probably was.

MM: Well if you want to be honest about it, probably not. But it was kinda nice to play there. The energy was really good. Everybody was really great. Akron-ites were excited that we were playing there again.

BW: Yeah, you were rejected there at the time and then you come back and everybody thinks it’s great.

MM: That’s fairly common. Bands have to leave their hometowns to get discovered. Especially if you’re doing original material. There was no appreciation at all for that back in the Seventies. We would lie and say we were a Top Forty band so we could get a gig. We’d be up there going, “Here’s another song by Aerosmith. It’s called… Jocko Homo!” At that point there’d be some out of work factory guy who was bummed out anyway, some Vietnam vet who came back and the factories are all closed he doesn’t know what he’s gonna do with his life. He’d slam his beer down and go, “That’s it! You callin’ me a monkey you mother fucker?” We’d once again get paid to quit, beat up, chased out or a combination of the three.

BW: That’s amazing. Cuz I’m friends with a guy I think you know, Rod Firestone from the Rubber City Rebels.

MM: Oh yeah! God, that’s a name from the past! We spent a lot of time with Rod during the formative years. He was instrumental in DEVO having a home base in Akron cuz he had a club that he opened and he allowed DEVO to play there. Then, of course, we ended up bringing Pere Ubu down there too. That was like the cultural island in an otherwise really dark, culture-less factory town.

BW: He always likes telling stories about The Crypt (a bar that originally catered to workers at the nearby Goodyear factory which Rod Firestone and his band-mate Buzz Clic transformed into Akron’s first punk rock club).

MM: It was a cool club. I was the soundman for a while for his band.

BW: Yeah, he told me you were the soundman for the Rubber City Rebels! They still play a few times a year. I met them when they did a tour of Japan. I was reading about you in David Giffels’ book about DEVO. Do you like that book, or is that a touchy subject?

MM: We weren’t part of it. We weren’t interviewed for it. It’s got a lot of misinformation in it. My feeling about that is, whatever. There was this one guy who was tangentially connected to us for a while who got involved. And it’s definitely the story of DEVO from the point of view of this guy who didn’t get to be part of the band.

BW: The story I wanted to ask you about from that book isn’t one of those stories. It’s in there about John Lennon coming up to you…

MM: That’s true.

BW: I wanted to hear that story.

MM: When we started going to New York we turned into a phenomenon. Which was pretty cool. Every time we whether it was CBGBs or Max’s Kansas City after the first show that we played it was a mob scene. It was always packed. In New York at the time it was customary for people that were celebrities to be able to call Max’s or CBGB’s or the other clubs and say, this is Mick Jagger and I’d like to bring Charlie Watts and Keith Richards to the DEVO show tonight and Bianca my wife and a couple friends. And they’d go, OK and put them on the guest list. But then they’d charge that against DEVO’s part of the take.

BW: (laughs) That’s awful!

MM: So every night we played in New York we’d have people like Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, all the filmmakers, all the actresses, all the people in bands. There’d be Frank Zappa’s band or whoever was in town. Brian Eno, Robert Fripp. They all showed up on our guest list. But that just meant we’d have to beg for gas money to drive back in our Econoline that held all the equipment and held the band. We didn’t have any place to stay. We’d have to crash inside the van.

BW: That’s like a twelve-hour drive back to Akron from New York. I’ve done that.

MM: Something like that. I don’t remember how long it was back to Akron. But I remember one night we were sitting outside of Max’s and we’d just played a set. I was waiting for everybody to leave so I could go in and finish unloading our equipment and drive back to Akron. I was in the passenger seat. And I looked around and it’s John Lennon and Ian Hunter from Mott the Hoople. They’re really drunk and they come out and John Lennon stuck his head in the car. And he got up about six inches from my face and started singing “Uncontrollable Urge” really loud. He obviously understood that the “yeah yeah yeah” part was a permutation of what he’d done. And the opening of the song, I don’t know if you ever paid attention, but it goes like dah-dah-duh-DAH, dah-dah-duh-DAH.

BW: Oh yeah! Like "I Want to Hold Your Hand"!

MM: Yeah. I took it right off "I Want to Hold Your Hand". Then the “yeah yeah yeahs” come in. So he knew it was a mutation of him. And he sang it for me right there with alcohol stinking spittle right into my face. I was in shock and about as high as you can get for the rest of the night. I couldn’t believe it.

BW: That’s amazing.

MM: And him and Ian, they just kinda put their arms around each other and started wobbling down the street singing the song all the way down Park Avenue or whatever street that was.

BW: I’m really looking forward to the tour and the new album. What’s the new stuff like?

MM: It sounds like DEVO, that’s for sure. Some of it sounds like it’s early, some of it sounds like the third or fourth album. And some of it is like the later stuff with more electronics. But lyrically it’s the same as what we always did. If it has anything to do with love it’s usually kind of absurdist. Other than that, without lecturing, we talk about the issue of de-evolution and things falling apart.

BW: Are you bringing the guitars back then?

MM: Yeah there’s some really good guitar stuff. One of the things I insisted Bob 1 (lead guitarist and Mark’s younger brother) do was I told him he had to play a lead that outdoes Smart Patrol. I told him this has got to be his new signature solo. So we’ll see if other people think of it that way.

BW: I’m looking forward to it and to the tour. Good luck!

MM: And thank you, SuicideGirls!

Advertorial/Competition: Get Intimate With Spread On Us "This is getting really uncomfortable," says Spread star Ashton Kutcher after watching his character get fucked in a leather chair during commentary embedded in the special features of the DVD version the film. Indeed Kutcher complains... more

Advertorial/Competition: Get Intimate With Spread On Us



"This is getting really uncomfortable," says Spread star Ashton Kutcher after watching his character get fucked in a leather chair during commentary embedded in the special features of the DVD version the film. Indeed Kutcher complains that acting in the film often caused him intense discomfort -- "agony" even -- brought on by frequent and severe bouts of vasocongestion in his nether regions (a condition more commonly referred to as blue balls).

Those who watched the film in theaters earlier this year may empathize as the film features some of the hottest sex scenes seen in a mainstream film in recent years. Thus, as Kutcher waited until the cameras stopped rolling to work out frustrations brought on by the day's acting off set with his wife Demi Moore, many cinemagoers had similarly uncomfortable commutes home. Needless to say, Spread is likely to do considerably better when it's released on DVD and Blu-Ray on Nov 10th than it did at the box office, for this is a film best experienced in the private confines of your own home (preferably with relief close at hand if you catch our drift).

In Spread, Kutcher plays Nikki a charming freeloader who hopes to get ahead by getting head -- and servicing the needs of his wealthy female companions. Co-star Anne Heche is perhaps the film's biggest surprise however. She plays Samantha, one of Nikki's well-heeled marks. It's without doubt the Sappho-esque actresses' most erotic role to date. "I've gone further in this movie than I have ever before," says Heche, before adding, "Why didn't I do this when I was 22?"

The actress and mother of two, who hit forty in May of this year, confronts the no holes barred (pun intended) sex scenes with a refreshing honesty. Though the action is often graphic, Heche's toned body shows scant evidence of the two children it bore, and the numerous encounters with Kutcher's character are both hyper-erotic and hyper-real.

Samantha may accuse Nikki of being "nothing but six inches and a pretty face," but it's his mastery of the art of the pick-up that gives the Hollywood player -- and therefore the film -- an edge. Indeed, in the aforementioned commentary, Kutcher fesses up to being a student of The Game, journalist Neill Strauss' infamous seduction bible (which spawned the VH1 reality show The Pick-Up Artist).

Throughout the film, Kutcher's character schools us on the basics of The Game: "There is only one pick up line -- Hi, what's your name? -- everything else is cheese." Player-centric tips such as "Never show her you're impressed -- it lowers your market value" and "You want to give them a good fucking, but not too good -- leave a little room for the relationship to grow" keep the dialog sharp and heighten the irony when the master player ultimately gets outplayed.

Visually, the third character in the plot is Samantha's sleek and stunning, glass-walled Hollywood Hills home -- Nikki's Spread du jour -- which serves as the film's sensual playground. However, for drama's sake, emotionally, the love triangle is completed by newcomer Margarita Levieva's character, Heather, who brings unexpected chaos to Nikki's highly controlled world.

Though Spread is an erotic comedy caper that celebrates all that is wrong with Los Angeles -- a metropolis that idolizes the beautiful and superficial -- Kutcher, unlike his character, is wise enough to keep his baser Hollywood instincts in check. "I've played the game enough to know it doesn't end well," says Kutcher, who married his smokin' hot older women in 2005. "The only way to win is through true passion and love*."



WIN SPREAD TO GO

SuicideGirls has teamed up with Anchor Bay Films for a special competition so you can get intimate with Spread in the privacy of your own home. Winners will receive one of three copies of Spread on either Blu-Ray or DVD (your choice).

Answer the following question to enter:

Which lady would you prefer to be your sugar momma -- Anne Heche or Margarita Levieva?

(See pics at: www.flickr.com/photos/spreadthemovie)

Send entries via email to spread@suicidegirls.com. Please remember to include the following information:

1. Name
2. Address
3. Date of Birth
4. Preferred format (Blu-Ray or DVD)

Contest closes on November 23, 2009 at midnight PST. Winners will be notified by email on or before November 27. No purchase necessary. Must be18 years or older to enter.

For more information on Spread and the DVD/Blu-Ray release go to Spread-themovie.com.



Footnote:
* The only disclaimer being that Nikki's trademark "rollover sleeping smile" has apparently worked well for Kutcher off screen too, enabling him to avoid getting out of bed to take out the trash on more than one occasion when asked by his wife.

V invaded ABC with some of the fall TV season’s highest ratings. For fans of the 1983-84 NBC miniseries and TV series, the new take on alien invaders offered more twists than just a new network. The show deals with modern issues, via the flashy gimmick of spaceships hovering over our cities and lizard-faced... more

V invaded ABC with some of the fall TV season’s highest ratings. For fans of the 1983-84 NBC miniseries and TV series, the new take on alien invaders offered more twists than just a new network. The show deals with modern issues, via the flashy gimmick of spaceships hovering over our cities and lizard-faced baddies posing in pretty human skin. Among hints at terrorism and health care reform, the new V infuses the alien invasion with a juicy media dilemma.

One imagines if aliens landed today, Jon Stewart would be cracking jokes that night on The Daily Show. So too, in the age of 24 hour news, this V has a media subplot too. Struggling TV anchor Chad Decker (Scott Wolf) covers the arrival of alien leader Anna (Morena Baccarin) like all the other newshounds, and it lands him a seat of favor. Chad gets the exclusive with Anna, but a minute before air, she threatens to leave if he asks her any negative questions. Chad chooses to conduct the interview she wants to give.

There were no such edicts demanded by Wolf himself. Of course, he’s got a show to promote, not an evil agenda to hide. Or at least that’s what he wants us to think. But, at a cocktail party ABC threw this summer to promote their fall shows, Wolf stood in the middle of the room so anyone could get close to him. To put things in perspective, Shaquille O’Neal walked by, towering over Wolf and us. Only in Hollywood.

Wolf has been a staple of television since the mid-90s drama hit Party of Five. Bailey Salinger became a household name, or perhaps more accurately, a dorm room name. A stint on Everwood kept Wolf on screen for two years, but the short-lived hostage drama The Nine left viewers hanging when it was cancelled in its first season. If V continues, Chad will be the one with a direct line to Anna, if only he can get her on record.

SuicideGirls: Did you ever think your character might agree to Anna’'s demand, but on the air, ask her a tough question anyway?

Scott Wolf: Yes. I did. I think Chad is a pretty smart guy. I think he'’s pretty resourceful so I think as surprised as he was and caught off guard as he was, I think there was never a moment when he wasn’'t still thinking, “How can I get control of this?” The ongoing story is going to be just that. There'’s this really great cat and mouse between he and Anna for who’'s really in control of that relationship and who's agenda is going to get fulfilled.

SG: At what point do you think we’ll see him ruffle her feathers a little?

SW: Very soon.

SG: Like you know it happens in one of the first few scripts?

SW: Yeah.

SG: Because there’'s a way to ask anything and make her feel comfortable responding, right?

SW: Yes. That’'s the fun part and they went right at it, which is what you see Chad do right away is capitalize on the ambiguity of what it means to be a journalist. Without giving anything away, what he'’s attempting to do is put Anna in a postition where she knows that he has at least as much influence as she does. What’'s really fun about it is we don’t know really why. What’'s driving Chad? He clearly is ambitious but he’'s also clearly got a sense of a moral obligation to be a journalist. So that internal wrestling match I think is going to be fun to play.

SG: There'’s also the reality of you either get a positively spun story or none at all. It is important to put her on the air.

SW: That'’s exactly right, which is why the first question you asked, which is, “Would he have gone on air and asked her the tough questions anyway?” I’m pretty sure he knew she would get up and leave. Or find a way somehow to not be answering questions. I think he was smart enough to know that this opportunity wasn'’t just one interview. So ruining things by betraying a trust, by breaking that relationship down, I think he knows she can find someone else to be her voice if she wants to. And, it’s better off him than someone else.

SG: She could even find a bigger patsy, then we’'d be worse off.

SW: That’s right. I think part of the fun of it is I think she picks him probably because she thinks he'’s a pretty good patsy. I think she winds up being surprised that he winds up being formidable in his own way.

SG: Do you think his move dealing with Anna in the first press conference was calculated or it was just his nature and that won them over?

SW: It’'s a really great question because I really feel like Chad is the kind of guy who really is almost the David Letterman of journalism. He knows he’s going to have the right thing to say. So he doesn’t stand around plotting and thinking. I think that’s why he can be a little more relaxed and not uptight than some of the other journalists because things seem to come to him. He still is, in a sense, an unfulfilled character because he believes he belongs at a position he’'s not attained. He really thinks he should be THE VOICE and THE PERSON that people go to when spaceships descend upon the earth. He'’s not that guy yet so while he’'s confident and he believes himself to be able to roll with anything, I think when she looks at him and says, “Do you have a question?” I don't think he had that question planned.

SG: When he criticizes the other journalists for going negative, that wasn’t calculated?

SW: Well, the first thing he says is, “Is there such a thing as an ugly visitor?” So he sort of makes light of, makes sort of a joke with her and is sort of irreverent with her.

SG: But he’'s right in a way that the press shouldn'’t only question the visitor's intentions. They should also inquire about the hope and positivity of alien life.

SW: That part is “yes.” I think what he knew was he wanted to put out a friendly face. He capitalized on an opportunity to reprimand these other journalists and make himself look like the good guy that'’s on her side. So yeah, but in terms of exactly what to say and when, I think he just showed up believing a moment will arrive when I get a chance and I'’ll know what to do.

SG: There was a journalist in the original V, right?

SW: Yeah, there was a female. There was a news guy who went through a lot of anchoring and relaying of what’s going on between the visitors and the humans, but I think the counterpart to the character I’m playing was a female character, and a really ambitious journalist who was trying to capitalize on their arrival as well.

SG: So they made the action hero a female (Elizabeth Mitchell) and the journalist a male.

SW: Yes. I think they intentionally played with the gender of each role. There are things that are faithful to the original and then there were a lot of ways it was fun to really have a reimagining that'’s unique to this show.

SG: They did some reshoots before the show aired. Did you have to reshoot any of your scenes for the pilot?

SW: They'’re reshooting an early scene with my character, the introduction of my character actually. For various reasons, they’'ve decided to go, not in a different direction with the character, but to change his introduction a little bit.

SG: Did the new introduction affect where you ended up at the end of the first episode?

SW: It’'s still a natural. It fits with who the guy is but there was something in the introduction, the first scene they felt didn'’t get us on the right track right away so there’'s a slight change to it. I think it’s really, really smart. I think it’s a lot less objectionable in terms of a character than what we had shot.

SG: Were you frustrated by The Nine and hesitant to get into an ongoing story?

SW: It wasn'’t the ongoing story. I don'’t know if frustrated is the right word but it was upsetting that that had gotten cancelled. I loved it and loved the cast, loved the character and the story. It didn’'t keep me from wanting to be involved in a really great story. ABC did everything they could to make it work and really the postmortem on that show is just that it didn'’t work. Sometimes they just don’t but it'’s exciting. I’ve been very, very lucky to be able to be at events like this working on shows that I’'m really proud of and excited for. I think this is the best one I'’ve ever been a part of so I’'m excited.

SG: Since we’ll never see, what would have ended up being revealed about the bank in The Nine?

SW: I think eventually we would’'ve been out of the bank and everything that happened in there would have been disclosed. It was a lot. There were kind of a lot of shockers that were meant to be unveiled over the rest of the show and I don'’t even know most of them. I knew the one shocker they wound up revealing at the end of the 13 episodes which was that the bank manager, Chi McBride’s character, that he was involved.

Flight of the Conchords fans know that Wednesday is business time. In their song “Business Time,” Jemaine Clement sings that Wednesday is his weekly love making night, so it’s business time. It follows then that for an interview with Clement on a Wednesday, it is also business time. “I suppose... more

Flight of the Conchords fans know that Wednesday is business time. In their song “Business Time,” Jemaine Clement sings that Wednesday is his weekly love making night, so it’s business time. It follows then that for an interview with Clement on a Wednesday, it is also business time. “I suppose so, according to my own rules,” he said in a roundtable interview with a group of reporters.

His Flight of the Conchords character might not be much of a stretch. In person, unscripted, Clement carried himself and spoke the same way as his folk singing counterpart. He sat stiffly upright with hands folded and shoulders tight, and spoke in stunted fragments.

He didn’t get any more relaxed in a private, one on one interview either, but we wouldn’t have it any other way. That awkwardness makes sincere, innocent comedy in his songs with bandmate Bret McKenzie and their TV show on HBO. It also works for his new movie, Gentlemen Broncos.

Broncos casts Clement as sci-fi author Ronald Chevalier. Chevalier was a big shot with his Cyborg Harpies books but these days he resorts to plagiarizing work from kids at his writer’s camp. The film from Napoleon Dynamite writer/director Jared Hess combines his quirky real world characters with their bizarre sci-fi creations. Fans of the fictional Ronald Chevalier can find out more about him on the official website the filmmakers set up.

The Conchords also have a new album out, “I Told You I Was Freaky” which includes songs like “Sugarlumps,” about their male organs, and “Hurt Feelings,” a sensitive hardcore wrap. This interview contains a lot of inside jokes about Conchords songs so if anything sounds strange, listen to their music to find out what we’re talking about.

Suicide Girls: Did your hair grow out to Ronald Chevalier length or was that a wig?

Jemaine Clement: That was my own hair. I just sit there and someone does it but it take a lot of hairspray and a lot of back combing. Usually you do a screen test or a costume test before you start and at first I got there, the makeup artist was local. They try and hire local people as much as they can and she didn’t have a brush. Firstly, she wouldn’t look at the photo. I had a photo of a guy. I had all these different ideas which I went over with Jared. There were different ideas but I wanted this really big poofy one. I showed her and she said, “Okay.” She was doing it without a brush. She didn’t have a comb, she didn’t have a brush, with her fingers trying to do it and she wouldn’t look at it either. I remember like, “No, it’s not like that. You’re not looking at it.” “No, I saw it.” She got fired for a different reason. She insulted one of the actresses apparently on the same day. She got fired. If you’re a hair stylist, you’ve got to at least have a comb.

SG: Is Chevalier’s wardrobe comfortable?

JC: Well, it’s mostly comfortable but the jeans were very, very high so they could get uncomfortable at times.

SG: With the Chevalier websites providing more Chevalier beyond the movie, how long will you continue playing Chevalier?

JC: Well, I don’t really continue doing it. I did a thing in Austin and I think I might introduce the film tonight as Chevalier but it’s not really my character. It’s Jared and Jerusha [Hess]’s character so I can’t take it and have his own life without them.

SG: Are there musicians as pretentious as Chevalier is as an author?

JC: I’m sure there are. I’m sure there are.

SG: That you’ve encountered?

JC: Yeah, I knew that you were getting at that. Well, I started off doing theater and by that I mean putting on ridiculous shows with my friends with very little money. I meet people all the time that are just awful, just awful and just opinions of solid steel, just unchangeable.

SG: Have you been looking to have a career outside the Flight of the Conchords?

JC: We kind of started the Conchords as something else to do while we were doing other jobs, so it was more the other way around. The Flight of the Conchords was just an outlet for something fun to do.

SG: Well, you’ve been in several movies now. Are you more famous than Bret?

JC: I don't know. Bret’s got a different interest really to me. He mostly does music. We split up and I usually go and do comedy and he goes and plays gigs. He started a massive ukulele band. Almost every member plays ukulele and they do covers. They’re really successful in New Zealand. They travel around and he’s also in this reggae band which is one of New Zealand’s biggest bands actually. They play these big gigs and he plays with them too. So that’s what he does. He had a solo album and he’s probably writing some more music.

SG: I will have to check out his solo album.

JC: Yeah, check it out. It’s not a comedy album though. It’s dance. It’s about dancing.

SG: My favorite Conchords song is “Mutha’uckas” because I also have too many mutha’ucka’s ‘uckin’ with my shi’.

JC: Yeah, who doesn’t?

SG: What can we do about all these mutha’uckas ‘uckin’ with our shi’?

JC: ‘Uck them up.

SG: Well, that’s simple.

JC: Yeah, that’s all I can say.

SG: It was also great how you covered every era of David Bowie, including Labyrinth. Were you a big Labyrinth fan?

JC: Yeah, I was actually. I remember when that movie came out in my town. The line was right around the block. Even the line to the movie was exciting. It was just the biggest line you’d ever seen. At that time, it was probably one of the biggest groups of people I’d ever seen all together, were lining up for Labyrinth.

SG: Were all movies like that in New Zealand?

JC: No, I don't know why. I guess because of Bowie. I guess there was a lot of hype around that movie.

SG: Is “Sugarlumps” your answer to Fergie’s humps?

JC: Yeah, and Kelis’s milkshake and a few other things. I thought it was time men objectified themselves.

SG: What was the idea behind a sensitive rap about hurt feelings?

JC: Usually the ideas for the song come first so a song about hurt feelings. Because our characters in the show think of themselves as rappers even though they’re pretty far from it, they’re pretty serious about rap.

SG: Have you ever recorded a proper version of “Who Likes to Rock the Party?”

JC: No, but I remember the first time that we did it live. I mean, the first time was all right but then the next time we did it, we used to do it like this: One of us would go, “Mmph, kjj, oof, who like to rock the party, kshh, who likes to rock the party?” We were trying to do a dance tune but with no instruments. We just bombed, but we brought it back to life for the show.

SG: When is the robot uprising?

JC: Yeah, it’s late. It’s late. It’s nine years late. Robots are surprisingly badly organized.

SG: Do your love songs actually woo women?

JC: Once someone came up to me and told me that she had sex listening to our live album and she thanked me. So I don't know, I guess.

SG: I’m wondering if I tell a woman she could be a waitress or a part time model, would that work?

JC: Try it. I’d love to know.

SG: Do you start with really good music and then think of words, or do you start with funny words and then add music to make it work?

JC: I think we’ve done every approach that you can do. Even more than that, sometimes we think of a character and we think of a song as a character. Say, like the song we did, “Bus Driver Song,” it’s about this bus driver who was driving around the country. That’s not in the show so it’s not as well known. Yeah, sometimes it’s a tune. Definitely when we first started it was always the tune. We’d make up words and sometimes they were funny and we’d try and add more jokes and stuff. So it definitely began like that but usually now it starts with the idea of the song.

SG: Why does so much music take itself so seriously?

JC: Man, once I was doing this interview in Ireland and it was quite bad because it was over the phone, like on a cell phone. We were playing some sh*tty gig and we were trying to promote it. There was a serious musician on the show so the DJ was asking me, talking about funny music, “So you do funny songs?” And then the serious musician was really offended. He hadn’t heard any of our stuff but he’s like, “Why are you hiding behind [humor]? Do you not have emotions?” Really accusatory. I don't know why they’re like that. Also, a lot of our songs actually do come from serious things. Some of our breakup songs have come from breakups. We just think of it like that. We play in comedy clubs so we’ll talk about real breakups but we’ll disguise it. I don’t even know if I could do that myself, actually go and put my heart out there.

SG: In a way, you can relate more to the real emotions of funny songs. “I’m Not Crying” is really about pretending you’re not sad.

JC: There’s so much interpretation open to music anyway. A lot of people think Leonard Cohen is the most depressing singer but he’s one of my favorite singers. No, my favorite singer I’ll say, and I find a lot of his lines really hilarious and clever and funny. But other people don’t connect to them like that.

SG: Is there style the Conchords haven’t done yet? There’s been rock, techno, hip hop


JC: Well, for all the talk of folk, we hardly ever do folk. So maybe it’s time to do some folk. Bret, when he does his own music, it’s as I said dance music so he loves high production and stuff like that, always adding instruments. If I was more in charge, because Bret’s more in charge of that side of it, if I was more in charge it would be more like a folk album.

SG: “If You’re Into It” is folk, right?

JC: I guess so, in the instrumentation anyway.

SG: You’ve said you don’t want to do a third season of the HBO show because of the high demand to write scripts, write music and perform them both. But, hasn’t the show allowed your music to thrive more than it ever would have without that exposure?

JC: Yeah, definitely. Yup, but I mean, usually we used to write one show a year maybe. I’m talking about a live show so it was like an hour’s worth of songs. It would take about a month, but it’s quite hard to do and then we’d play those songs for years along with other songs that we developed. If we had a whole lot of new songs ready that we loved, then we might go and make a show or a movie or something.

SG: Did the show inspire the songs or did the songs inspire plots for the show?

JC: Mostly in the first season we had the songs first, so sometimes we’d think of a storyline to incorporate the song like the Bowie one. We had the Bowie song so we thought of a storyline to incorporate Bowie. But still, we would just write storylines and see if we could fit [the songs] in. Sometimes they worked really well, just coincidentally, and sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they seemed very forced. Hopefully people laughed at that.

SG: It’s a musical. You don’t care what the reason is for breaking into song.

JC: That’s right, you don’t care. We care, but who knows? Perhaps we take it too seriously ourselves.

SG: What happened to the R in your name?

JC: When my mom had me, she was 17 and it was in the mid ‘70s at the height of Jackson 5 fever. I think she may have even been to a Jackson 5 concert sometime before she knew she was pregnant with me. So I was kind of named after Jermaine Jackson and my parents didn’t want me to be called Jerm in school, so they took the R out. In New Zealand you don’t really say your Rs.

SG: That is really thoughtful of them. Most parents don’t have that foresight.

JC: I think you do think about that. I think most people do think about it but they were so young, they were just out of school and stuff.

SG: Can I be the second Flight of the Conchords fan?

JC: Yep, sign up.

SG: Is the sincerity of some of your ridiculous lines an important part of the humor?

JC: Yeah, yeah, that’s the fun part about doing it as well. It’s hard not to ham it up. It’s hard to resist.

SG: You often end up being the response guy in the song. Is that a role you take on purpose?

JC: Yeah, well, “If You’re Into It,” I wrote that one so I gave myself all the jokes. I definitely did that one on purpose, gave myself all the funny lines.  

Gentlemen Broncos is now playing and “I Told You I Was Freaky” is available in stores and online now.

J.C. Hutchins' techno-thriller novel 7th Son: Descent hits bookshelves today, but the story has already had a long life as a popular podcast. The audiobook versions of Hutchins' 7th Son trilogy have been downloaded and enjoyed by tens of thousands of listeners, which caught the eye of St. Martin's... more

J.C. Hutchins' techno-thriller novel 7th Son: Descent hits bookshelves today, but the story has already had a long life as a popular podcast. The audiobook versions of Hutchins' 7th Son trilogy have been downloaded and enjoyed by tens of thousands of listeners, which caught the eye of St. Martin's Press. Now you can hold the first volume of 7th Son in your hot little hands, knowing you're part of something that's been in the making since 2002.

The story follows the lives of seven strangers who are brought together in a government lab, only to discover they are all clones of the same man. Not only that, but the man they were cloned from is a remorseless killer with access to some mind-bending technology. Human cloning only scratches the surface of the action in 7th Son. Hutchins' rendering of the interactions between the seven clones, each with distinct personalities, is masterful.

If that's not enough to tantalize you, you can grab a free PDF of the novel, and check out a series of seven audio prequels, 7th Son: 7 Days, that explores the lives of the clones before their abduction.

Meanwhile, Suicide Girls sat down with Hutchins to get the story on 7th Son: Descent, the future of the trilogy, and even a possible Hollywood movie.

Jay Hathaway: 7th Son already has a big following from its release as a podcast, but for everyone who's starting with the print edition, what's this book all about?

J.C. Hutchins: 7th Son is a modern-day thriller with science-fiction elements in it. It's in the same genre as a Michael Crichton book. 7th Son is about seven guys who live in different parts of the country, who are kidnapped after the president is mysteriously murdered by a 4-year-old boy. They're brought together at a super-secret government facility, where they are told that, despite some cosmetic differences, they have been unwitting participants in a human cloning experiment. And yes indeed, they look the same. Some are fat, some are thin, but they're cut from the same cloth, and they have the same recorded childhood memories from birth to age 14. They've been a part of a nature vs. nurture experiment called Project 7th Son. They were never intended to know that they were part of this project, and they were never intended to be brought together but the folks who founded this experiment discovered who was behind the murder of the president. It is their genetic progenitor, the original John Michael Smith, the guy whose memories and flesh they share. They were cloned from him, and they've been brought together to track him down and figure out what he's up to next.


JH: So, you're sitting down to write your first novel, and you decide "I'm going to have seven protagonists?" Isn't one hard enough to write?

JCH: 7th Son started as a concept for a superhero comic. Not just any superhero comic, but a team superhero comic, like Justice League of America. The concept was to tell the story of seven guys who were cloned from a grizzled old war veteran. A general in his 80's or something like that. The best damned war hero from World War II. They had his recorded childhood memories, and they had superpowers. There was going to be an issue with them wrestling with memories from the early 20th century, while living in the 21st century and having capes and spandex and rayguns and all that. I used to report for Wizard, the comics magazine, and I encountered comic book scripts from masters like Alan Moore and Warren Ellis. I was like, "There's just no way." I was so familiar with prose writing, 'cause I was a journalist at the time, that I didn't think I had it in me at the time to write a script format. So I decided, "Let's write it as a prose novel." I didn't think that the superhero genre ‚ I've been proven wrong since ‚ wouldn't really stand up in prose fiction format. So let's make these guys everymen. So really what it was is that I came up with the title "7th Son," and I was like "Well, what does that mean?" And then it went from there to the super hero team concept, and now it's still kind of a superhero story, it's just that these guys are far more normal, despite their extraordinary origins. I guess if I can write a book with seven protagonists, I can do anything now. I can't wait to write my next book, it's going to be about a guy peeling a label off of a beer bottle, and that's going to be it.

JH: With no verbs.

JCH: With no verbs! It's just going to be him sitting and pondering paint drying, or something. Yeah, it was kind of challenging, but one of the things I've learned is that having so many characters in a particular room, you have to think like a camera. You have to make sure that the reader is reminded that there are people in this room. You have to bounce from one character to another and glance and do all this, so that really helped me paint the visual picture of a scene, and helped me understand that you can't give characters short shrift in these scenes. Everyone has to contribute.

JH: Different readers are going to be drawn to different clones, and you must have favorites yourself. How do you decide how much screen time to give each character?

JCH: Yeah! The characters who have more screen time are the characters that I personally liked. There are a few characters, like the character who was formerly called Jonathan [in the original 7th Son podcast], now called Jay ‚ I just didn't find him very interesting. [laughs] How can I put this in more diplomatic terms? I think the more odd or everyman‚ it's either of two extremes: the well-grounded individual such as John gets a lot of screen time, because he's probably one of the most easy to identify with for most people. But these characters represent different facets of people's reactions to human cloning. And so, the priest ‚ a great many people in this country are religious and spiritual, and I felt obligated to have a priest represent the struggle that these folks might have, and the dialogue that we might have someday when human cloning is real ‚ because that's such rich territory, he gets a lot of screen time. And of course, the crazy person, the oddity, Kilroy 2.0 the computer hacker gets a lot of screen time because he's so interesting, because he's so broken. He has his own kind of transformation throughout the story.

JH: And because, when you recorded it, you had fun doing his voice?

JCH: [laughs] I sure did! I totally did. That was one of the challenges of doing the 7th Son podcast the first time around, back in 2006. What do these people sound like? I never considered myself a voice actor before I started doing 7th Son, but one of the things I realized is that if I were to simply read their dialogue and not put a performance into it, it may be hard to aurally track who's who. I don't know where Kilroy's voice came from. When I was writing the novel years ago, that's not the voice he had in my mind, but it just kind of happened. Frankly, I'm glad it did, because people seem to love his performance.

JH: Which clone's attitude about cloning most closely aligns with yours?

JCH: Wow. Um. I'll kind of go down the list. John has a very secular reaction to it, like "I am not a unique snowflake, and that kind of sucks." He's alarmed. Father Thomas has a crisis of faith. Michael the Marine seems absolutely nonplussed. He's just a "take life as it comes" kind of guy. Kilroy 2.0 celebrates the fact that, after being a conspiracy theorist, he is actually conspiracy himself. He personifies it. He loves it. Jay kind of looks into the governmental and regulatory issues of all this, and the legality of it. Jack represents the ethics argument: just because we can do this, scientifically, doesn't mean we should.

For me, I'm okay with human cloning.I think that this is going to happen, and I have a really open mind about it. I think that we'll certainly see organ harvesting hailing from human cloning. Will we ever see the kind of full-body replacement that is seen in 7th Son? Well, that greatly hinges on the ability on the ability to record human memories and implant them in a human brain, which is also seen in the book. When that happens, the legality of ‚ if you've got a 90-year-old version of yourself, who has opted into the cloning and memory injection process, you would basically have a 20-year-old version of yourself, with a 90-year-old's experiences in his mind. What happens to the 90-year-old person? Does he relinquish his possessions and his marital status and all of the things that come with that? Those are the things that are going to be the hardest for us to wrap our heads around. Does he opt in to euthanize himself?

JH: It's interesting that the book is coming out in the middle of a huge national healthcare debate in the U.S. So if human cloning is the answer to anything, people are going to ask ... who pays for it? This technology you're writing about can't be cheap.

JCH: Ha! Right. And I know this is the conspiracy theorist in me speaking, but I'm absolutely convinced that an institution has already started cloning humans. How could that not be? But the human cloning thing isn't really the issue, because you're just replicating flesh. We could clone a person and raise him like you would any other child, and because of the whole nature/nurture thing, you would have a completely unique and completely different person. The real ethical debate for me is the concept of recording human memories. I don't think we're going to be there for a while, but human ingenuity ... it's gonna happen.

JH: Do you think that readers 25 years from now will find the controversial parts of 7th Son commonplace or kind of quaint?

JCH: God help us if it is! And I don't really mean that in a serious way. But I do think that cloning human flesh, if it hasn't already happened, it will. We've already figured out how to destroy memories. One of the technologies in the book is called Nepth Charge, and that will wipe out a person's memories completely. I'm sure that one could do that with a ray or a sonic whatever. There's got to be a way to create that kind of ruination in a human's mind. I'm not even addressing the ethics of it, I think that's rotten. Injecting memories into a blank brain or even a healthy brain ... that's the thing that we may see within 50 or 100 years. The question will be, if we can record a human memory, do we really need this meat machine that we are occupying? Are there more efficient ways that we can exist, without requiring a biological sack?

One of the things that inspired 7th Son was a book written by Ray Kurzweil called The Age of Spiritual Machines, in which he talks about human consciousness, and our consciousness existing on a kind of neural Internet. If we can record human consciousness, why would we need to exist in the real world, when we could exist in a neural, virtual world. That got me thinking about recording human memories and using that in 7th Son. Really, we're either going to one of two ways: either we'll figure out a way to traverse the need for a flesh sack, or we'll put memories into human brains and see the technology that we see in 7th Son.

JH: What's the status of the other two books in the trilogy? Do they have release dates yet?

JCH: We don't know. One of the things that is so critical about 7th Son's release is that the first book in the series is the only one to have been picked up for release at this time. A lot is riding on this, because it requires the book to become either a critical or a sales success to justify the additional expense of acquiring the sequels. I'm turning to my fans, both old and new, and saying, "These are stakes. If you want the sequels in print, there's only one thing to do, and that is to bring it!"

JH: How about the movie adaptation of 7th Son? Any progress there?

JCH: The trilogy has been optioned by Warner Brothers. I'm certain the studio will be looking at how this book does with sales. It's moved from being an option to being "in development." That means it's been announced by the production company, Unique Features. These are the dudes that produced the Lord of the Rings trilogy and I, Robot. They know how to adapt big stories into film. The last I heard from my film agent ‚ and this was a month or two ago‚ was that a screenwriter had been assigned to it, and that he was nearly completion of the first draft.

JH: Who do you think could play all seven of these guys?

JCH: When I was writing 7th Son, I never had a person in mind. A lot of writers will mentally cast their characters as they write them, and sometimes even include descriptions like, "He looked like Harrison Ford." For me, I never had a mental image, besides basically an anybody. The only actor I ever thought of while I was writing 7th Son was General Hill, who is a very imperious, tall and commanding military dude in the book. I thought of the guy who played President Palmer in 24. I think he would be a great General Hill. Now, after the fact, I'd love Ryan Reynolds to play the clones. Ryan Reynolds is best known as being a comedian, but he's also been in some great action pictures. He's ripped, he's a good-looking guy, he's funny, and he was also in a comedy in which he wore a fat suit ‚ so hey, there's Kilroy. I think he has the charisma to pull it off. Frankly, I wouldn't kick Brad Pitt out of eating crackers in this bed. Or Will Smith. They could change it to Jane Alpha and hire Angelina Jolie, that's fine by me.

JH: For fans of the podcast, has anything about the plot changed for the print edition?

JCH: The only small regret I had about the 7th Son Book One manuscript that I recorded in 2006 was that we hear a lot about the villains in conversations with our heroes, but we don't see the villains until at least the halfway point of the book. I thought it would be a good idea to see them earlier in the novel. I actually wrote two completely new chapters‚ you haven't seen 'em, you haven't heard 'em ‚ that are basically the machinations of the villains. We get to seem them doing horrible things to people. I wanted to introduce them early in the story to personify the threat and create more dread about what they were up to.

JH: With so many books out there that try to tap into a reader's sense of fear and dread, how did you go about coming up with something new for people to be scared of?

JCH: I've thought about this a lot. What I'll often do is I'll play the What If? game. What would be a good idea for a story? Because I love science fiction, but frankly, I really enjoy writing science fiction set in present day, I think that it's far more accessible for a reader to read a story that takes place now, that features kind of futuristic technology than to set a story 100 years from now, when there are flying cars. You can't really intuitively identify with a flying car. I like to make things as accessible as I can for my readers.

I think that while vampires are hot ‚ they're clearly hot in the literary scene and in the movies right now, lots of supernatural terror ‚ the future of fright is in technology. Constant variations on Pandora's Box. A great many of the ideas I have for future books have to do with technology gone bad. And it's that five-minutes-into-the-future technology, so while it may be completely preposterous, it seems likely.

JH: So you take on the role of a futurist, the guy who's anticipating stuff that could realistically happen, because real is scarier. What sources do you mine when you're doing that?

JCH: Ray Kurzweil is still a really good source of inspiration. His most recent book, The Singularity is Near, is a story bible for shit that could go wrong. He looks at it in a very optimistic way, as he should. This guy is a bona fide futurist. I'm just a futurist wannabe. He's a leader in the futurist space, and I look at his optimistic projections and figure out ways to ruin the world with them.

I also listen to a radio program that I subscribe to as a paid podcast, called Coast to Coast AM. This is a late-night talk show that either tells the truth about a great many conspiracy theories ‚ 2012 and the Mayan calendar and UFO abductions ‚ or it's just great entertainment.

JH: So it's right up Kilroy 2.0's alley.

JCH: He would listen to Art Bell on Coast to Coast AM, absolutely.

JH: Is finally having 7th Son in print anything like you imagined it would be?

JCH: This is living up to my current expectations, and the expectations I've had for the past few years. Before I finished writing 7th Son, I had the great mis-notion, as all newbie writers do, that all you need to do is finish writing the book and send it to somebody, and then everything magically happens and you get a check for a million dollars. Which is the biggest heaping pile of bullshit that you'll ever, ever think. I think that releasing my work in podcast form, and the vociferous promotion that I had to do with that, and the networking and the hard work, that has managed my expectations. Just because you build it, or in this case, print it, that doesn't mean people will come. A lot of this is me continuing to do what I have done for the past three and a half years. I haven't even had time to process the idea that this book is going to be on shelves.

JH: Did you have each character's backstory completely worked out before you knew you were going to write the 7th Son: 7 Days prequel stories?

JCH: One of the things I knew I couldn't do was write sequel content. The second and third books have already been written. Writing stories‚ and I have a great many of them outlined in my head‚ that take place after Book 3 wouldn't make sense, because no newcomer can really appreciate that. So I decided to take the story back and write stories that took place two weeks before the events seen in 7th Son: Descent. I wanted to give an opportunity for readers to experience the life of the clones before they were clones. The moment your novel starts is when your character's life is changed forever, and in the instance of 7th Son, I took that quite literally: in the first chapter, I kidnapped all of my clones. They were all ripped away from their normal lives, and so we never really saw their normal lives.

Did I know these people's lives when I started writing 7th Son in 2002? Not entirely. But I saw this as a great opportunity to flesh out what I did know about them. I don't write full character sketches for my heroes. I don't know how well that serves a novel. If you're spending more time writing biographies of your characters than you are writing your book, well, you'll never get your book written that way. What you see on the page is often just about all I know.

For more on J.C. Hutchins and 7th Son, visit JCHutchins.net.

Download a Special Edition 10-Chapter .pdf excerpt of 7th Son: Descent here now!


Get the full novel in your google reader here until at least November 3rd, 2009.

Julie Benz fans know her by name, but to a host of others, she's "that girl from..." She's played major roles in popular projects, if not a marquee name herself. In Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff Angel, she was a powerful vampire, Darla, who turned Angel in the first place. more

Julie Benz fans know her by name, but to a host of others, she's "that girl from..." She's played major roles in popular projects, if not a marquee name herself. In Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff Angel, she was a powerful vampire, Darla, who turned Angel in the first place. On Dexter, she's been the title character's loving girlfriend, and now wife, Rita. You may have also seen her in Rambo, Saw V, Jawbreaker or As Good As It Gets.

She was not in The Boondock Saints however. That series did not require her services until the sequel, 10 years later. FBI Agent Eunice Bloom comes to town to investigate the return of the MacManus brothers. After Agent Smecker passed away (because Willem Dafoe did not return), she's the resident expert on the McManus boys, but she's not entirely who she appears to be either. As part of the Boondock Saints style, Eunice recaps the crime scenes and the audience sees her walk through them. She interacts with the flashbacks, strutting between gunmen and firing back.

Benz called in for an interview a week after wrapping Dexter for the year. This season finds marriage and fatherhood spreading Dexter thin. Rita suspects he is cheating on her or doing drugs. If only she knew he was just a murderer. With only her voice to represent herself, Benz was playful, demanding to see us in person. But, we made do with an exclusive phone call to discuss The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day.

SuicideGirls: How did you like playing the kickass authority?

Julie Benz: I loved it. I loved it. I had to leave all my vulnerabilities at home and go to work every day and be this strong, sexy woman. I haven't been that in a long time as far as roles that I've played. I've played a lot of victims and love interests, but never this badass, this true badass woman. It was great.

SG: It's true, you used to. Darla was a tough cookie.

JB: Yes, I used to but like everything, you go through phases. It's interesting, the same roles get attracted to you during certain phases in your life so there was a phase where I was the victim or the love interest in everything. Then all of a sudden Eunice comes into my life. It's completely different from anything I've done and a huge challenge, and so much fun to play.

SG: But to be a victim in Dexer or Saw V is not a bad place to explore that.

JB: No, it's definitely not a bad place either. I've been the victim in great material. That's always wonderful. There's nothing wrong with playing the victim. Rita started out very damaged and weak and she has grown strength, but she's still very feminine and soft and vulnerable. She has a lot of vulnerabilities and she pretty much wears her heart on her sleeve. I think that's what makes her so lovely in the series because she's the only one who really is that way. Everybody else has their guard up and has baggage and is jaded. Even though Rita probably has more baggage than anybody else, she still has this very open, optimistic side to her which I think shows her strength. But, then to walk into a role like Eunice who can take on any guy in the room and can take them on intellectually and physically is a whole different energy that I get to tap into.

SG: Do you see her as filling the Willem Dafoe role?

JB: Well, obviously, she fills the role of the FBI agent role coming in. I can't fill Willem Dafoe's shoes. I don't know anybody who can. I like to make a joke that Willem wears a 10 and I'm a size 7. There's just no way I can fill those shoes. All I can do is play Eunice to the best of my ability. I think Eunice stands alone in the bible of the story, in the bible of the script. She stands alone as her own character.

SG: How did you come up with the accent and red hair?

JB: It was all [director] Troy [Duffy]'s vision, the hair and everything. Troy wanted me to have red hair and he wanted this very specific accent. I worked really hard on the accent. Accents are not natural for me. I skyped every night with my dialect coach as well as typed out all my material phoenetically every single day. Then just prayed to God that it would be there. I lived with the accent for about three months where any time you talked to me, that's how I talked.

SG: How much of her body language was yours, or directed by Troy?

JB: I literally walked off set on season three of Dexter on our last day of filming and got in an airplane and walked right onto set in Toronto into Eunice. I had no time to get rid of Rita and bring on a new character.

SG: Her body language is very specific though with her strut and her neck crack.

JB: First of all, I think the shoes had a lot to do with it. I insisted on wearing very high heels. I mean, it wasn't much of an insistence but there were very specific shoes that I wanted to wear because it just completely changes my energy when I'm in a certain type of shoe. Then Troy gave me some very specific guidelines as far as what he wanted. In the beginning, he did help craft a lot of physicality, but then all of a sudden it became natural.

SG: Did you feel sexy in the uniform?

JB: Wow, I mean, I'm carrying a holster and a gun. Yeah, I felt hot. 6" stiletto heels, who doesn't?

SG: Did you get a chance to go to the shooting range?

JB: Not really. There was a moment where I had a little bit of some shooting but that was about it. Since I've wrapped the movie I've gone to the shooting range. Actually, I shoot to kill, I discovered.

SG: Had you been looking for a gunplay action heroine?

JB: Yeah, I mean, it's fun to play these tough women, these badass women that can handle the weapons. It's just fun. It's just an added extra thing to learn. I mean, I now know how to twirl pistols.

SG: A lot of your projects became cult hits. When you go into a series that's already got a cult following, do you feel like, "Okay, I've got this. I know this world."?

JB: I don't necessarily think about that aspect of it. It's more I went into this thinking about Eunice Bloom. I wasn't familiar with The Boondock Saints before I got the role and when they sent me the script, no one told me it was a sequel. The script was sent to me and it was titled All Saints Day. It actually was a really great script, so I didn't know it was a sequel. I had no clue about what Boondock Saints was until after I got the role. Then I discovered the following that it has. It makes sense. It makes perfect sense.

SG: Is there a crossover between this audience and your other work?

JB: I think so, definitely. There were some fans that were a little hesitant because they've only known me as playing Rita on Dexter and they're afraid it's going to be this vulnerable kind of character. They don't understand that it's not. So I hope I change their opinion.

SG: Also, you're an actor.

JB: Right, but if you're only familiar with a certain amount of my work then I don't blame anybody. If you're only familiar with one side of me as an actor and you haven't seen the other side, then it's not your fault that's all you see. It's up to me to prove myself and show that I'm something else.

SG: How does Dexter's following compare to Buffy and Angel?

JB: I think it's the same except unfortunately, with Buffy and Angel in the United States we aired on The WB which was predominantly a teenage network. I don't think we had as wide of an audience as we could have had if, say, we had aired on a major network. I think there's people that have discovered the show on DVD afterwards that didn't watch it because it was solely on The WB. But I think Dexter has that same audience. It has this wide audience. Well, the Buffy/Angel audience obviously has grown up and they're at the age where they're big fans of Dexter now.

SG: Obviously Rita is just thinking about her marriage. Do you ever look in from the outside see Rita as a force trying to normalize Dexter?

JB: No. I mean, I see that. I understand that intellectually but when I'm playing her, I really just play what's on the page. She's just a woman trying to save her marriage basically. I don't really think about the fact that he's a serial killer and all that because Rita doesn't know that. She doesn't know she's trying to normalize him. She's afraid he's either cheating on her or using drugs again. That's it. That's where her head goes. And that's normal. If you were with somebody and they started sneaking around and you found an apartment, would your head go to serial killing? No, your head would go to cheating or drug use, wouldn't it?

SG: A part of me thinks she'd be okay with the truth, since he's only killing bad guys. As long as it's not cheating or using.

JB: Well, is it okay? I don't know if she would say that. I actually don't think she would ever believe it. But let's hope we never have to answer that question.

SG: Never? You don't think the show will ever have her find out?

JB: I mean, they might. Obviously, they probably will. I just personally believe that even if you showed Rita all the evidence, even if you showed her the show and said, "We've been following your husband around. This is what he does in his free time." She would say that's not him. That's not him. It's not out of naivety or stupidity but out of love and strength because when you share your body with someone and your soul and you create a life and you create a human life with that person, it's a reflection of who you are. I think the human condition, we're not equipped to handle that kind of reflection.

SG: Isn't it great we can analyze her like this?

JB: Yes, and I love the people that think if Rita found out, they'd become like Bonnie and Clyde. That's so romantic but I highly doubt that would ever happen.

SG: I also noticed you play a receptionist in As Good As It Gets. Were you the one who asked Jack how he writes women so well?

JB: Yes.

SG: Did you sense at the time that that would be a trailer moment?

JB: No, I actually was hoping it wasn't going to get edited out. When the trailer hit, when the first trailer aired on TV, I remember I was shooting some television show. I forget which one. I went into work and someone goes, "Oh, I saw you in the trailer for As Good as It Gets." I went, "No, that's Helen Hunt. She's the star of the movie. I have one little scene. There's no way you would see me in the trailer." They were like, "No, no, no, it was you." And I'm like, "No, it's not." The next thing you know, I saw it and was like oh my God, it's me. It was a huge honor and completely unexpected. When it came out I heard everybody's bad Jack Nicholson for a good two years.

SG: Did you hear any good ones?

JB: No, because Jack is Jack. No one can do Jack. No one can and they all think they can. The guy at the makeup counter of Saks thought he did a great one and he made me do the scene with him. I got a lot of that.

SG: It's amazing how everyone thinks they should try it on you.

JB: Yeah, and they want to act the scene with me. It's really like uh, well, since I acted with the real thing, why would I want to do it with you?

SG: You became the judge and arbiter of Jack impressions.

JB: And I only spent like half a day with him.

SG: Are you wrapped on Dexter?

JB: I am. I wrapped last week.

SG: Is there a good finale?

JB: It's an amazing finale this season. This season the storyline just kind of slowly builds and builds and builds until this big giant crescendo at the end. It's going to leave you wanting more. It's going to leave you wanting season five.

The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day opens Friday. Dexter airs Sunday nights on Showtime.