GEEKchocolate

AH - Is that at all clichéd that American actors are intimidated by Shakespeare in the way that maybe British actors are intimidated by [Edward] Albee or [Eugene] O’Neill?

JW - Are they? I think there’s a slight trepidation in people who have been acting for a long time and some of the people in this never really had [performed Shakespeare], but the main body of them, Clark [Gregg] and Reed [Diamond] and Amy and Alexis and Fran, they were all classically trained and all have done a great deal of Shakespeare. I’m told that Fran Kranz was the best high school King Lear ever.

AH - Is there a record of this production?

JW - I wish. But yes, I knew I had a phalanx of people who could absolutely just walk in and get it done no problem, and the rest, it was largely on trust. They were all good. Sean had never done it, I don’t think Tom [Lenk] and Nick [Kocher] had done it.

AH - There’s probably an assumption that it’s very different to do this than it is to do Avenger’s Assemble, etc, but isn’t it kind of similar in more ways than people think? You have characters, you have an ensemble, you have stories to tell…

JW - Yeah, fewer explosions. We had a few, but the movie was long, so… At first you’re working around everybody’s schedule, and everybody’s busy with something else, so it was exactly like Avenger’s Assemble. And at the end of the shoot, someone said this must be so different, and I’m like, amazingly it’s not, because the process of developing a play to a screenplay is - why is everybody here, and what is Margaret’s interior life, which for me is actually kind of beautiful and tragic, and what’s going on with these guys, because I’m not going to invite my friends to come and work for nothing if I haven’t got a good reason for them to be on screen.

How does Leonato’s aide, which was combined from messengers to give Leonato some presence, played by Joshua Zar, who is just always behind him indicating his power, and how does that work out, where is his one moment? And it’s not that different than how does the guy with the bow and arrow matter in an alien invasion.

AH - I can see that.