Mostly known for his portrayal as Colin in the TV series L.A. Macabre, actor/model/voiceover artist Aidan Bristow is using his multifaceted talents to great effect by continuing his climb in the industry. Now, in honor of the release of his latest film The Believer, I talk with him about the film, his attraction to working on it, and his experiences with the cast.
Me: Hello and thank you for taking the time to do this. First off, your new project 'The Believer.' What can you tell us about the film?
Aiden Bristow: In the film, we meet Violet and Lucas. They're a couple that is trying to see if they can salvage their relationship after Violet aborted a child that she was pregnant with. It creates a bit of conflict in the relationship and they're trying to see if they can work through it or not, and as the film continues we learn a little more about why Violent aborted the child and it has some demonic undertones to it. From there, the film becomes a little more mysterious and more of a thriller with some horror elements.
Me: How did you come to the role of Lucas? What about him intrigued you?
AB: Shan Serafian, who is the writer/director, he's an extremely talented writer. I had the pleasure to be involved in his first feature film he did about ten or twelve years ago and so l worked with him then. We met on that and he directed me in four different plays from then on and we've had a great working relationship and he was over at my place to work on ideas that we could self-produce with a limited budget and be kept to limited locations which became The Believer. This is Shan's background, he's a ghostwriter for James Patterson and he's really good at getting a scenario or an outline or treatment and turning that into a full-length script. So he went off and did what he did which he's brilliant at and I brought in Sofie who's a friend of mine from acting class who I've always wanted to work with. I introduced her to Shan and they got along really well. The rest is history and we started making the film.
Me: Was there a specific mindset you used to approach the character throughout the shoot?
AB: Yeah, the thing that's tricky about Lucas is knowing beat-by-beat, scene-by-scene, exactly what he knows, what he's thinking, what he's confused by, and what his convictions are about his reality. What was really helpful for me was that we rehearsed for several months prior to the shoot every single week, Sofie and Shan. The three of us, we really discovered those things, going scene-by-scene and going, okay, here Lucas thinks this is what's going on or this is the chance of him saving his marriage and then going back to the page and writing it all down. By the time I showed up on set, what was cool was we didn't have to do any investigation as it was all mapped out who his character was scene by scene. Because we were a low-budget film, we didn't have the luxury of many shoot-days and we had to be very efficient with our time so that came to be very, very useful.
Me: How did you approach the scenes with you and Billy Zane given the twist that comes about?
AB: Well, Billy was really generous to us, you know. We only had him for a day, but he gave us a rehearsal day for free which he didn't have to do. We ended up renting a conference room and talked about our scenes together, who his character was, what the reveal turns out to be. We talked about all those things and I think what we were trying to figure out is how long my character has been working with him as my therapist, what have I been getting out of it, is it a safe space for me to reveal everything, or if there's still something I keep to my chest. So a lot of our conversations between Billy, Shan, and myself were about those things so Billy could kind of get comfortable in the world he was operating in and kind of understand his character a little better. And working with him was a total treat, he was a total professional, and just the fact that he wanted to rehearse suggests that. On that day, he came in, we knocked it out of the park, and by being a fan of his even before I began acting to share the screen with him was a real thrill to rehearse with him and work with him.
Me: Given the intimacy of scenes with co-star Sophie Kargman, what did you two do together to develop your chemistry?
AB: Sofie and I had worked together on screens in class for a while prior to the shoot. We had a good repour as far as how the other worked, we really respected each other's work. Sophie's a really talented actress, she's just one of those people that when you work with her it demands you to be better than what you usually are. She's very sharp and very talented and so, through the format of working together in a class setting, we got used to having someone give direction and taking notes, we were just really familiar with that dynamic going onto rehearsal and being onset. Just being teammates and trying to work through scenes, so I think whatever chemistry there is comes from years and years of being in class together and working with each other so I hope that translated.
Me: Do you recall having any odd or funny on-set stories about yourself or any of the other cast/crew members?
AB: Yeah, I want to talk about something that happened in the ending but I don't want to give away too much! This is in the trailer, but there's a dinner scene in the third act where it's me, Sophie, Lyndsey, and Susan who play Violet's parents and we didn't have the most money in the world but there's a neck-slicing gag that is in the trailer that we only had two attempts at so it has to go right. If it doesn't go right we're basically screwed, so that day was a lot of pressure and everyone's going around smiling a lot really nervously. The first one didn't go as well as we hoped, almost nothing came out as there's this pump with a tube, and these special effects technicians that we had couldn't get any blood to go through. They're pumping as hard as they could, and that made everything even more tense and nervous for the second one. And I remember when Susan's neck started squirting blood there's this huge sigh of relief which is the total opposite of the type of scene we were filming. You should've been horrified and gasping but everyone was just so happy to see this guy and his prosthetic just squirting with blood all over the place which also made for a nightmare to clean up for our production design team but we got the shot that we needed.
Me: What are you most looking forward to with the film out?
AB: I guess what I'm excited about is that, our goal was to make a real thinking-person's film and so I hope people who really like to be challenged in that way and try to do the guess-work as they're along with the film and try to guess what's going to happen in the end that they get a fulfilling experience. That it surprises them enough, that it challenges them that it becomes a cool experience from beginning to end. I hope that as smart as a viewer is and how much they guess what's going to happen that even that viewer gets surprised ultimately by what ends up happening.
That was really my hope when Shan and I were sitting in my room and came up with the story. we knew we didn't have that much money but we thought that if we made something smart and we could execute that we could find an audience. And that's our hope, that the audience we went for is a real thinking-person's horror fan or thriller fan who wants to be challenged because I don't think there's much out there like this, that's for sure.
Me: Lastly, what else are you working on that you'd like to share with our readers? Thank you again for your time!
AB: So, I work in a lot of motion-capture for video games, so the last couple of years I've been very fortunate to work on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, play a really cool character in that. But I just started a new video game where I've signed more NDA's than I know what to do with so I'm not technically allowed to say the name of it but it's going to be a massive franchise as it's a really cool story. I'm having the best time working on it, it's like a cool mystery/sci-fi kind of thing so that should be coming out next year at some point. I'll probably be working on it for the next couple of months. I did want to mention in January I did wrap up working on Halo which will come out later this year so that was a really cool part to work in that franchise. But I've just been really lucky and got to work on some major video game franchises which is odd because I'm not a gamer myself. I don't own a console or anything so I go in with a total open mind on these things, and between the programmers and the writers of these games they've been so generous. They sat me down with total enthusiasm and showed me YouTube clips of everything from the past franchises so it was a concentrated education on those things and I really love it. I think we're all compelled by people who are passionate about their interests and it's been a real treat to be a total novice when it comes to these video games and them telling me the backstories of these video games.
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