Ken Marino

Interview By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

Ken Marino is one of New York's most perennial talents. He's best known for his work on the enduring MTV sketch show favorite The State and has since been known for his various recurring roles on TV series like Dawson's Creek, Charmed, and Veronica Mars, as well as his short-lived comedy series Stella on Comedy Central.

Marino reunites with his former State co-star David Wain to co-write and act in the film The Ten, which is now available on DVD. The movie's a series of ten vignettes loosely based on the Ten Commandments. He appears in the 'Thou Shall Not Kill' vignette as Glenn Richie, a doctor who kills his patient as an accident.

We spoke with Ken and had many questions for him regarding the sheer oddness of this film. The first we asked was whether The Ten's origins as The Ten Commandments had any special significance.

'Certainly, our intention was not to make any sort of comments or any sort of statement about religion or anything for that matter. We took, as we did with every story, we took our very silly premise and think it through and execute it as seriously and as artfully as we could.' Marino insists.

We also asked the now 39 year old actor how he and David if they made any rules for themselves in structuring a film of this caliber.

'It is true,' Ken says, 'There's a lot of random, non-sequitur, service humor, but there's probably far more method to the madness than might be apparent, because it's not like yeah, whatever, whatever, like every single line is poured over and every little structural element, we actually made the choices as to where to carefully break convention and when to break the rules and when to stick to rules and when to wink, when to break to full-throttle.'

'Yeah,' he continues, 'I mean the order changed a little bit in editing, but that was the idea that we would change it up enough so it would hopefully not feel monotonous, but that's the built-in inherent risk of any sort of sketch-oriented movie is like, OK, you got to start all over again with another one. There are tangents and extra things that were very funny, I think, but just for time, we had to cut. Even though we thought we had a tight-cutted, it was a two hour plus cut and we just said it has to be 90 minutes, no matter what, period.'

Also on deck was whether there were any moments in the film Marino thought went too far.

'Not really,' he says, 'If we thought it was funny, we left it in, if we thought it was funny, we took it out. That's the only barometer that means anything in comedy. I mean certainly, in a rated R movie like this, you know if you are really offended, you shouldn't even bother. But if you're not easily offended, we think you'll think it's funny.'

Marino also shared with us a rather crazy scene in which character gets anally raped.

'It's infectious,' he explains, 'When Rob is raping me, that wasn't necessarily funny at the time, but I thought it in the context of the whole story, it was.'

This begged the question of whether or not he and Wain both personally think anal rape is funny.

'Yes,' jokes Ken, 'It's about the execution.'

We further discovered the actor's odd penchant for sick humor when he was asked if he had any Ten Commandments stories to share.

'To answer that question would be like Sophie's Choice,' he replies, 'It would be like choosing one of my own children to be slaughtered. It would be like young Sasha, who is too young to know (laughing). She can go.'

'I had a brother named Scott and I murdered him'with a gun, so that's something I have certain regrets about,' Marino jokes, 'I mean, it was justified because he disappointed me. I had sort of really coached him as a track star and in high school, he didn't make the time I was always hoping he would in the track meet. It was a huge disappointment to be, so I shot him.'

We also asked Marino how he and Wain decided on the film's casting.

'Once we had a finished script, it was very fun process to see, OK, who are the people we like and how we can fit different people in and what would be a good part for that person,' he says.

One noticeable aspect about The Ten is that the movie features plenty of his and David's former State co-stars. We asked Ken what it was that keeps the circle of actors from that series working so closely together.

'It's just all that we really respect and love each other as people and performers,' he replies, 'All of the people that we worked with in The State and still work with to this day every day 20 years later, we met in freshman and sophomore year of college at NYU.

Another noticeable casting choice is Jessica Alba. He explained to us how he and Wain managed to bring her on board to do the film.

'She just really sort of stopped by en route to shooting Fantastic Four,' Marino recalls, 'We shot her three weeks before the rest of the movie in LA because we wanted her to be in it and so, she came in for really half a day and we shot her on a green screen set with us. She was awesome.'

Also shared with us from him was a musical number scene that ties the loosely connected film together.

'The musical number was fun and very, very logistically complicated,' Ken explains, 'Because in no chance we would have ever gotten the whole cast in one place in one time, so basically, for example, we're shooting Oliver Platt in the house where Arnold was shot.

And then, at the end of the day, we put up a green sheet,' he continues, 'He would just sing just his part in the musical number and we had to edit all of that together into one so it looked like everybody was in one place and in one time, including bow in the end. Everyone bows at the end.'

Finally, we ended with another rather humorous quip when Marino makes no bones about describing his career since the end of The State.

'I feel like what's been my history with Stella on Comedy Central is that my lot in life is pretty gay, but not actually gay,' he claims.