Spare a thought for Taylor Kitsch, people. Two years after “John Carter” bombed in ways we dissected at length, followed by the double whammy of “Battleship” and “Savages” also, um, underperforming, and he’s still out there, working his way through serious projects. Our review of HBO‘s AIDS drama “The Normal Heart” finds him one of the better things about it, and he also has Canadian mini-comedy “The Grand Seduction” coming up, where he stars alongside Brendan Gleeson (trailer here).
Accordingly, he sat down with Variety to talk over his newest projects, which revealed that he hasn’t overwhelmed himself with preparation for either of them – “I wish I’d seen it”, he says of the stage version of “The Normal Heart,” and “I had never heard of it or knew it existed” of the original, French-Canadian version of “The Grand Seduction”, which came out 10 years ago. But then again, dude went and sat down with Larry Kramer, “The Normal Heart”’s author, and got his reminiscences of the AIDS crisis right from the horse’s mouth.
Still, Variety also couldn’t resist touching on his past failures, about which Kitsch is pretty open: “it wasn’t an uplifting experience. My biggest regret would have been if I didn’t do enough personally. If I didn’t give it everything I had. If I hadn’t prepped enough. I don’t have that regret, so that allows me to let go.”
Which, kudos to him, but he does strike terror into our hearts with the next sentence. Speaking of the “John Carter” sequel, he says: “I know the second script was fucking awesome. We had to plant a grounding, so we could really take off in the second one. The second one was even more emotionally taxing, which was awesome.” But never fear. There may be a script, but no way is Hollywood that desperate. Yet.