Lou Diamond Phillips is One Bad Hombre in Get Fast

The last time we saw Lou Diamond Phillips brandishing six-shooters, scaring supporting players,  and sporting the spiffiest cowboy attire imaginable, he was stealing scenes and going sociopathic in Big Kill, the wild and wooly 2018 Western in which he portrayed Johnny Kane, a flamboyant hired gun who took ungodly delight in doing murderous dirty work for a treacherous town boss known as The Preacher (Jason Patric).

Now the C&I cover star is once again playing an ostentatious gunslinger, this one known simply and appropriately as The Cowboy, in actor-director James C. Clayton’s full-throttle, pedal-to-the metal action-thriller Get Fast (now available for rental or purchase on streaming platforms). The big difference this time is, Phillips is playing a contemporary character, a flashy fixer for an unforgiving drug kingpin who wants The Cowboy to round up and gun down the professional thief (Clayton) -- known as, well, The Thief – who, along with his partner in crime, stole millions of her ill-gotten gain.

We had the pleasure of talking with Phillips a few days ago about Get Fast – and, while we were at it, about his latest novel, The Tinderbox: Underground Movement (set for release Nov. 19), and his next movie, Werewolves (Dec. 6 in theaters). Here are some highlights from our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Cowboys & Indians: So did you get to recycle some of your flashy wardrobe from Big Kill in Get Fast?

Lou Diamond Phillips: [Laughs] No, not really. I just think that when you’re playing characters that are somewhat similar, you have to do everything you can to make them individual and unique. So even if I had kept some of the Big Kill wardrobe, I don’t think it would've applied here. What was great is that the costume designer on this one came up with some really great choices with the duster and the hat and the shirt and the whole nine yards. So it was quite fun.

C&I: I can’t help thinking that when you first read the script and came across some of the choicer bits of dialogue – like when you tell a targeted individual, “I hope there’s no hard feelings – if it were up to me, I would have let you off with a stern warning!” -- you actually had a great big smile on your face as you imagined how you would deliver that line.”

Phillips: The truth of the matter is you’re absolutely right. When you read stuff like that, I can automatically hear myself saying it. And from the first set of dialogue, I heard the voice. I knew it was going to be kind of like my dad, who lives down in Texas. I just knew I was going to do that kind of thing. The script was fun and exciting and fast paced to begin with. And then when you get to dialogue like this, you go, “OK, alright, I’m just going to have some fun with this.” And every once in a while, I'd add this or that to some of the dialogue, or start singing “Streets of Laredo.” That was kind of my choice. But a lot of it was already on the page. And so it was really just committing to the bit, as they say in comedy.

C&I: Were there ever times when you had to pause the cameras because you and other actors started cracking up?

Phillips: Fortunately for me, I was the funniest one there, so nobody else was cracking me up when it comes to that. I mean, when I did Psych or Brooklyn Ninety-Nine, I was playing The Straight-Faced Guy. And that was challenging, because James Roday and Andy Samberg are both hilarious human beings, and they would crack me up all the time. But on this one, I got to be the funny guy. And the other actors, you could kind of see mirth in their eyes, but they never cracked.

Well, I’d tell you who cracked a lot was James Clayton who played The Thief, but also is the director. And I could see him covering his mouth a few times behind the monitor. And as a theater performer, when you get that immediate reaction, you go, “OK, I’m on the right path.”

C&I: Is it just my imagination, or does James look in this movie a tad like a Ryan Reynolds who’s been slapped around a lot?

Phillips: [Laughs] Oh my gosh, I’ve referred to him a few times as the road company Ryan Reynolds. They’re both Canadian, they’re both polite as the day is long, and both have a great sense of humor. And so yeah, James could play his little brother easily.

C&I: What was the toughest nut for you to crack while you were preparing to play The Cowboy?

Phillips: Well, I think you know me well enough, Joe, to know I never phone it in. It’s never a walk in the park. But it’s funny: It seems lately like when somebody writes with me in mind, they decide to give me these paragraphs and paragraphs of dialogue. And it’s like, hey, I’m getting older, man. I don’t need to be doing monologues like this anymore. But yeah, it’s a challenge getting those chunks not only memorized but massaged.  Because with especially good dialogue, you want to get it right. I’m not one of these people who want to just sort of half-ass it, or ad-lib it, especially when the writer is the director -- you want to be respectful of the amount of work they put in to really craft the things that you’re saying.

And then with a character like The Cowboy, everything is all about presentation in his image, and how his rhythms are and all of that. So it’s all about doing the requisite amount of homework to really kind of dial it in, especially when you’re dealing with a low budget film where there’s a lot of action and everything else. You are not going to be doing 6, 8, or 9 takes to get the performance down. You’re lucky if you get two or three. So the schedule definitely pays service to the stunts and all of that stuff. That takes a lot of time. So they expect you to show up as the actor and be able to act efficiently.

C&I: Moving along to another subject, you have a new book coming out next week, the second in your Tinderbox fantasy franchise.

Phillips: I do indeed. And I'm incredibly happy about it. I mean, the first book, The Tinderbox: Soldier of Indira – that was a long process. My buddy Craig Johnson helped me out with that. Along with another dear friend, Chris Bohjalian, author of The Flight Attendant and The Princess of Las Vegas, and other New York Times best sellers. They kind of steered me down the right path to publishing with the first book. And the first book was so well-received and so well reviewed that my wife and I turned our minds to doing a sequel to it.

It literally was Yvonne who came up with the plot for The Tinderbox: Underground Movement. We had originally thought that we’d raid the fairy tale world much like we did with the first one with Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytale, The Tinderbox. But she came up with a plot and a threat a conflict that literally feels like it was pulled from between the lines of the first book. And whereas the first book took me almost 10 years to write off and on because of my day job, the second one I pounded out in about a year. And she does illustrations in this one as well. It drops in hardcover November 19, and it’s also available in audio and Kindle.

C&I: Any potential for movie or TV adaptations of the books?

Phillips: I originally wrote the first book as a screenplay. But I realized that because I want to direct it -- nobody was going to give me that much money, man. It was just really, really expensive, which is why I wrote the book in the first place. And I also set it in space because I figured that was going to be the commercial route to get it made. This was before that type of fantasy really, really took off on television, after Game of Thrones. And after having really expanded the world and embellished what was originally in the screenplay, I realize now that I do think it’s a series. I think the first book can cover 10 episodes, the second book the same, and I would love to see it go down that path. We’ve had a couple of inquiries, nothing that I can etch in stone just yet.

Hopefully the second book will do well and that will spark a little more interest. The only problem with it, of course, is that it would be very expensive. It’s not like you're shooting a nice little family drama on Long Island or someplace. I mean, you have to create these whole worlds, and there would be a massive amount of CGI. I think an audience now is used to Game of Thrones – which, to be quite honest, I mean, it’s not television. I mean, they take three weeks to shoot a battle scene – man, that’s a movie. So it would be a big ask to do 10 hours’ worth of film. This one would be quite an undertaking. And so it’s not an easy sell. But, hopefully, we’ll see some interest spark for it at some point.

C&I: Meanwhile, you have another movie coming out next month called… Werewolves?

Phillips: That’s right, Joe. And it’s all about vampires.

C&I: [Laughs] But seriously, folks…

 Phillips: No, I’m really thrilled about it, man. This is director Steven C. Miller’s first wide theatrical release. He’s been an indie guy, doing streaming and art-house stuff. But this one is coming out in I think in excess of 2,500 theaters across North America on December 6th. And you got Mr. Action Hero, Frank Grillo, as the lead. Frank told me he’s seen it, and he really liked it. That’s saying a lot, because Frank’s not easy to please.

C&I: Not unlike yourself.

Phillips: I admit, sometimes it’s just a gig, and that’s the way it is. But I've been so pleased, man, because I’ve been able to put my heart into everything I’ve done lately. With Werewolves, it’s a great concept, in that it’s not just getting bit by one werewolf and then you turn into a werewolf. No, they went big. This is The Walking Dead big, where a super moon triggers a latent gene in a lot of people, and you're talking about hundreds if not thousands of people turning into werewolves from the effects of the super moon. And I play the head of the CDC, who’s desperately to find a way to block the effects of this on people.

It’s really interesting. All of us have recently lived through a global pandemic, and here you’ve basically got a global pandemic of werewolves. So it’s a great concept, one that really ratchets up the amount of action there is. Yeah, it’s like The Purge meets An American Werewolf in London.

C&I: That sounds like a good tagline.

Phillips: Exactly right.