Romany Malco
Interview By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com
The name Romany Malco might not ring any bells for you yet, but you've seen him before. After making a splash as one of Steve Carell's friends in The 40-Year-Old Virgin next to Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd, Malco has surfaced in such comedy hits as Blades of Glory and Baby Mama. Now he has a major role in The Love Guru, playing the hockey star that Mike Myers, as the Guru Pitka, comes to help. With any luck, the role will convince audiences that Malco is a natural star.
Of course, fans of Showtime's hit series Weeds already know that. For three seasons, Malco played Conrad, Mary Louise Parker's pot-dealing partner in crime, in a dramatic and frequently understated performance that proved he had talent that extended far beyond 'wisecracking black guy' roles.
"I feel like for the first time in my life, I actually have a little bit of athletic ability," Malco says of his role in The Love Guru, which required quite a bit of ice skating. "I was on skates like six hours a day [in preparation]. When we started, I was instructed that I wasn't going to really have to do any skating, they had a double, blah blah blah. But by the time I got there and they saw how well I could skate by then, they were telling me I needed to do jumps and spins and slams -- they started giving me tapes and telling me I needed to get my form better. So I went from not having to skate at all to needing to have perfect form."
The most enjoyable -- and at the same time the most stressful -- aspect of filming was not the hockey, but the ability to watch a brand new Mike Myers character at work. "The straight face factor was a big deal," Malco says. "It's extremely stressful when you've got people ruining take after take that are magic. And how do you ruin a take' Mike does something funny, and you do shit like this." He visibly stifles a laugh. "That's how you ruin a take. The only challenge becomes being professional."
Malco also had the opportunity to square off with Justin Timberlake, who plays a French hockey star nicknamed "Le Coq" -- who apparently has the biggest one in the league. "He made some strong character choices," Malco says of Timberlake, who spends the movie underneath a giant porn-star mustache. "While I was training, I met a few guys who actually played hockey. They had that mustache and that hair."
After The Love Guru, Malco's career is stacked with a number of potential projects. First up is St. Johns of Las Vegas, which he starts shooting in a month. "Yeah, I head off to New Mexico; [I co-star with] with Steve Buscemi. He and I play insurance claim investigators. I think it'll be a nice, funny indie to be a part of."
Unfortunately, Malco's upcoming work doesn't include the fourth season of Weeds. "Look, let's just be real: there's no possible way that I could have done this movie and Weeds at the same time," he says. "They've been so patient, every single year. The first season of Weeds I did 40-Year-Old Virgin, the second season I did Blades of Glory, the third season I did Baby Mama. They were really bending over backwards to make my schedule work as it was, and it's like, this just took the cake."
Malco will, however, be back to work with his 40-Year-Old Virgin director Judd Apatow, who exploded after Virgin and his follow-up, Knocked Up. The two have pitched and sold a couple different projects to major studios. The first one up is called Military Recruiter. "It's about a really underhanded military recruiter who will go to any extreme to sign people," Malco says. "This man signs prostitutes, homeless people, junkies all up. He finds ways for you to pass the drug test even though you're a drug addict. That kind of thing. It's basically the process through which a lot of these guys have gone to recruit kids and send them to Iraq."
The other project requires a bit more explanation. Read it yourself to believe it: "It's called Being Ron Malkovich," Malco begins. "It's a true story. In 1997, I started this penis enhancement company, with products for premature ejaculation and impotence and infertility, selling this stuff over the internet. But then all these radio stations started calling me, wanting to talk to 'the representative of this company.' And if they knew it was me, they could do research and find out I was once a rapper, and that just takes away all the credibility of the company. So I just started pretending to be a doctor. He affects a deep, serious voice. "'In my fourteen years of practice, I've found that...' And they were like, 'What's your name'' And I was like, 'Dr. Ron...Malco...vich.' Because the "vich" would add that Jewish credibility. And this was a true story! There's tapes of it and everything. And Judd was like, 'You've got to be kidding me. We have got to make this into a movie.' And so it went."
His friendship with Apatow, and his casting in Virgin, happened in a roundabout way. "I did an experimental movie with Paul Rudd back in the day called The Chateau," he says. "$150,000, in France, we played brothers who inherit a chateau in the south of France. That movie, it didn't really do anything, it didn't go to theaters, but it changed both of our lives. Judd saw the movie and called me and said, 'Can you improv''...So I auditioned with Judd Apatow for five hours. Five hours of improv. He called me back the next day, I improvised for three more hours. And then the one day he could get Steve Carell in the room, I improvised with Steve Carell for two hours. And a lot of that ended up in the screenplay."
