Articles/Interviews: Chick Chick

    I was running late for my interview with Paul Walker, star of The Fast and the Furious. I couldn't remember what time it was scheduled for and had to stop at Walgreen's to get batteries for my tape recorder.

     When I finally entered the Hotel Monaco, Paul's sitting in the hotel lobby, his bags packed and propped in the corner by the porter. Seems that I was his last interview of the day before hopping the shuttle back to SoCal. After introductions, Paul suggested that we move from the lobby into the hotel's parlor.

     When I replied, "Whatever's clever, man, but first I gotta take a piss," he broke into a grin and exclaimed, "Dude, I dig the way you talk." Thank God for that; a kindred spirit of unpretentionality.

     Paul Walker is best known to teen moviegoers as the good looking jerk in such films as The Skulls, Varsity Blues and She's All That. Yet Walker's been a Hollywood brat (in terms of being a silver screen prodigy) since he was 9 years old. You see, that's when he appeared in the Troma cult classic Monster in the Closet. After starring in a string of other forgettable (but no less entertaining) B-movies such as Programmed to Kill and Tammy and the T-Rex (not to mention a stint on The Young and the Restless) Walker hit the big time with a starring role in the surfers-turned-naturalists comedy Meet the Deedles.

     Dude, don't miss our take on Paul in the Fast and the Furious. Given his stature as a rising Hollyood star and bona fide sex symbol (Paul is the classic SoCal male with blonde hair, blue eyes and that smooth surfer slang-tang verbal action), Walker is decidedly down-to-earth and, dare I say, honest.

Back to business
     After returning from the little boys' room, I unpacked my recorder and also laid out a stack of videos on the coffee table in front of us. Walker's face lit up with a grin when he saw the boxes for Monster in the Closet, Programmed to Kill and Meet the Deedles.

     I wasn't sure what kind of reaction I'd get now that I'd spilled all of Walker's proverbial celluloid skeletons in the closet out on the table in front of us. But he just laughed and shook his head as he reached for and picked up the Monster in the Closet box. He excitedly began recounting how he was 9 when the movie started and when he had his 10th birthday one of his teachers brought a birthday cake to the set.

Ah. What a nice teacher.

Memory Lane
Given his low budgie past, I asked Walker if he has any regrets about starring in such obvious, well, crap. "I don't think you can," he replied matter-of-factly. "I think it's funny." Walker paused and picked up the case for Meet the Deedles.

     "Dude, I gotta tell you right now, my brother loves this movie. He's gonna be 13 and, like, this is one of his favorite movies ever. And it's not because I was in it, but because all of his friends. He's in Jr. High School now and, like, kids that he didn't know up until like maybe a year ago are like goin' 'Oh my God! That's your brother...!' Little kids love this movie, so I dig it for that."

    Walker points at the Monster in the Closet box and reiterates what he said earlier, "This was cool. I mean I remember this, like, so well. I remember it like it was yesterday and I mean #$%*, I was only, like, 9, 10 years old [when I made that]. I dig it. And Tammy and the T-Rex? I laugh because every one is like 'What? You worked with Denise Richards?' And I'm like 'Yeah, what's up?!'"

Tabloid love story
     As we reminisced about his B-movie heritage, Walker veered off course a bit, bringing up the wondrous misinformation that seems to clog the Internet.

"It's funny, someone told me that there's some reference to a movie, I don't know, some B.S. about Santa Monica Blvd.? Somebody says there's a flick called Santa Monica Blvd. that I'm working on. I don't know what the hell that is. And then there's something that says I'm doing Othello."

Walker may be confused about these erroneous career updates but he seems to keep it all in perspective. "I've found some cool stuff, though," he laughed. "One of my favorites was that I was dating [Lois and Clark's] Teri Hatcher. Let me think, what else, a couple other hotties [that I was supposedly dating], I think Alyssa Milano was one of them. That's always good."

At a theater near you
Make-believe projects and bogus relationship data aside, Walker is poised to burn up the screen this summer as Brian Spindler in the NOS injected street racing heist thriller The Fast and the Furious. It's his first starring role and subsequently the first time he gets to play an adult and not some oversexed high school jock.

"For sure, for sure. I'm playing someone who's more my age," agrees Walker. "But I'm gonna tell you, doin' Varsity Blues and goin' back to high school was dope. I mean #$&*, all summer long I worked with like 40 … cheerleaders. They were all college-aged, too, at that point. That was a blast. I mean I loved it. I didn't have a prom and I got to play the meathead jock that I hated in high school. I mean I guess I was semi-categorized as being a jock in high school, but it was cool playin' that prick one."

     "…I was kinda weird in high school, though, because I played all the sports yet my hair was always down to my shoulders. I had, like, hair wraps…And I always wore 501s and they were usually holey and I just had stuff written all up and down 'em. I had 'Peace, Love and Happiness', you know? I thought I was a hippie, bro. I wore Birkenstocks every day. I went to a Christian high school, so I was pretty funky. The teachers didn't give me a hard time, though, even though I was totally way out of line in terms of my dress code. But they dug me though, so I got away with it. I was above the law!"

Cops and drivers
     Speaking of being above the law, Walker plays a cop in his latest flick. And given that the movie revolves around the world of illegal street racing and the way that many of today's action stars do their own stunts, just how much of his own driving did he actually do?

"I got to do quite a bit of it actually, you know, all within reason. I got to pull a coupla pretty gnarly E-brake pulls. Like you know where I'm shooting Johnny Tran when he's driving away? That was my idea. They wanted just like a sweeping chase as I was driving and BAAM! BAAM! BAAM! me just shooting wildly. I told Rob [Cohen, the director], I was like 'No, it doesn't work that way.' I was like 'Lemme set it up. I'll load out the parking brake, just WHAAA! pitch like a 90 and I'll just come out, BOOM and shoot over the door.' And he was like 'Can you do that?' And I'm like 'Yeah!'.

" "So all the crew, they're freaked out 'cause I'm comin' right at the camera and I was doin' like 60 to 70 miles an hour. So they put up a stake bed, so they had a bit of a barricade and they put the camera on the other side. I did it three times, just stuck it every time BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! It was just me in the car and I had the gun right here, holstered in my lap and had to do the full quick draw and everything.

"That's what I love. I love doing the action stuff. It's soo much fun!"