Jordan Gavaris

Part 1

0:06People who have asked me all day Brian or Snoopy. So what do you think I am? Well, let me give us a look here. You know your family guy character is pretty well from what I learned today. I do. I do know my family guy character is very well. Brian have you seen a Rupert? Ah, ah, ah, got Brian. Look, I really need you to do... Are you wearing a wristwatch? Hey Brian, you never get up to leave when I just hit the lowest. Completely just smacked her right in the face, right out of the ground. Ehh, abuse. It's funny, right? Hey, I was just wondering little now, have you seen that Nash Bar up the street to live with my newspaper on occasion? I would say that based on the eyes, I got to go with Snoopy. Snoopy is correct. Snoopy is correct. You should go in the new one. There's a family guy panel coming to Toronto in September. Are you serious? Yeah, Seth and all of them. You know, I met Alex Porstein actually at the EW party in Comic-Con.

0:51She's hilarious. She's ridiculously hilarious, so dry too. I was like, thank you. I was like, you know, I watched you on MattTV, blah blah blah. I'm emotionally vomiting over this woman and I was like, you know, you turn me on to acting. She's like, oh, sorry. And I was like, you're so funny. And she's like, okay. She turned you on to acting. She did, well, not her solely, but I was a big fan of MattTV. Big fan of MattTV. I love the sketch comedy. So I used to, that's how I sort of started doing voices. Did you do a missed one? I haven't asked you. I'm not going to put you in the spot, but... Everyone's been putting me on the spot. Yeah, today you've been singing, you've been doing a whole... I am like, I just want to go and drown in a bathtub or something because I'm so embarrassed. It's horrible. You sound like Dallas Green, man, you can sing. I do. All thanks. Well, did you notice that was a Dallas Green cover? No. Maybe that's why. Maybe it was the girl, yeah. No, but I do actually sound a bit like Dallas Green.

1:38So I've been told. I'm not, but not by my own admission. Well, all vouch for it. I heard it and that's the first thing I thought. Thank you very much. That's a compliment too. It's not like, Dallas sucks. You sound like him. No. Dallas is a... He's sold, what, how many records now? A lot. And he's a really cool guy. Anyway, Orphan Black. We talked about a little bit in the red carpet at the much movie awards, but I want to... It's interesting, the cloning thing. I've been thinking more and more about it now. They've cloned his beef patty the other week. Some guy wants to clone John Lennon because they found his tooth and now they think they're DNA. That sounds healthy and realistic. Okay, so you're saying bad and realistic. That's the most part of that. So it's a good or bad idea. I think that for the medical community could be like an incredible idea. I mean, even something as simple as like cloning your hair follicles

2:23if you want to get a hair transplant or cloning your pancreas because you have diabetes and you need another pancreas. I don't know if that would work, but I think it would. I think it does. I think they're doing that right now. I think pancreatic issues begin in the pancreas. Yes, they would. That would make sense. Let's go with that. That would anatomy 101. Yeah, I think in terms of medical community or even potential military investments if people lose their... I'm really sorry. That's not rude at all. Not in the slightest. Oh, sorry. That's like I'm like in high school again and the teacher is just like, I didn't have a high cell phone in high school. Actually, I was kind of a loser. No one had cell phones in when I was in high school. And like all the cool kids would whip out their like giant flip phones that weren't evolved yet. No, we have the Zach Morris ones. This is just so cool.

3:09This is my cell phone right here. But human, the way your show does it, good or bad? Really good, I think, because we're not just showing the... We're not just letting the public know that human cloning is a realistic possibility. It is. It's not science fiction. It's... Yeah, sorry. Well, it's not anymore. It's not science fiction. It's very much science reality. It's just science. So, what we're also kind of exploring is the implication of cloning on society, on the lives of the people that are affected by this. The great thing about it is that we actually see firsthand the implication that this experiment has on its test subjects, which are... You know, Casima, Katya, Beth, Allison, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, I just think that when you get into the territory of letting cloning become free science and not something...

4:00Because it's very low tech. I mean, you and I could do it in the basement. I don't think I could do it, but thank you. I appreciate your confidence. Well, come with me, Snoopy. No, but really, you know, it's really easy to do. And I think that when it's made free science or public science, that's when you would begin to have an issue. I think if it's strictly... I mean, even in the military, imagine somebody loses their arm in battle and, you know, they come home and they get a new arm. It's pretty unbelievable when you think about it. It's got really deep. I feel weird trying to have a deep conversation. I'm sorry. I'm like, I'm not... No, no, no, it's what I wanted. Is it? I felt it, though. Like, I knew you wanted it, and then I was like, I'm gonna go there. Yeah, and I appreciate it. I like it. But I want to come back to your character for a second, because I hear TAT. Yeah. Stays in accent all the time. I do, too. You do, too. Is it for muscle memory reasons? How come? Yeah, muscle memory maintaining because there's a bunch of different things on top of the accent.

4:50There's a whole physicality that goes with him that's different than mine, and finding that tension and finding those muscles can sometimes be challenging, especially if you've gone over the weekend and you come back to work on Monday. And it'll take a little while to get into it, and then once you're into it, the best thing to do, it might seem a bit precious, but really the most effective thing to do, is just stay in the community. And the most effective thing to do is just stay there, because you make when the movement in the speech becomes unconscious, you end up making discoveries in how they say things and how they move in the way that they move through the world, and that's when the light bulb, those are when the light bulb moments happen. That's when the good stuff happens. So it's just better all around, I think, in my opinion. That's my process. No, Daniel Day-Loo has told me the same thing almost. Did he? I love him. I think you're in good. Isn't he such a great guy? He's the best, like we know him. Nice guy. Danny.

5:35Danny. You know, we haven't seen each other since never, but... We call him DDL. Do you? Yeah. Well, actually, there are lots of people I have. I have a sort of pretend relationship, but not really with Sissy Spasic. Oh, there's one. Sissy and I met... That's a name, too. Oh, Sisn't she great. Yeah. Sissy, I love you. I just, I didn't get a chance. I was such an idiot when we met, and I just said a bunch of stuff that didn't even make sense. If you ever see this, I'm so sorry. I had like emotional, I just vomited all over you emotionally, but I thank you. She'll see this. She's my number one viewer. She tweets me every time. I knew it. She doesn't have Twitter. Any reals Sisies Spasic. Do that! I'm so sorry. Thanks, man. You're welcome. You're welcome. I don't know what happened to you. Hold on. How do you want to do it? How do you shake pause?

6:20How do they... No, well, I've been doing that all day. When we like sniff each other's bloods. My dog does that to people. We're not going to do that first. I can't. I can't. I can't.

Part 2

0:17experiment and they're killing us off. Who is the original? Who created us? There's nine of you. No, there's only one of me. So, boys of an angel. What song have you been writing or singing lately? Boys of an angel. Dude, last, a fan expo? You play that song on your phone? I think City and Color cover or something. Thank you so much. I'm waiting to hear what are you writing songs? I'm writing, I've got two songs I'm writing. Okay, do you expect a real answer? Okay, good. Yeah, I do. I'm not going to get totally like you any. I am writing a couple of songs, but I'm actually writing a screenplay right now in my off time.

1:02I'm training, as studying with taking a really cool class with a bunch of amazing actors in Los Angeles. I love hearing when actors still say they take classes. Oh my God, never stop learning. What's this class on? It's all about kind of taking all the ugly bits of yourself and laying them out there and being honest about them and less acting, more cathartic. But it's all kind of in the vein of Strasburg's method and Stonislavski, the teacher. I won't say our name just out of respect. But I, she studied kind of the method, which is where I'm from. You're from Memphis as well, yeah. So it's easy, I don't have to work to understand sense memory. It was already there and then I could join the class pretty easily. But she's incredible. It's all about impulses too. And how the ego, which is, if you're no Freud at all,

1:50you know is the thing in life that tells us, don't do that. That's not socially appropriate. This isn't socially appropriate. You have to stop doing this. Like don't, you know, pick your nose in public. I don't know. Yeah. Whatever. Terrible example, but something that an ego would say not to do. But the id is the one with the impulses and those primal desires that say like, I want this, I need this, I want that. So it's basically an offering you a really safe environment to explore the id by removing the ego and finding out what really makes you tick because whatever is most primal is really, that is your, those are your bare bones. That's your modus operandi. That's interesting. And I'd ask you what it is, but I don't want you to spill, like, your deepest, darkest secrets, but the, the, yeah. I just want to go up to Howard. Did you watch House of Cards?

2:36I have comments based on this one next week. Okay. What? No, I didn't hear that. I know, I'm going to sit there and just be like, friends, it's underwood, you're scaring me right now. I'm so scared. Can I come? You make it in LA. We'll talk about this afterwards. There's that line that they talk about which is so brilliant when they say everything in life is about sex except sex, which is about power. And it's so true. I don't know where to go from that. But you said something about felines, maybe? No, you said something about animalistic characteristics. Animal exercise. Sure. You didn't mention that, but that's what I was going to go to. A primal animal. Yeah, I knew there was some sort of tie in. I had a segue before the House of Cards thing. I'm curious as to this. So this is you actually, like, walking around your house like a cat trying to find Felix. Yeah. Yeah. Where does that idea come from? Of the cat over every other animal? I was reading the character and I just found that there were a lot of, if you know,

3:24sometimes embodying an animal can help you to find a character's physicality. You can be really inspired by the way an animal moves is to how a person would move. Anthony Hopkins was really inspired by the snake for Hannibal Lecter. So he moved like a serpent. You don't actually move around the sound stage in character as a serpent, but, you know, sort of rigid back the stillness, the sort of calmness and just being and sort of being still. Felix is, he reminded me so much of a feline. I thought, well, fine. Let me do an animal exercise. Let me explore what a feline feels like. And I noticed that my shoulders would go back and, you know, the head goes up and suddenly you're sort of looking down on the world. There's almost this weird territorial alpha attitude that comes with embodying a feline

4:11that I thought was so great for him because he's worked so hard, you know, being different, being an outsider. He's been very oppressed. And I think that people who experience oppression are usually, there's a reason why communities that are marginalized will go so far the other way to make themselves heard and known. It's because that's what oppression does to people. It makes them want to break out. So he just never stopped breaking out. Will he get jealous of all these clones because he's, maybe he'll be pushed aside. I think that that was something that I toyed with in the first season. And then as the second season progresses, I think there's actually more, it's more about Felix resenting being an accessory to Clone Club. But he's lost a piece of himself in Sarah's lunacy and in the mystery and in who am I,

5:02who are you, what does all this mean? He's losing himself. I think that that's more what he resents. Not, I think he and Sarah's relationship is strained for other reasons, which will come to a head later in the season, but I can't tell you what they are. No, and I understand that. But we will talk about this past weekend's episode. Yeah. Where you guys go off? Yeah. Where are you going? Going on a road trip. Okay. That's what we're going to get. All right, I'm going to buy out of it. We're in a car. We're going to be driving on the road. No, we're going on a road trip. I think it's, we're just on the run. We wanted to expand the world a little bit too. We had a little more money this season and I think we wanted, because we had to bottle a lot of stuff last season, just budgetarily it made sense. And because the world was smaller and we were focusing more on laying the pipe, we want to

5:47grow the, we expanded the world. We grew the cast, the shows, concept grew, and what we were able to do got bigger. And I think it was just natural that we'd hit the road and we'd leave the sound stage behind for a few weeks. That's cool. That'll be fun to say. Yeah, it's going to be, it's, and working in that environment was so amazing. It's so different than working in a set where you just, you know that your environment is, is fabricated. It's all a falsity. When you go out there and you're out in the country, country especially, I feel like the city is like, you know, just, you feel very claustrophobic when you're out in the middle of nowhere. It's this incredible feeling. You just feel so free to kind of do whatever and explore and you don't feel in any way sequestered. Yeah. You're not shackled to a mark or to anything.

6:35The other scene I remember, I just switched to the switch topics because we don't have much time. But the other scene I remember is you with Allison's on the computer I think on Skype or something. But you've got two of Tachyonas around you. Yes. And a third one on the computer was probably dubbed it later. But the techno dolly and working in that scene, talk about that. What was it weird? Yeah, I can imagine. It's gotten, I've done a lot more clone work this season which has been great for me. And I always butcher this explanation. But it's, everyone always does it's okay. Everybody, it's so hard. It's so hard. It's so complicated. Basically, we break the frame, the frame being the screen into thirds. And each Tachyona occupies one third. Now, if I started seeing the Sarah, we shoot it as Sarah. And we're talking to, it's pretty basic. You know, we do a pass to establish the camera pattern. Then we do a pass with the doubles to get the blocking down, the physical movements.

7:23Then we remove the doubles and we do a pass, the usable pass with the tennis balls on the T stands. Or the X on the wall. But things get more complicated if Felix likes, and sometimes he does this, he'll decide to move. From Sarah to Allison or Sarah to Kasima in a scene. And if that happens, then after we shoot the Sarah coverage and she changes over to Allison, I join her at that part in the scene where I'm supposed to enter. And then the rest of the scene, I'm reacting to Sarah. I'm reacting to this stuff we already shot. So I have to go and watch playback and see where Sarah kind of motion to Felix, where he might go like that. Or he might react to something she says. And I have to remember at what point that happens, so that I know what to do with my body. And sell her presents, sell the fact that she's there, even though she's not.

8:09Does any training get you ready for something like that? No. Except doing it. Tach says improv helped her. I didn't do long form improv the way that she did. I mean, I think it's just like surrendering yourself to the fact that it's insane. And like we just all tell ourselves, Tach said this at the SAG conversation. She's so right. We just tell ourselves we can't do it because it's just too crazy. We just tell ourselves that we can't talk to another person that's not there. We can. Anyone can. Like we all have imaginations. We just pretend we can't do it because we're just too insane. It's just too insane. I'm going to take a full circle with the imagination thing. The script that you're writing. You probably don't want to give it too much away. I get how the business works and everything. But just like it's horror or comedy. Like what do you dig writing? It's a horror. Okay. It's a first one. All right. Cool.

8:54It is a horror. It's a sci-fi horror entry to a character drama. Okay. And I'm doing it just because I was really inspired and I've been inspired. You always write it. Yeah, I've been writing for a long time. I always I didn't I journaled a little bit and then but I mostly wrote short stories. Even in writers craft in high school. I was always doing weird short stories and that never made any sense. I love doing like those two sentence stories too. The horror ones that really get under people's skin. Like every night for the last like three weeks I've been waking up to this knocking and it just won't stop. And it's you know too bad that it's coming from the other side of my mirror. I don't know. You know what I mean? Like something that sort of like twists and I love and I love David Lynch. I was I just saw Lost Highway for the first time and I was really inspired by Lost Highway because it's so weird.

9:40And he just I mean back in the 90s when they just give 50 million dollars to anyone to go shoot a movie because a bunch of executives wanted to hang out with movie stars. It's not like that anymore. You don't get those 50 million pay days for your script? See that. It's like the five million dollar feature or it's the hundred and fifty million dollar feature. Yeah. The only company that's really doing like 50 million dollar features is MRC. Searchlight doesn't do it anymore. Not really. You would know better than I would. No really. And this conversation went way too insides. I know this is like what I was going to be like what is happening. What even fuck. I haven't seen anything of recent. I mean this probably odd one that's 20 but really for the most part it's five or one hundred and fifty. I could keep going with that but I won't because I am curious about this. Five quick questions. We will. Five quick questions. One word answers. Kevin's basic. Brilliant.

10:25All right. Scripting for off. Script. Staedra screen. Screen. Lemon or McCartney. McCartney. Hitchcock or Kubrick. Hitchcock. In one word Orphan Black. Trippy. Thanks dude. Thank you. Appreciate it. That is interesting though. So weird right.