Calvin Picou

by Omar Salas Zamora

December 21st, 2022

Calvin Picou is an actor living in West Hollywood.

Omar Salas Zamora: When you're working with directors, are you looking for anything in particular or are you just happy to be on that project?

I'm always happy to be on the project. I’ve been lucky in my life to work with directors who are experienced and have worked with other experienced actors and respect the process. What I look for in a director is someone who knows what they want but is also willing to hear my ideas about the character and see my choices before they try to mold me. 

Robert Forester said that sometimes you just have to show up to be paint for the director - the painter. He was specifically talking about David Lynch but from your point of view, would you prefer a collaborator versus a leader? 

The director has to be a leader first and foremost. A wishy-washy director who's just kind of saying “hey, it's whatever, we’ll find it” is not going to make something with a specific perspective or a compelling story. 

You once told me that you were excited about aging because you felt you’d have more opportunities as a character actor. 

When you’re in your twenties they want you to be young, fit and attractive, so you have to learn to be this charismatic person and sort of charm people. I think young people are asked to “be themselves” a lot and I don’t know, that’s not why not I became an actor. Character actors get to use all of their craft. It’s the challenge that’s exciting. I imagine it's similar for directors who want to do genre work. Capote is a prime example of Philip Seymour Hoffman doing that. He’s changing his voice, the way he walks, and he’s already a great actor on top of that so now he gets to completely disappear into this character. That’s very exciting to me. When I was in high school, I felt like I had to win the most awards, I had to be the best actor in the world but watching Hoffman made me think that if I can only influence some young actor’s life as much as he’s influencing me, that would be a huge success. Later, when I was about to leave drama school, I made my way through the PTA/Hoffman canon and I was admiring their work together and thought, well, if I can do anything with my career, I’d like to find a director who I can work with consistently. Someone who I feel akin with and work with like a life partner in a way. That might be a strange deal with the devil, but it’s a fulfilling one. 

There are some collaborations between us that I definitely gave you more allowance than I would any other actor but I think for Here Comes Your Man, that returned to you being an actor that booked a role. 

That’s true. Being cast in the pilot felt like, “oh, I have a job” but I was pretty sure that if it got picked up, I wouldn’t be a part of it. Not because I wouldn't want to be, but because I assumed producers wouldn't want it to be me. 

Then when it was picked up, you were the one that stayed. 

Yeah, and it felt kind of surreal, looking around and thinking: I’m still here?

With Adam In Fragments, you were in the rare situation in that what you were writing had already been financed. It was your first script. Did you feel any pressure? 

No, I feel like you took on the brunt of the pressure. It felt freeing to me because for one, when I started writing it wasn't with a means to an end, it was completely an exercise. I wanted to write something- to write crime- and you had mentioned expanding Adam and you knew it would be about Adam and a girl but you didn’t know what the relationship would be exactly. Before putting a single word to paper, I thought, well, this isn’t going to happen, I’m not going to push this. I’ll just use this idea because it’s here and it’ll get the ball rolling and my own idea will come at some point. Then you were gracious enough to take that as my own idea. 

You were very drawn to Adam and had a great insight to him, but I don't see you playing that kind of character. Do you feel like you're attracted to different material as an actor than you are as a writer?

I really like interpreting things. For instance I'll read a script and I'm, like, man, this female role would be so much fun to play. So writing gives you a chance to play a part you wouldn’t get a chance to otherwise. I don't think I would have played Adam in anyone's imagination. I’m a bit too square. But that's one thing I enjoyed about writing in particular, it's what I enjoy about first draft writing, once you have a character and you're putting them in this situation you get to see how they're gonna react instinctually. It just flows out of you in that first draft. Once you're in the writing room you have to be practical and craft the right way to produce it.

Is there a specific performance that made you think you could be an actor?

West Side Story made me want to try acting. It just looked like fun. It never seemed like something that I couldn’t do. Um, Spider-Man, as a kid? I watched Spider-Man so many times that I realized I knew the whole script. When you’re inexperienced you think memorization is the biggest challenge, so once I realized it was possible I never looked back.

But you weren’t a performative kid. You weren’t, like, putting on a show at Thanksgiving, you know? 

No, but I was in the church choir, loved improv. I was an annoying kid. I would do voices a lot and quote movies, or just riff. I was performative in the way of like, I’m going to make people in my class laugh or crack jokes at Boy Scout Camp. I saw Dustin Hoffman In Rain Man when I was pretty young and my dad said, “oh, yeah, that’s the guy from Hook,” and I was shocked. And then there’s Cool Hand Luke. I had seen James Dean performances and like most young actors, I became a James Dean expert immediately because there's only three movies and a couple biographies and then you know everything, but I felt like I didn't have the emotional connection or tortured life that he had had. I felt sort of intimidated by that, but seeing Cool Hand Luke made me feel like you can just go the way of Paul Newman and be grounded and reactive. He didn’t have to have a heart of glass. He's so subtle and so personal that he makes you cry. He doesn’t have to throw his firsts into his father and wait on the floor. That performance made me feel that there was a place for me as an actor.

I want to talk about James Dean and the romanticism around him. I think most young actors are enamored by him, by the legend and maybe by the craft. You were and so was I. What are your feelings towards him now, ten years after working as an actor yourself?

My first feeling is that I'm extremely jealous of all the actors who got to live in that time and work with all of the master acting teachers; Strasberg, Adler, Hagen, Meisner. It feels like there was a competitive nature in an encapsulated community then. Everyone wanted to be Brando, then everyone wanted to be James Dean, and there was a question of who was going to be next. Dean worked with Brando’s teachers so he could think, “okay, as long as I listen to this guy, I’m gonna get there.” And he did. That acting method is good if you’ve had a tough life and he absolutely did. I was fifteen or sixteen when I discovered James Dean and I was obsessed with him. I watched East Of Eden then Rebel Without A Cause and found Giant as soon as I could. There was a mystique of living fast and dying young. I came into finding him at the same time in my life that I came into finding philosophy and he was just the perfect role model for me at the time; this this thoughtful guy who was deeply personal and so unafraid to show parts of himself that as a kid you grow up thinking, I don't want anyone to see this. I think that's why most young male actors find some sort of kinship with him. He made it okay for men to be emotional.

There’s a documentary called The James Dean Story that was released pretty quickly after his death and it has these hometown interviews with his family and friends and it’s strange seeing this towering figure humanized. He was just a dude that came from an Indiana farmtown. As the years go on, I find myself thinking he wasn’t as strong as his contemporaries but he’s more valuable as a legend for actors to look up to. East Of Eden is his best work. Rebel would be considered a teen B-movie if it wasn’t for him. He led the first teenage rebellion in America but those things fade away. I don’t know if eighteen, nineteen, twenty year old actors look at him anymore. Maybe I’m wrong. 

I’m only ten years removed from those actors but the difference in the technology that was available to us in my childhood makes for this huge generational gap by comparison. If I had streaming access when I was seven years old, I wouldn’t have watched all my DVDs over and over again, you know?I probably wouldn’t have ever watched movies from the 50’s at all if there was a new series on Netflix and Amazon every week.I do think Dean’s immortality lives on though for actors who find him. Because James Dean died so young, he’s as humble as a legend can be. He never saw the fruits of his labor, and we never saw a negative side or imperfect side of him. He's almost, like, a martyr for actors.

Do you remember what you were doing when we first talked about working together? I contacted you and asked you if you wanted to audition. Something I would never do now. 

And I asked for the full script. 

And I sent it. Another thing I would never do now. 

Whether or not the answer is no, I'm always gonna ask for the full script because I don't like making assumptions of a character if I don’t have to. But anyway, um… I asked for the script and I had read it and I immediately started making notes on the scenes that I thought would be the audition scenes. I remember making notes all throughout the script and because it's so visual.

It’s the only script I ever wrote with so much prose and it had debatable motivations, which is a very weird thing for a script because the script should tell you this is how we're gonna shoot it, this is what we're gonna do over here. It should be practical but it was a very vague script that read more novelistically. 

Two years before that, the first movie I saw in Los Angeles was The Place Beyond The Pines. When I read your script, I thought, okay, this is a good comparison. It's another movie with long stretches of quiet characters with questionable motivations who are sort of painted into their environment. I was happy that you were having a conversation with me, because one of my favorite things to do, to break down any script, is to have the conversation and ask questions and, you know, examine things. And I remember ... having Place Beyond the Pines in my head ... and wanting to impress you that like, oh, there's this movie that it reminds me of this, but I couldn't think of the name of the director, and for some reason, Gus Van Sant came out and you're like, “yeah!” and you mentioned Elephant and The Death Trilogy, I was like, “okay, great!” As it turns out I was thinking of Derek Cianfrance, but I literally could not have said a better director. You were very open about your influences and I loved that. 

If there’s someone that I want, I will make it very difficult for them to fail. We talked quite a bit before you actually auditioned, which meant you knew what my ideas were, my angle. I know I give some actors more allowance than others because I want them to succeed and I wanted you to succeed. At the end of the day, if you gave a shit audition then you wouldn’t have gotten it but it was important to me that you did get it.

I did.

What movie do you want people to talk about more?

The Boys In The Band (1970) would definitely be one. I like dialogue heavy stuff. It is like the kind of thing that I would enjoy doing. I just think people should see it and appreciate it, even if you’re a straight man. It asks a lot of the audience. I watched it three times before I understood what was going on, but the fact that it mesmerized me enough to want to keep coming back to it said something.

It's a very interesting time capsule. Any time that you have any material focused on a subculture or any kind of minority group, you’re in a kind of danger zone. Boys In The Band is so dark and it's so depressing that I think it shocks modern queer audiences. Rainer Werner Fassbinder wrestled with that, too. This fight for progressivism needs every shade of a minority. There can’t just be angels and demons.

But when it came out, it presented a situation where these people could live normal lives. It’s the outside world that is ruining it. It’s not about gay hate or even self loathing. It's not exactly saying “I hate myself”, it's saying “why can't I love myself?” and that's an important distinction because...it is hopeful, it's a hopeful cry from hopeless people.

Photography by Omar Salas Zamora

Interview by Omar Salas Zamora