In “Boulevard,” which recently premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, a devoted husband (Robin Williams) in a marriage of convenience is forced to confront his secret life.
Roberto Aguire plays a troubled teen who forms an unlikely relationship with Robin Williams’ character Nolan. Read what Roberto had to say about playing Leo.
Tell me how you first heard of this project?
Well, the project was written by a man called Doug Soesbe and he has a friend who him and I were very close and he got me the script and said, “Hey you should read this, it’s absolutely breathtaking, it’s phenomenal. I read it fell in love with the script, fell in love with Leo and my next meeting was with Doug to say I want to play the part, I really love it. Doug and I had a phenomenal meeting, he’s such an intelligent, caring, giving, generous man and at the end of the meeting he said you know what I would love for you to play him and that meant the world to me and now we’re here.
That’s a different route, you didn’t meet the casting director, you met with the writer.
I met with a writer. I think that’s the thing about this industry you have to be very creative as actor how you get roles. It’s a lot about connections in this industry, it’s a lot about the people you meet. At the end of the day we’re all artists and we all just want to work on amazing projects and amazing material and I think meeting with writers, young directors, with other actors. It’s very important.
So at what point did director Dito Montiel come into the mix?
Dito came right after that, actually. Robin and Dito came around the same time and they both came on board and we all met and it was just amazing from the beginning and then obviously we had great people that got attached. Kathy Baker whose actually superb, honestly she steals the movie at the end and it’s just amazing what she does and then Giles Matthey, all these great people that came on board I think because of Robin and Dito, they were such forces and they were so passionate about the script. You won’t find anyone more passionate than either of them except Doug and maybe the other actors and definitely Kathy but just the whole group was so fantastic and so talented.
Leo is a pretty dark character. Can you tell us about getting into his head?
It was rough, it’s tough to get into the head space of someone whose in such dark space, but it is one of the most amazing things in the world because it’s such a challenge. I’m on the other side of the spectrum, I’m an optimist , I love life there’s so much beauty everywhere and for Leo there’s a lot of darkness. So obviously the physical transformation was a huge step for me, it literally let me get into the skin of the character. Loosing 35 pounds just has such an emotional toll on you that you can’t fake it, it’s all this genuine low energy. Then I started smoking for the character, too which is really unhealthy, but I needed something where I felt dirty and cigarettes do that for me. So that whole physical transformation was just bringing myself to a place that I’d never explored that I’d never been that I jumped into.
Tell me about working with Robin Williams, what was your first meeting like with him?
It was phenomenal I think that he’s one of the geniuses of our time … I think that he is so specific with everything that he does as an actor and he’s so funny and he’s so intelligent and cultured and he’s just an amazing person. So to get to work with someone who is such a master for me at the beginning of my career is huge. I got to learn so much from him and he’s such a generous actor, he was there all the time, just giving. I remember one time we shot for 12 hours and we had done all his coverage and it was the last shot of the day and we were switching to my coverage and usually in that situation both actors are tired so the one behind the camera won’t give as much, but Robin started giving as much as he’d given in his takes and he was there with me every single take that I had until five or six in the morning or whenever we wrapped. As a young actor to have someone who is so already matured in his career and so established do that for you is a blessing and a rarity. The first meeting we had together was actually in a restaurant and he was so sweet and so funny and I grew up watching him and I love doing accents and he loves doing accents and so in the middle of the meeting we started doing accents and we started talking to the waiters in accents, he’s just such a phenomenal guy.
Your character has a very specific lifestyle and different actors tackle preparation in different ways.
I’m actually one of the crazy actors. I love research. I love learning as much as I can about the world about the characters and I did meet with a couple of different male hustlers and do a lot of back story for him because I think it’s so important to know about where this character comes from before you see him on the screen. That’s what people forget, before the first shot of Leo there was whole lifetime you know and it’s up to me as an actor to find what that life was and put it all together and see how it informs him in this little moment of his life and I love getting my hands dirty and going and seeing where Leo would live and how he would live and who he would live with and that whole world, that’s part of why I started smoking, I just needed to feel what this kid is doing and why he’s in this situation and why he’s surrounding himself with this horrible horrible profession, these horrible people this just toxic environment and by the end of the movie I was really able to figure out what was going on in his mind.
Where did your passion for acting come from?
I’ve aways been a performer, I’ve always just gotten up and done random things. Started dancing, or putting on accents and puppet shows or doing God knows what in front of people, I guess at the beginning it was just to get attention. I think it changed into I really liked entertaining people and making them laugh, then that slowly evolved into “Wow, I can make people feel something.” I can have them take a journey and leave a theatre or movie theatre feeling something different than what they walked in with, a different head space and maybe it helped them move through something they were unable to feel in their own lives, and for me to actually figure out that actors had that kind of power threw me and I said there’s nothing else I’d rather do then touch people’s lives through this craft.
Can you speak about what type of films you would like to tackle in the future? “Struck By Lightening” was a comedy and “Boulevard” is a drama.
It’s really funny I’m really comfortable in both I used to do a lot of comedy and I love physical comedy which has kind of taken the back seat nowadays, but the old days of Jim Carrey and “Ace Ventura” that kind of thing even going back to Charlie Chaplin, which is completely physical, I love that kind of comedy , I love someone slipping on a banana and breaking his head open and that being the funniest thing in the world, but when I got to NYU, they said you have to focus on drama, you have to focus on building that side of you. Luckily, I am very comfortable in both, but I don’t want to do anything that is comfortable, I want to do things that scare me both in comedy and drama/ I want to look at characters and I think “Wow, that’s a challenge, that is really hard,” and jump into it because that’s the only way you push yourself forward and grow as an actor and I think that’s the only way you keep reinventing your career because if you constantly take the roles that seem easy then I think you’re settling.
