411mania Interviews: DJ Qualls

Posted by Jeffrey Harris on 11.10.2009

The Road Trip star speaks with 411mania for an exclusive interview on his new original web series, Circle of Eight, with episode 6 premiering Tuesday.

Actor DJ Qualls was introduced to audiences in the outrageous hit comedy, Road Trip, almost a decade ago. Since that time Qualls has appeared in films such as The New Guy, The Core, Delta Farce, and Hustle And Flow. DJ was nice enough to take some time out of his busy schedule to speak with us last week about his career and his role in the new Paramount Digital web series, Circle of Eight, with episode 6 set to premiere November 10 on MySpace.



Jeffrey Harris: How was your Halloween?

DJ Qualls: I actually got obliterated and ate a bag of candy and passed out. So it was pretty uneventful.

JH: What kind of candy was it?

DJQ: It was the flavored Tootsie Rolls. Have you ever had those?

JH: No, I haven't. I've had like a chocolate Tootsie Roll.

DJQ: Every Halloween they have them in all kinds of flavors. So, I lost my dog earlier in the day, I was so tired. I finally found him, so I drank like a bunch of vodka and sat at home and ate Tootsie Rolls.

JH: So you weren't giving the Tootsie Rolls out to kids?

DJQ: *Laughs* No.

JH: Can you tell us about your roll in the show, Circle of Eight?

DJQ: The show is a 10-part web series. The episodes are about 6 minutes each. It's about this group of people who live at an apartment building in downtown Los Angeles, and at the beginning of the series a new girl moves in and all these strange things start happening to her. And what we come to find out fairly shortly is that these people have been living the same day, over and over and over again, sort of a Groundhog Day thing and at the end of the day they die. And they've been doing this for thousands of times in a row and she never remembers any of the days but the other seven members of the cast do. And it's sort of an experiment; we come to realize through living this day over and over again that she makes a choice and every day she makes the same choice, so we're trying to get her to -- kind of manipulate her into making a series of choices that would save us and we haven't gotten it right yet and the series picks up sort of in the final day of her journey.

JH: It sort of sounds like when I moved out to LA.

DJQ: Every day was the same?

JH: Yes, and I didn't die at the end of the day, but close to it. And who is your character in this show?

DJQ: My character is Randall, and I'm making a documentary about what's happened to us. And the only thing that survives is at the end of every day is the tape that I made and our memory of what happened. And so we review the tapes after every new day starts to find out how to manipulate the situation to go in a different direction. And every day we sort of hope against hope that we are going to save ourselves, but it never seems to happen. And the series is interactive in that the audience will ultimately determine our fate. They'll determine what decisions Jessica [the girl who moves in] -- what decisions she makes.

JH: This is sort of symbolic of the change in which media content viewing has changed in more toward digital on demand entertainment, not just with web shows like this but also movies and TV shows -- getting it on your Iphones, your computers, and on demand. These sorts of shows are on my Video On Demand channel for my Time Warner cable box. Media seems to be very much shifting to this digital, on demand model. Do you think this is part of that?

DJQ: Yeah, absolutely . . . when do you a film, like you may do it and won't see it for a year or year and a half. We finished this last month. And the reason why I got involved is because I'm looking -- I've never done anything like this. And this is quality -- it's a studio quality feature broken up, and it will be released as a feature after this, after the decisions are made and after it makes its run on MySpace. But yeah, this is where we're heading, and everything you do now seems to be from your computer so it would make sense -- like you do all this sort of research about media online and now you can actually get some media content at the same place where you're doing your shopping or you're doing your networking. I think it's really cool.

JH: You mentioned the shorts being broken up will eventually be edited together and released as a feature, was that how the project was conceived from the beginning or was there any thought on making the show an episodic TV series or anything like that? Or was the web series followed by a feature the original plan?

DJQ: We shot it as a film. It was interesting to shoot it in this way because we had to have a 6 minute segment, but we shot additional things that will be edited in. The feature will be R-rated and we can't do R-rated content, I don't think, on the web. We're actually age restricted in some way. But shot it like a regular film shoots and the productions values seemed to be right along what you would have in a feature-length movie of this budget. And I think this is the highest budget thing ever produced just for the web.

JH: You got your start and big break playing Kyle in Road Trip almost 10 years ago. What was that like for you when you were just first getting in?

DJQ: I was doing a play in community theatre, Nashville, and at casting I wound up going through a media casting group in Atlanta that was casting Road Trip, and I went in and I auditioned for a one-line part with like 25 other guys and I said my line in front of Todd Phillips and . . . so I got the movie and we finished about 3 months later and I came to LA about 3 months after the film was finished to do some press and I was driving down Sunset Boulevard from out of town and I saw my face on the side of a building, and that was just sort of -- I had no idea what was actually happening. And the movie came out and it was really successful, and three years passed really, really quickly. I did 8 movies in 3 years . . . it was hard to get my mind around, and its still a little bit hard.

JH: I'm sure a lot of little kids think growing up, I want to be in movies and be a big star. Was it ever like that for you and then for it to be actually happening to you, what was that like? A lot of people think I want to get out of my small town and have a movie career, so how did you feel about that?

DJQ: Yeah, absolutely. I dreamed about acting -- but I'm from a town of about 4,000 people. The biggest industries in my town at the time were pajamas and caskets. Those are the two factories that sort of the high school funnels into. And I had no idea how I was going to make it happen, but I always wanted to do it. I decided it probably wasn't going to happen before I got in Road Trip, so I applied to law school in Vandervilt, and I thought that's probably what I would do but I would do community theater -- and I felt like I had to get some kind of creative outlet. And I was really lucky because I've seen kids, now that I've lived in LA for a long time, I've seen kids moving out here in droves to try and make something happen and they go 10 years without so much as an agent. And I don't have that in me, I would've quit a long time ago. So I sort of think this is what I'm supposed to be doing because it wasn't easy, but I was lucky. And I think if I didn't have some kind of talent or ability I wouldn't have kept it going this long. But I do think at least initially, luck played a huge part for me.

JH: Funny little story. One of my favorite TV shows, The Big Bang Theory, you did a special guest appearance in the first season as one of Sheldon's acquaintances, Toby Loobenfeld. I was in the audience the night that episode was filming, so I saw got to see you live working with that cast and that was a great experience for me and I really enjoyed Toby. Do you think he'll ever pop up again on that show or do you think by the nature of his ruse with Sheldon, masquerading as a drug-addicted cousin, keeps you out of the story?

DJQ: I don't know. It's really funny that you were there. That event was really the most horrifying night of my entire career so far. I had ever done like a sitcom. It's a completely different set of skills. I mean like I actually auditioned for the part Jim Parsons (Sheldon) got initially. We actually tested against each other, and he was so much more right for it than I was. And it was the creators that asked me back, they knew me, they were like we got you this part, and I was like yeah I'd love to because I knew the cast pretty well. So I went to the show and after day 2, they're completely off book. And we don't do that in film. We do like a page and a half a day. And they know 60 page scripts in 2 days and I was really, really nervous about that. And I don't know. I don't know about going back to a sitcom. I don't think that's for me. I mean I really admire that. It's really funny. People tend to look down on the type of acting [in a sitcom], it's presentational, and it is a really tough skill. I think it's much harder than film, and I don't think I'm cut out for it.

JH: I couldn't tell that you were nervous at all. You really seemed to have it down.

DJQ: I took some anti-anxiety medicine right before. I think it was working for me. But the day before we taped, I was driving to Warner Bros. for our final rehearsal and I broke down; like I was begging God to break Warner Bros. down before we had to tape this. It was the most stressful thing I've ever done.

JH: Me personally, I probably wouldn't have been able to keep calm around Kaley Cuoco.

DJQ: She's actually very, very sweet and she's also one of the reasons why I was so relaxed because there was a big talk right before I had -- I mean I had this huge monologue that came out real weird and they kept re-writing it. And the creator like as they were re-writing it right before we taped, I kept messing up the lines, and he [Kaley] was like -- I heard him off stage, "this guy can't remember anything!" And I was like, "****!" And Kaley just pulled me aside and was like, "Look, just relax. You've been in a bunch of movies, and you just go out and if you have to do it bunch of times it will take a bunch of times." And I wound up nailing it on the first time. I don't know. The show is so beautifully written and the cast is so talented, but I don't know how I fit in there.

JH: Did they get you in on the ping pong tournament at all?

DJQ: No, we didn't do that. Oddly enough, as I was praying for Warner Bros. to burn down, there was a fire around the lot around the same time. So, I think that impacted our rehearsal schedule and it was a year ago so I don't remember, but something was going on and we were really rushed.

JH: DJ, you're very much a working actor out here. As an actor and when you're working and you're not always working, how do you handle the down time? The ups and the downs and maybe you really had an eye on a part and it didn't work out. How do you stay in it mentally out here?

DJQ: Well I mean I think that key to survival in this business is to not let it get you because when you start out acting you have this sort of hope and freshness that you bring to things and I think its really attractive. And I think it's what gets you noticed. When you lose that, when you are wounded and jaded and you let Hollywood get to you, it dulls what you bring to the party in a sense and I think that that slows your career. For me, I have disappointments all the time. I'm bored out of my mind when I'm not working. I've learned to leave LA as much as possible. I have friends who aren't in the entertainment business. I don't go out. I mean went through the whole period of going out in Hollywood a lot, and I don't do that anymore. It's just meaningless, and I sort of focus on what I'm doing now and what's coming next. I've gotten into producing, and I'm writing with my buddy and we're doing a feature next year together. So, I don't let it get me. I mean, I have a friend who's in Twilight now, and she's going through her first sort of experience of people writing terrible things about her.

JH: The paparazzi aren't letting the Twilight cast get any sleep.

DJQ: I really feel bad for them because I know what that feels like. When you're new, and you first catch people's attention, people love to be nice to you but they love even more to write terrible things about you. And I think more than the actual business itself, the stuff around it is the stuff that takes you out. It can really, really hurt you. And you just have to learn -- I mean I have an interview next with someone who wrote something really terrible about me and I have to pretend like it didn't happen. And that's part of this job, I realize that journalists now aren't just journalists, they're media critics. And it makes them look more cool and draws more attention if they write bad things about you and so I accept that's part of it.

JH: Anything else in the pipeline right now? I know you mentioned you were writing a movie with your friend. Anything else like that?

DJQ: A movie that's festival-ing right now called Last Day of Summer, that I starred and produced with Nikki Reed, that's my friend that's in Twilight. And I'm doing John Sayles next picture with Chris Cooper in the Philippines in February . . . really excited about that. That is a perfect example of keeping yourself going. Like this year wasn't great for me, I worked like two times because everything I was offered was terrible, but then you have a moment, I'm working for John Sayles next. I mean so that's the exciting part about being an actor out here is that you never know what's around the corner so to just keep yourself going to have a great opportunity out of nowhere. And for me that's what happened. I got this script which was good that they asked me to read, and I was like there's no way they will cast me in this. I went in and I did my best, and the next day I got a call, "when can you do it?"

JH: Thanks so much for your time, and looking forward to seeing more of you in Circle of Eight soon.

DJQ: Thank you.



Thank you to DJ Qualls for taking the time to speak with us.