Sex Ed, written by Bill Kennedy and directed by Isaac Feder, stars Haley Joel Osment as Eddie Cole, a 23 year-old aspiring geometry teacher who, with high hopes but a meager resume, has just landed a position monitoring middle school detention. After a rather unfortunate incident, Eddie realizes that the kids are, for the most part, severely lacking in sexual education that doesn’t involve malicious findings on the Internet, and so he takes it upon himself to pilot a proper sex-ed course, something he is perhaps the least qualified to teach. His new teaching experience becomes doubly uncomfortable when he develops the hots for a student’s older sister. Feder’s new feature is short, simple, and straddles the border between romantic comedy and vulgar in an oddly pleasant way.
What attracted you to the project?
I read the script about four years ago, and first of all, it made me laugh, it’s a comedy, it’s a big jest, it was funny on the page, and then meeting with Isaac Feder, the director, after I read it, I could just see he had a really clear vision for the movie. And as time went on, the project just kept getting better and better, and we had it cast—it was still kind of astounding we were able to get all these people in one movie, so it became something that got really exciting as time went on.
Do you think you share similarities with Eddie? Did you connect with the character well?
He was a very clear character on the page; I don’t have any shared experiences with the character. It was actually based on a mutual friend of the writer and director who taught English in Korea many years ago, and he had the same sort of struggles that Eddie did. And my mom is a teacher, so I knew about the lifestyle of the teacher, the challenges they face—we just sort of put together the character from there.
What was it like working with director Isaac Feder?
He’s a great director. He’s someone who’s very detailed about everything, and would make sure the whole cast and crew shared his vision. We were all working on pieces of the same puzzle. And one thing that was great about the film, that we only had 20 days to shoot, was that he basically all had it planned out in his head; we shot very efficiently, and I think we had a lot more money than we actually needed, and that’s a testament to how much Isaac made out of very little.
What was the most enjoyable part for you about working on the movie?
I like that Eddie sort of has this Greek chorus of characters surrounding him. It happened, the way we shot it, too, that one week it’d be just me and Matt Walsh, and the next week it would just be me and Retta, and the third week it’d be just me and the kids. So there were just these phases of the movie that were all intertwined with each other onscreen, but the way we shot it, it was kind of cool that each week was a completely different experience, which I really enjoyed.
What was the atmosphere like on set? Any funny mishaps?
Luckily, we didn’t have too many mishaps. The atmosphere was—we all got along really well, which was one of the only reasons the movie worked and everything. We had great kids who really enjoyed what they did. It was Tampa in the summer in a building that didn’t have air conditioning, and I’m wearing a t-shirt that’s black and a button down every day, so that was the hottest to work in. But I think it really was the tone, you know, that we didn’t have a lot of time to get it made; we had to hit a home run every day, and luckily, all of it fell into place.
Could you talk a little more about working with all those kids?
Yeah, I didn’t quite know what to expect. I haven’t worked much with kids in my career; I’m usually the only kid on set. I think we had a great casting director that went all around the country and found kids from Florida and New Orleans, several kids from Los Angeles. It wasn’t a random group of kids; the kids who were all cast, they were very well behaved. We didn’t know what to expect and it ended up being great.
Did you guys have any freedom in terms of being able to improvise when you got on set?
We did, definitely. The freedom was there, and because it’s sort of a detailed plot, we didn’t go off-course a whole lot, excluding the scenes I had with Retta and a lot of the stuff that I had with Matt Walsh, particularly the end; the end credits scene was completely improvised. So that was the freedom there.
Your father was also a film and theatre actor. Would you consider him a big influence in how you and your older sister got into acting at such a young age?
Sure. And what was cool was that him having a background in theatre—when we were growing up and working—that was sort of the philosophy and the technique that we came from, you know, character study, and all the work that goes into building a character to play. I ended up going and studying theatre in college which was a nice way to culminate acting as a younger person and now, with that knowledge, I’m trying to take it forward into the big business.
You were pretty established as an actor at a very young age; what made you want to pursue acting further when you got to college?
I think I wanted to go to college whether or not I studied acting. When I was doing my college tours my last year of high school, I hadn’t really decided what I was going to study. But NYU just really had a terrific program, and when I got there to study experimental theatre, it just really felt like the right place. Part of it was to study acting, but also going to college at 18, going to the city and having that experience is something you can only have once in your life, so I’m glad I did.
What was your favorite part about going to college in New York, being 18 years old and independent?
When I visited NYU, of all the schools that I visited, it was the only place where I immediately felt like I would be at home there. And you know, good work was being done there; it was a good, no-nonsense program. I didn’t really discover how much I was gonna love the city, so much that I consider it a home now. Getting through freshman year, and deciding whether to go back to the dorms or get a place sophomore year, saying you know, “I’ll probably wanna be here a long time.” And even now, I think it’s a city that exposes you to so many different experiences that are really important for an actor to have—meeting a really diverse group of people keeps you fresh and able to create more interesting characters.
Do you have any upcoming projects that you’re working on?
Yes, I just finished a film called Sleepwalkers with Ahna O’Reilly and Richard Armitage coming out next year. Yoga Hosers, the Kevin Smith movie I did, will also be coming out in late 2015. And probably the biggest is the Entourage film.
Sex Ed is now playing.
-Ziye Hu
