EDIT: I now know this is Thomas his facebook photo!

Photography by Alexi Lubomirski

Click on the photo to see it fullsize. Photography by Theo Wenner.

Interview has long been a fan of artist-turned-artist/actor/musician, Thomas McDonell—sorry, 10-year-old fans of McDonell’s Disney film Prom, we beat you to him. When we last spoke with McDonell in 2009, he had just appeared in his first film, an experience he described as his “best odd job.” These days, however, it seems as though acting is less of an “odd job” and more of a “day job.” Last April, McDonell made the unusual transition from visual artist to tween (or pre-tween) pin-up when he starred as the innocuous bad-boy in the aforementioned prom-glorifying Disney film. When we heard that McDonell had landed a role playing the younger version of Johnny Depp’s character in Tim Burton’s new film, Dark Shadows, and would be guest-starring on ABC’s Suburgatory, we thought it was time for a catch-up.

We spent an hour with McDonell chatting and embarrassing ourselves on his newly purchased piano. Topics ranged from his upcoming group show at the 7Eleven Gallery to Best Buy, how there is more to Disney than Jonathan Taylor Thomas, and McDonell’s not-so-closeted passion for Ben Affleck movies.

EMMA BROWN: You’ve said that working on your first film, 2008′s The Forbidden Kingdom, changed the way you looked at things, and that’s why you wanted to continue acting.

THOMAS MCDONELL: Totally. But that’s because it was the first time I was on a big movie set and it was impressive, especially this huge Chinese kung fu movie set… whoa, man. So I thought that I could work on movies more.

BROWN: Has this change in perspective continued to be true?

MCDONELL: Yeah! It really has, [laughs] in different ways. The cliché about young actors is that they want to diversify the work that they do to show [their] range, but it’s true. Or at least, for me, I want to keep doing different stuff; doing different work, you see different things. So I went and worked on this ABC television show [Suburgatory] and I spent all day, for the week that I worked, on a soundstage in a warehouse, which is way different than a kung fu movie set outside of Shanghai. But interesting also, to see how a half-hour comedy television show is shot. I wanted to [work on Suburgatory] because I didn’t know anything about that kind of work and because Jane Levy [who plays the protagonist, Tessa] is cool. We filmed a movie together over the summer [Fun Size] and we had this idea that I could work on her show. I play the guy next door; it’s no big deal. [laughs]

BROWN: Have you always been interested in acting, or was it entirely through The Forbidden Kingdom?

MCDONELL: Yeah, I was interested in acting secretly. [It was] the first real job that I did was while I was still in school. I’ve always been interested in acting. I guess because I like movies a lot. I think the last one I saw was The Future, it’s a Miranda July movie. A cat narrates the film, which sounds ridiculous, but it’s not. I [also] love The Town. I really want to work with Ben Affleck, I love Ben Affleck… Are you going to pick [an answer] between Miranda July and Ben Affleck [when you write up the interview]?

BROWN: I’ll probably include your fondness for both so that you seem like a layered person. You can pick a third person if you’d like.

MCDONELL: I can? [laughs] that’s very generous of you. My mind is drawing a blank. That’s it, I guess, that’s the whole universe, the two of them.

BROWN: I’m glad they are still producing work then. You just finished filming Tim Burton’s new film, Dark Shadows, how was that?

MCDONELL: Yeah, I went to Pinewood Studios to work on that. It was quite interesting.

BROWN: Was it intimidating?

MCDONELL: No.

BROWN: There are a lot of exciting people in that movie: Christopher Lee, Eva Green, and, obviously Johnny Depp, although I think I’ve watched too much 21 Jump Street to take him seriously.

MCDONELL: That stuff made you not take him seriously? What about the videos of him reading Hunter S. Thompson letters online? They’re pretty goofy.

BROWN: Is that what you opened with: “Hi, Mr. Depp, you’re kind of goofy”?

MCDONELL: No.

BROWN: “Nice to meet you?”

MCDONELL: [laughs] No, not that either. I’m not telling you what I said.

BROWN: Your last movie, the Disney film Prom, was quite a commercial role for you. Do people recognize you on the street now?

MCDONELL: Sometimes, infrequently though. The target demographic [for that movie] ended up being quite young, little kids. One woman stopped me on the street one time, she said “Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. Hold on,” she went on for quite a long time trying to figure out how she knew me. It turned out she had watched Prom with her girlfriends. People recognize me less frequently now that I no longer have long hair.

BROWN: What attracted you to your role that role—the semi-delinquent teenager, Jesse Richter?

MCDONELL: I had never done anything like that before; that’s what was most attractive about it. To tell you the truth, it wasn’t, “I’ve always wanted to play a senior in high-school senior who rides a motorcycle,” it wasn’t that kind of thing. It was more that I wanted to learn about how that kind of movies is made.

BROWN: Did you watch live-action Disney movies while you were growing up?

MCDONELL: No, I don’t even know if there were live-action Disney movies.

BROWN: Jonathan Taylor Thomas!

MCDONELL Yeah, I guess. I didn’t watch those. I loved their old animated movies, Snow White… One of the things that interested me [in Prom] was the history of [Disney], there’s a lot to it. The school that I went to at NYU was meant to be an interdisciplinary kind of arts school. The woman who was running the department at the time, Nancy Barton, who is no longer the chair of that department, she’s an artist, she went to Cal Arts in the ’80s and she wanted to model the school after Cal Arts in the 80s, which was sort of a hotbed for that kind of artwork. A lot of really great artists were both going to school there and coming through to talk to students. I had [also] worked for [artist] Ashley Bickerton in Indonesia when I was a teenager; he went to Cal Arts too. One of the things that was interesting to me was the relationship between Cal Arts and Disney: Disney started Cal Arts, there’s a whole story to it. Walt created the school so that he could create people who were right for the job; it was supposed to be more than just technical drawing.

SOURCE