Our Interview with Noel Fisher!

We started our fansite about two years ago and we were excited just to interact with Noel via social media and support his work.  Can you image how epic it was for us to sit down for coffee (of course!) with Noel when we were in Los Angeles last month?  Everyone that has met him has told us wonderful things about him. We are happy to confirm that Noel is in fact an amazing individual. We feel privileged to have had the opportunity to hang out with the one and only Noel Fisher.

Could you tell us what your favorite project has been to work on so far?

It’s hard. Every project has a cool new thing about it. There are many cool aspects to movie making- like where you’re at, the cast you’re with- it’s kind of hard to compare.  I think for right now it would be somewhere between Battle: Los Angeles, Shameless, Twilight, and Hatfields & McCoys. They have all involved going away for a certain period of time.  Shameless mostly shoots here [L.A.], but it’s a very family-oriented set and it comes across on the screen too.  For Hatfields & McCoys, Twilight and Battle, they were all shot away from home, which is a whole other…you become kind of like close nit when you’re somewhere else.  For Twilight, it was the “Vamp Camp” and we were all at the one hotel.  You get to hang out together and bond.

What places are you interested in traveling to, not just for work, but also on your own?

I really want to go Europe.  I really have done very little traveling other than work.  The only places I’ve traveled have been for work.   I’ve gone and done things while I’ve been in Romania and that was great.  That was the first time I had ever been to Europe, and the only time other than that was when I went to Birmingham for a convention.  Other than that, I really want to go to Europe.  I really want to go to Thailand and Japan.  I shot The Pacific with Rami [Malek] and that was in Australia. I would love to go back to Australia.  I totally fell in love with Australia.

What are some of your favorite things and sights in L.A.?

It’s a cliché, but I love the beach.  The beach is great here.  Growing up in Vancouver, there are beautiful beaches, but you can’t really go to them for about eight months of the year or maybe more that. And here, most of the year you can manage actually going to the beach.  Anytime I can get out to nature, I really like that like Mojave or going camping.  I’m a big camping person.  In the city [L.A.], Katsuya Sushi is great.  If you’re into sushi, that’s a nice spot here.  I’m pretty simple.  It’s sushi, frozen yogurt and coffee.

So you just wrapped up filming season three of Shameless (YAY!)  How was filming?  Is there anything that you are looking forward to seeing?

I’m really looking forward to episode six, because that’s a really crazy episode.  [He promised to try and live tweet for that episode!]

We mentioned the beard episode in season two and here’s what he had to say about it:

I grew the beard for Hatfields & McCoys funny enough.  They asked everyone to grow your hair and grow your facial hair, because you know its back in the day, a history piece, and all the guys didn’t shave that much.  So I start growing it out and it’s terrible – patchy and gross.  I don’t have black hair either, so when I get to the Shameless set they have to start coloring it in at a certain point. Which kind of helped, because they could color in the patches.  When you see the episodes where I had a full on beard, that was like a month of me trying to grow and I’m like ‘Man, this better be worth it.’  I get to Romania and meet the director and the producers – they literally look at me and they go, ‘Yea we’re going to shave it.’

He shared another good story about his facial hair on Two and a Half Men:

That was my first part that I ever booked in Los Angeles.  He’s supposed to have that straggly beard, but back then I couldn’t even do the straggly beard. I just couldn’t do anything.  They literally took little tiny fake hairs and glued them individually on all over my face to give me that.

Your role in Hatfields & McCoys was a pivotal character in whole the story.

Yeah, he [Cottontop] was a pretty tragic little character.  It’s kind of hardcore that actually happened to him.  That’s pretty sad.  I’ve played kind of a challenged character a couple times now, and one of the reasons I really wanted to do Hatfields & McCoys was that The Dog Named Christmas- a Hallmark movie and the best possible world, a very loving place.  I really like the contrast of showing – especially back in the day – the realities for someone like that and how horrible it turned out for that person.  It was a really fun part and a really fun show to work on.  There were a lot of really talented people on that.  Getting to work with Kevin Costner, Kevin Reynolds, Bill Paxton, and Tom Berenger was amazing.  That was really fun and I feel really lucky that I got to do it, especially this year. [I’ve played] really different characters – like the Shameless character is so different from the Hatfields & McCoys character, which was so different from the Twilight character.  It’s really fun; I get to jump around being completely different people.

Can you talk about your costume in Breaking Dawn Part 2?

The funniest thing about the costume was the boots.  We both had these little elf boots, they’re really really cute.  They had absolutely no grip on the bottom, like smooth.  So every time before running on the fake snow, we’d say to each other, ‘Okay, you alright Guri? Don’t break anything.  I’m going to try not to break anything.’  Stopping or doing anything like that was really difficult, but it was fun.  It all worked out really well.

Did you get hurt at all filming BDPt2?

I didn’t, thankfully.  I had these suede riding pants that had no give at all and that’s one of the funny stories I’ve said during interviews, that the back of my pants just ripped like twice.  I was so happy I wore black underwear that day and not some strange color, polka dots or cupids.

One of our favorite scenes was the arrival scene with the wolves.  How was it working with the CGI wolves?

That’s my favorite scene.  The CGI wolves are really fun to work with, because it’s one of those very funny movie-making magic moments where nothing is there.  They’re just not there for the scene in the woods. They just gave us general areas to look at and there would be a tree there or something.  In the showdown scene, they would come in with these big cardboard cutouts of wolves and stick them next to us.  When we would do the running scenes, you would literally have someone running along side next to you holding a cardboard wolf.  It was a really funny moment.

The other really cool thing about the arrival scene was the fast running.  That was one of the coolest things I have ever done.  There’s a huge carpet that they lay out, about 150 feet of carpet, like a rubber carpet.  You just stand on it and they pull it on a truck at about 20-30 miles per hour and you’re running while being pulled on this carpet with little elf shoes.  No, actually for that one they made us wear real shoes.  They were really about safety with everything.  There’s a lot of cool stuff in it…the stunt people we worked with were amazing.  I got to pretend beat up the badass from Tron – the guy with the mask in the new Tron movie.  He’s like the really hardcore guy.  I had a whole conversation with him, because he’s one of the Volturi and I’m like, ‘Dude you could kill me so easily in real life, but you’re making me look like I’m tough.’

What was your reaction when you read the big twist at the end?

I thought it was genius.  You can do a lot of things in such a different medium.  In the book, you can have the thoughts so specifically laid out and it could become really tense and you can talk about all the tension in the thoughts.  In movies, you have to show it. You can’t show thoughts and there’s only so many times you can do like The Wonder Years voice over thing and it doesn’t work for a conclusion or a climatic ending to this really epic series and especially epic movie.  So I thought that it was just a really good idea that they took powers that are in the book and created a scenario as to why the decision get made that happen in the book.  I thought it worked seamlessly.  It wasn’t something that was way left field and works with conjunction with the books.  I was really happy with it.

What are some shows you watch, besides Shameless of course?

I really like Game of Thrones.  The books are crazy good too.  Homeland is amazing.  Everyone is raving about Homeland and it is well deserved of the raves.  There’s so much and I feel really lucky, because right now with all these networks doing their own original programming, it seems like the Golden Age of television.  There’s so much good TV on right now.  Sopranos kind of kicked it off and from then on we’ve had Deadwood and so many amazing TV shows. That’s why I get to do a show like Shameless and watch Homeland and Treme and all these amazingly acted and written shows.  Those are some of them.

Anything in the works now that you are done with the filming Shameless?

There’s another season of Shameless that I am contracted for, so I definitely will be in the next season.  Which is fun because I love working on it.  Other than that I really don’t have anything right now.  I’m kind of looking forward to a little bit of downtime.  It’s been a big year with HATFIELDS & MCCOYS, Shameless and Twilight.  There’s been a lot going on this year and I’m all right to have just a couple of weeks to sit and hang out with Sushi.  There are always meetings that I’m taking on some cool scripts.  We’ll see if anything pops.