ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: A more recent project of yours is a film called Johnny Got His Gun [which is based on Dalton Trumbo's 1930s novel and was previously made into a movie in 1971]. Will that be released in theaters?
BEN MCKENZIE: I don't know. We shot it in the early weeks of fall last year. We've been sort of working in post with it. It's a film version of the play version of the book, if that makes sense. The book was a big deal, especially during Vietnam, and it was turned into a one-man play with Jeff Daniels. So we decided to film me doing the play. I'm in a black box theater, and there's no audience. It's sort of a hybrid, between, like, a Lars von Trier Dogville and Spalding Gray, you know, Monster in a Box, something like that. It's not quite a play, not quite an ordinary feature. It was really a lot of fun for me to do, and something different.
The character must have been a huge challenge — you play a war survivor who's lost all his limbs and facial features.
Yeah, he basically has no ability to speak — he communicates through Morse code by tapping his head against his bed. He has no eyes, nose, ears, mouth. But because it's a play, I'm shown as I see myself, full-body, fully capable. You have to sort of physicalize that.
How did you get into that project?
The director [Rowan Joseph], who's been involved in L.A. theater — and New York as well — approached me about doing a film of it. And I'm somewhat political, and I loved the book and the play. I just fell in love with the words, you know? Dalton Trumbo was one of the best screenwriters and novelists of his time, and the book itself has its own place in American history.
Johnny Got His Gun was already a movie in 1971 — did you ever see that?
To be honest with you, I've only seen clips. It's really hard to get a hold of. I've just seen clips from the [1989] Metallica video [for the song ''One,'' which included snippets of the film]. It's a very different thing than the movie. No props, sets...it's a much more stripped-down version of it. It's just the words, and someone's performing directly to the camera.
Is it just you most of the time in the movie?
Just me. The whole movie.
That's...awesome?
[Laughs] Well, wait 'til you see it. It was a challenge. There's nothing else going on — it succeeds or fails on its own. Hopefully it works out. I've seen a rough cut of it, and I like it. Looking at most of the career choices I've made since The O.C., honestly I'm just trying things that challenge me as an actor and if they don't work, they don't work. I'd rather search for something a little less orthodox and risk failure than sort of just doing the same thing over and over again.
What about The Stanford Prison Experiment?
It's been in pre-production for a while. Christopher McQuarrie, who wrote The Usual Suspects, cowrote this Tom Cruise movie Valkyrie, so he's been dealing with that for the past year, basically, so...we'll see. It's honestly a really great script and a great story, very timely. It's about this experiment conducted at Stanford — so the title works! They basically wanted to simulate a prison environment, so they created a fake prison in a building off-campus and put 10 or 20 students into groups. Half of them were prisoners and half of them guards, just randomly. And the idea was to see how people respond to authority. Basically, they had to call it off within a few days because it got really intense — the guards were verbally and physically abusing the prisoners and the prisoners were losing their minds. What started off as kind of a quaint little experiment became this fascinating study of the power dynamic and what prison can do to people.
Would you ever want to do TV again?
I might. There's very few actors — the George Clooneys — who can pick and choose. Most of us are just responding to what's out there. But that being said, I really do pick for the part. I loved having that immediate feedback from The O.C., and more to the point, I loved having a job to go to every day, and getting to exercise those muscles. But also, it got to the point where we were repeating ourselves and telling similar stories. So in that sense I think it was a natural place to end, before it went onto, like, 90210 levels, like 10 years later. Like, they all live together or something. That's kind of ridiculous.
Who's better with a gun — Al Pacino or Mischa Barton?
Al Pacino had a stronger grip, I think. I don't know if you've seen that SNL skit playing off that O.C. scene — pretty fantastic.
Oh yeah, with the ''Hide and Seek'' song playing over and over!
Yeah, that was hilarious.
Do you worry about being pegged as ''that guy from The O.C.'' for the rest of your career?
Constantly. I can't sleep at night. No, honestly, all I can do is try things that I think are different, whether it's [what I did in] Junebug — you know, that small, indie character — or working with Al. I try to do parts based on what those parts are and my ability to do them. I haven't done any of the teen comedy stuff since then. If people put me in that box, there's not much I can do about it.
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