NEW YORK, Aug. 23 (UPI) — The Outsiders and Red Dawn icon C. Thomas Howell says the villain and hero in his new film One Mile and its sequel One Mile: Chapter 2 have similar motivations.
Helmed by La Brea, Deadwood and Lost director Adam Davidson, the two-part action-thriller was filmed on Vancouver Island and casts Ryan Phillippe as Danny, a former special forces operative trying to re-connect with his teenage daughter Alex (Amelie Hoeferle) during a college road trip where she is kidnapped by members of an off-the-grid community led by Stanley (Howell).
“When I read this script, I really got excited to be able to play a character that was deemed as sort of the heavy, but I don’t feel that he’s really a bad person doing bad things,” Howell, 59, told UPI in a recent Zoom interview.
“There’s some things that [Danny and Stanley] share in common. We’re both working towards protecting the people that we love and even though my character is capable of doing some despicable things, it’s for the good of the whole, basically protecting this culture, this village that I’ve raised off-grid, that is on the brink of extinction,” he explained.
“I feel approaching it, not necessarily from sort of homicidal maniac, but a guy that’s willing to do whatever it takes to successfully sustain this group of people that are off-grid made it interesting for me. You don’t see that often in storytelling.”
Howell noted that villains are often portrayed as loners pursuing selfish gains and Stanley isn’t like that.
“The bad guy is usually socially disconnected from everybody else and just doing horrible things ‘because…’ and there was a real motive to do what Stanley needed to get done to help his own,” the actor added.
Another aspect of the character Howell thought was unique is how Stanley is able to confidently articulate his beliefs and plans to his followers, as well as Danny.
“That’s leadership — being able to communicate, being able to connect with people,” Howell said. “Bringing that to the forefront was important to me.”
Howell and Phillippe didn’t have many face-to-face scenes, since their characters communicate primarily by hand-held radio, but the actors were always on set to support each other.
“I would either be off-camera and he could hear my voice and be reacting to that, or, when we turned around to get my coverage, he would be there for me,” Howell explained.
“So, we’re not listening to a stranger’s voice, yelling somebody else’s dialogue that we’re supposed to be reacting to. It puts you in the moment and I think has a great benefit for the reactions to each other.”
This also allowed the actors to improvise a bit and try different line deliveries.
“If you have somebody else playing the dialogue for you, they’re going to just read the same thing over and over in the script. But if [Phillippe’s] doing it, he might give me a different answer than he did the first take,” Howell said.
“That allows me to be reactive and in the moment and truer, and something better than what is on the page could potentially grow out of that,” he added. “It’s important to be there for each other as artists.”
The films are now available on digital platforms.