Shooting in Italy, playing a recently paroled felon forced to go undercover, Tom Welling enjoyed his time becoming Terry Jacobs. Creating his own backstory for the character, he needs to bring down the head of the most infamous mob syndicate in Italy, played by Cam Gigandet.
We talked with Welling about becoming the character, action sequences and of course had to have some reflection on his time on Smallville as fan-favorite Clark Kent. This Superman can do it all….
Interviewed for Family Entourage
Family Entourage: Your character is Terry, he’s this felon and he is forced to go undercover… so talk to me a little bit about getting into his mindset.
Tom Welling: The quick answer is I like that he’s a good guy doing bad things for what he thinks is a good reason. And the film works for me because when I read it, Terry gets himself into a situation, but he doesn’t know how to get out of it. He has to navigate every single scene in order to get through the film. So I found that very interesting as a character.
FE: Yeah, I think that’s interesting too because your character, oftentimes, we see him a lot with Griff who’s played by Cam [Gigandet], and it’s kind of this back and forth rhythm of unpredictability, but it keeps us as audiences guessing. Share about what that banter mixed in with then action sequences looked like….
TW: Well, it was great because what Scott wrote and directed, especially for Cam’s character, it was important that we thought that Cam needed Terry for some reason, but we don’t know what it is. And so a lot of the film is him testing that trust, and then of course we know what happens as a result. But I think Cam playing such a great psychopath and being so different from take to take and scene to scene. I mean, we never knew what he was going to do in the best sense, and Terry just had to kind of like, wait, wait, wait, not knowing whatever was going to happen. Because I don’t think Terry really cared about himself. That was another thing he cared about, helping somebody else in the longterm. I don’t think Terry really thought too highly of himself either. So those were little things that I kind of just put in there.
FE: So you filled in that own backstory on your own so that it could better inform?
TW: Yeah, I mean, when Cam puts the gun to Terry’s head and he’s like, don’t point a gun at me. It’s like, you got to mean it, if you know what I mean, because he sure looks like he could shoot him.
FE: The film is Mafia Wars, so of course Italy is going to be a character, but you actually got to shoot in Rome. What was the experience like? How does that help you as an actor mentally get into that place?
TW: It completely helps because when I spoke to Scott about the film, he said, we’re only going to do this if we shoot in Rome. We’re not going to shoot in Canada and make it look like Rome. We’re only going to go to Rome. We’re going to shoot in the heart of Rome. We’re going to go to the actual places. And that was a big draw to me, because although I lived, I grew up living in different places in Europe and whatnot, but being alone in Rome, shooting a film, you use that as a fish out of water sort of mentality.
FE: Did your family get to come and did you explore it all or did you even use that and say, okay, they are somewhere else…
TW: Unfortunately they’d not be able to come because the kids were too young. And when you go to shoot a movie, it’s like they’re as much on their own as I am when I’m filming, because you’re never around. There’s not a lot of downtime when you’re shooting a film to hang out. So I think if we do Mafia Wars 2, they will definitely be a part of it.
FE: Well, also, there’s just some roles that stay with an actor forever because it’s so hard to separate them because you just loved the way that they took that on. For you, that’s Clark Kent in Smallville, and I worked at the CW when that was a show so it holds a special place in my heart too. But what does it mean for you to still be able to connect with audiences even now for that show, and then be able to have them come along and get introduced to new work with this film?
TW: I think it’s great because I think I’d like to think it created a fan base. And what I’m feeling more now is when I connect with fans, I’m hearing what that show meant to them, especially when they were young and then going through high school and college. And so you don’t get to experience that when you’re actually making the actual show. And then what you do is you do movies like Mafia Wars, and you hope that those people watch those movies. You know what I mean? But no, I think I enjoy Smallville more now than I did when we did it. I think I appreciate it more now, and I think it’s because of the interaction with the fans, and I mean that it means a lot to people and I appreciate that.
Available on Digital and On Demand on October 11th
