In Season 2 of True Blood, Ed Quinn played Stan a pretty viscious and uncontrollable vampire working under Godric in Dallas, Texas. Ed Quinn plays another pretty rough character in the new film The Caller with Rachel LeFevre and True Blood’s Stephen Moyer.
Ed plays Mary’s abusive ex-husband Steven. In the film, we’re not sure if his character is setting Mary up, or if Mary completely lost her mind? Fango spoke with Quinn about his new supernatural thriller, currently in release from the Samuel Goldwyn Company.
FANGORIA: Tell us about your role in THE CALLER.
ED QUINN: THE CALLER is sort of a psychological thriller. I portray Steven, Mary Kee’s ex-husband. On the surface, he seems very abusive, very angry. It’s a very real sense of terror. There’s an aspect to the script that’s so psychological, it’s almost surreal in trying to figure out what’s happening. What’s genius about the screenplay Sergio Casci created is that audience members can open up to the psychological horror that’s taking place among the time-shifting and all of the scary moments. There’s a very real terror, the domestic violence and being a prisoner in your own home. Even if you haven’t experienced it, people can relate and understand it, so it adds another layer of fear.
FANG: Was it the psychological aspects that attracted you to the script?
QUINN: What attracted me was the smartness. Without giving away too much, audiences, as they’re watching the film or seeing it a second time, will see things that are different. On the surface level, it’s just a psychological thriller with all these crazy supernatural things happening, but there’s an entire cerebral aspect to the film. What I loved about it, as you watch it a second time, in my character’s case, watch how his clothing and demeanor changes. Pay close attention to when I’m wearing the wedding ring. I love the attention to detail. When I first got to Puerto Rico, [co-star] Stephen Moyer called me down to have coffee. We started talking about all these aspects of the script, all the events and time changes, Sergio and [director] Matthew Parkhill’s attention to detail. That’s what I loved about the screenplay. It’s very smart. It can be straight-ahead horror or it can be this psychological thriller. It’s this web where you have to pull together and extract all these ideas—a lot of duality.
FANG: Steven might possibly be the cause behind Mary’s terrorizing phone calls, or he could be the red herring, a distraction from the real culprit. Though the audience doesn’t know what happened between them, Steven feels wronged by Mary. How did you approach the character within those scenes?
QUINN: I’ve played a few cool villains, and the key to a villain is you’re the hero of your own movie. Everybody else is making one movie. You’re making your own. I think the weak place to play someone like Steven, especially when dealing with domestic violence, is to play him out as angry and power-hungry. In domestic violence cases, they’re people who are frustrated, confused, embarrassed and hurt. I tried to layer a lot of that in. One, because I think it makes the character a little more scary. When he’s hurt or wronged, you’re more scared of him because he feels justified. It’s one thing if someone’s just mean or if they seem a little unhinged. There are some moments of physical altercation, but Mary Kee is another aspect. Is he exhausted after this long relationship with someone who’s bipolar or schizophrenic? When he comes home, she’s just gone nuts. He’s tired, at the end of his rope. Because we’re seeing it through her eyes, this guy is scary, he’s abusive and stalking her. Or is it, because they’re in a relationship and he knows her better than anyone else, and she is in a manic state? There are so many layers, there’s no exposition offered. But you can look at my performance and then look at the movie as a whole. You’ll start going, “Huh? What’s really going on here?”
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