Back in August, at the Cincinnati Twilight Convention, Angie and I had the opportunity to sit down for a chat with Mr. Peter Facinelli. We talked about tons of topics, including filming the wedding scene, how Carlisle has affected his real life, and director Bill Condon (about whom Peter had nothing but nice things to say). In addition, we chatted about Peter’s other projects such as Loosies, the White Bolger pic he’s working on, and his involvement with charity, specifically Alex’s Lemonade Stand. Check out the lengthy interview below!
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Team-Twilight: Several of the cast members have said that the wedding scene marked the culmination of the series and was very emotional. Did you find it was that way for yourself?
Peter Facinelli: I think it was the last day of shooting for us for first unit. But I also had second unit for another two weeks. A lot of those cast members were done with the movie, and I still had another two weeks so it wasn’t as emotional for me. It was emotional in the sense that it was a wedding. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house except for the vampires, because we don’t have tear ducts.
TT: Is there anything about Carlisle that you will take with you, that you will miss in particular?
PF: There’s a part of me that’s Carlisle, and there’s a part of Carlisle that’s me, so the two are kind of inter-meshed. There are moments when I am with my kids and I’m like, “OK, I have to show a little bit more patience,” and I feel like Carlisle has a lot of patience and compassion. So I kind of draw on him for inspiration sometimes being a parent. I could say, I’d take the scarves with me. I kind of left that behind in Eclipse. I don’t know if I wear any scarves in Breaking Dawn.
TT: Compared to the previous directors, what do you think Bill Condon’s fingerprint will be on the story?
PF: I can say that Eclipse was my favorite book, but Breaking Dawn is my favorite scripts. Bill is a writer-director and I think he worked with the writers to get some really subtle nuances in there. I think he also was fortunate enough where, because there are two films, he had more time to tell the story, whereas some of the other film makers had to condense the books. He was able to elaborate and fill in some scenes that might not have been in the books. I don’t think that it changes the book, as much as enhances. And that’s exciting for me. To have a little bit more surprises for an audience who is looking at these movies as based on a template from the book and knows them inside and out. So to have a couple more scenes that aren’t in the book is exciting. The books are told from Bell’as perspective, so the film allows us, since the film is not told from Bella’s perspective per se, the film allows us to actually delineate away from Bella’s perspective and give perspective to other characters, as well.
Bill is a great actor’s director. I’m hoping our performances are strong. Other than that, I am not quite sure the tone he is setting. Because as an actor, all the bells and whistles are put on after. Like with Twilight, I didn’t know there was going to be a bluish hue, or the music she was going to select, or the quick cutting. You came in and you did your job. As you are filing, you are in the blind as to what that director’s vision for the outcome of the film is. So you just come and you do your part and you hope for the best. I’m like any other fan. I haven’t seen the movie and I’m hoping that they all come together. There’s a lot of pressure on Bill because, the first three, the fans enjoyed. And I am sure he doesn’t want to be the one who drops the ball. Yet, he has to put his stamp on it. I spoke to him not too long ago. He’s very proud of the film and he hasn’t taken the job lightly. He’s been living, eating and breathing this film, even after we finished, assembling it, watching the cuts over and over. That’s gotta be maddening at times, to be that immersed in it. And there’s two of them. I remember getting the scripts, and you put both of them on top of each other and it’s very daunting. You’re like, “We have to shoot all of this in how many months?” So even as an actor, it was daunting and a challenge. You have to take it day by day, page by page, and you hope that the editing all comes together, and the tone of the film is right, but I’ll be looking at it like any other fan from a fresh perspective when I see it.
TT: As a fan, do you think that it was a wise decision to split it into two?
PF: I think so. Every time I sign that book it throws my back out when I picke it up. It’s a big book and I think the fans would have felt cheated to have a more condensed version. Even if you look at the first three, there’s a lot that didn’t make it into the film. For us, it was a good thing that it was split. The filmmakers were able to enhance the book a little bit in areas you might not have expected. So I am excited to see it in two films.
TT: The poster for Loosies just came out. It looks great. We also saw some official images and they look great too. You were a lot of hats in this film: you wrote it, you star in it, produce it. Everything but direct. What inspired you to do this project?
PF: I’ve written three scripts now. Two of them we’ve gotten made. First one was a little Hallmark movie that my wife starred in called Accidentally in Love. It aired to great ratings and was very successful. My wife had fun starring in it. There was a time I flirted with being in it as well, but I chose not to because being a couple that is well-known, I didn’t want the audience to be looking at me and Jenny. There’s a magic act that happens when watching film and television. You want to suspend belief so that you buy into these characters. I wrote these characters so I didn’t want to get in the way of people taking those characters and going on a ride with them. You break the illusion when you are a celebrity couple and I thought that would overshadow the film and it’s not going to do service to the script I wrote, so I took a back seat. It was fun to come on to set and watch a whole crew of people putting together sets of something that I had in my mind, and all of a sudden they are creating these things. I kind of got how Stephenie Meyer would feel when she wrote this book and had it in her head, and other people are now interpreting her stuff. And it was fun for me to watch, being on the outside.
With Loosies, I wrote it, I produced it, and I starred in it. That was fun being on the inside, where I was able to have a say in the director, the other casting, and be a part of the film making process with the director, and then after that, have a say in the editing, as well. As a producer, I could step back and say, “OK, these things don’t work. We need to reedit these.” It’s your baby that you get to see grow up and you get to actually stay with til the end. As a producer, writer and actor, if I am going to have my name on that, I want to make sure that what I’m putting out there, I am happy with. I’m really proud of Loosies. I am proud of the way it came together, I love the story, it’s a fun ride, and now I give it over to the fans and hope that they enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it.
TT: Is there a release date for it yet?
PF: It’s going to be a limited release in December. Hopefully the fans will come out wherever it’s playing, and if it does well, it’ll platform and go into more theaters. The more people that go see it, the more theaters it will hit. So if it’s in your area, make sure you see it. It’s meant to be seen on the big screen.
I missed movies, like steve McQueen movies. The antihero is a guy that grows up and lives with his mom at thirty years old. His mom thinks he works on Wall Street but he works on the subways as a pickpocket. The subways of New York are his office. Every morning he comes out in a suit and tie and kisses his mom goodbye and he goes down to his “office” and he pickpockets all day. But the reason why he’s doing it is his father left him with gambling debts so he has to repay them. And then one day he gets tapped on the shoulder and this girl that he had a one night stand with tells him that she’s pregnant. So his whole world comes to a screeching halt because he’s finally gotta take responsibility for something. I always say it’s kind of as much of a love story as much as it is a coming of age story for a 30 year old guy.
TT: Also, the Whitey Bulger movie that you are attached to. He was unexpectedly captured recently. This project is based on a book that was written before his capture?
PF: It’s based on a book called Street Soldier. I got the rights to it and we had a script and we have financing so we are hoping to attach a director and shoot next time next may.
TT: Will the capture change things?
PF: I think it might end up in the movie now, it might change the script a little bit. What I liked about it, because my producing partner read a lot of books on Whitey Bolger, this was the most interesting book because it told the Whitey Bolger story through the eyes of Eddie, one of his enforcers. Eddie was a victim his whole life, was raped as a child, and one day he grew into his body and he said, “I’m not going to be a victim anymore. I’m going to be a predator.” So he started being an enforcer for White Bolger, and Whitey Bolger became a father figure to him. And then White Bolger ended up ratting him out, which made him a victim once again. So I really like that character arc of Eddie. I like telling the story of that enforcer, and then seeing White Bolger through the eyes of him. It’s like Jaws. You don’t want to see the shark all the time, you just want to see pieces of him and it makes him more scary.
It depends on my schedule how much I’ll be in it, or if I’ll be in it. I created Facinelli Films not just to do vanity projects for me to be in, but I wanted to be able to tell good stories so there are some things I will be in and some I won’t be in. I’m not quite sure whether I’ll act in it or not. My first step is to get a director on board.
TT: You are a fan favorite and part of that is because you are so available to your fans at convention, at premieres, on Twitter. How do you balance that with your personal life?
PF: It is a balancing act. And sometimes certain parts get less attention. There are times when my fans get attention, times when my family gets attention, times when my career gets attention. And then if it starts to topple too much in one direction, I have to throw the counter weights on the other side. I felt like last year I did Loosies, Nurse Jackie, and Breaking Dawn back-to-back-to-back. So I would say August of last year through May of this year , I was pretty much working straight, which is great! And it’s not like I didn’t see my family at all, but it was difficult in the sense that I didn’t get to see them as much as I wanted to. So when the film wrapped, I had the choice where I could go find something for the summer and shoot another movie, or I could just take some time off. So I decided to take the summer off and completely focus on my kids and family. It was wonderful. Part of the reason we traveled so much is because I have three kids and they are all different ages and if we sit at home, they are all doing different things. One is doing soccer, one is at a friend’s house, one wants to swim in the pool, and it’s like everybody’s is separated. But when you travel on a family vacation, you are all kind of stuck together and there are no outside distractions. We went to Europe, the Maldives, Dubai, and then I came home and I went on a road trip with them. It was a wonderful summer and I am glad I did it. Because now I have to go back to Nurse Jackie next week and I’ll be in New York for two and a half months.
TT: And, even with that, you were posting photos and videos on Twitter for your fans.
PF: Well, it’s not like I can go dark on one aspect or abandon it. You might be giving more attention to one area but you still feed the other areas. It’s important to me to have that connection with the fan base. I appreciate those fans and I hope that they stick with me through my career. And I have charities that I do and I wouldn’t just drop the ball on them. I like to move and I can’t stay in one place for more than a week, it seems. So I am always on an airplane, I’m always going somewhere.
TT: You brought up the charity topic. How do you decide what charities to involve yourself with?
PF: I do get a lot of invitations to be part of a lot of organizations, and I do try to spread my time between various ones. But Alex’s Lemonade just became a favorite of mine because I was sitting at home and read an article online about this organization, and as a parent, I have children and I saw the courage that these parents had when their daughter died. Instead of crawling under a rock, which is what most people would’ve done, which is what I would’ve done losing a child, they said, “Let’s do something so that other parents don’t have to go through the grief that we’ve gone through.” So they literally turned lemons into lemonade. They started this foundation in honor of their daughter where you can get a lemonade stand sent to you through the mail and you can raise money for children’s cancer research. And I thought what a great idea because it teaches kids that, even at an early age, you can make a difference. And then your children are helping other children. And so I kind of latched onto that because there was a lot of meaning in it for me, teaching my kids that they can go out and do something positive. So I called them and asked “What can I do?” And I lent my name to them and I started doing these autograph signings to raise awareness. I’ve also done signings for Tennessee Floods and for Haiti, and blood drives. When you are in the public eye and are in the spotlight, you can do three things. You can do positive things and try to be a role model and try to inspire other people. Or you can do negative things and self-destruct in front of their eyes. Or you could do nothing. With those three options on the table, I would choose positive things and giving back. So that’s what I have done.
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