David Dastmalchian, Late Night with the Devil Star, Speaks

David Dastmalchian feels lucky. His new film, Late Night with the Devil, which premiered at SXSW 2023 to rapturous applause, has opened in theaters as a box office hit before heading to streaming April 19 on Shudder, and he takes a role uncommon in his career so far: The lead, Jack Delroy, a 1970s late night host about to make a truly disastrous judgment call during a Halloween live taping. Dastmalchian still can’t make sense of his top billing, or wrap his head around why his directors, the Melbourne-based brotherly duo of Cameron and Colin Cairnes, chose him as their guy. As with a live taping, though, there’s no time to fuss or quibble. It’s happening now.

Dastmalchian’s career of small, memorable appearances in films like Dune, The Suicide Squad, Relaxer, The Dark Knight, the Ant-Man series, Blade Runner 2049, The Belko Experiment, Boston Strangler and, most recently, Oppenheimer has, in his view, ill-prepared him for a character like Jack. Jack is slick, polished, a sponge soaked through with charisma and a latent mean streak that grows ever wider the further Late Night with the Devil goes; Dastmalchian’s own calculus suggests a vast gap separating his personality from Jack’s. But David Dastmalchian has life experience in the form of addictions he kicked over two decades ago, not to mention a casual authority over the many ways fear manifests in us all and functions as a behavioral motivator. It’s through these qualities that he found his way into Jack’s psyche. (He hosted Fangoria’s Chainsaw Awards, too! Every little bit helps.)

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For a film like Late Night with the Devil, where minimal resources and a period setting demand ingenuity to buttress attention to detail, getting the background right is crucial. David Dastmalchian believes that that effort is “where all the glory lives, where all the magic shines.” This is true, but everything the Cairnes brothers and their crew do to lend the film its authenticity ultimately revolves around Dastmalchian’s character. Jack Delroy serves as both the protagonist and the villain at the same time, the cause of his own downfall willing to take everyone within arm’s reach with him.

Speaking with Paste by Zoom, David Dastmalchian dug deep into the heart of Jack and how playing the character meant confronting his relationship with fear and drawing on his history as an addict.

Paste Magazine: There are two sides of Late Night with the Devil. There’s the detail that goes into recreating the talk show setting, the period setting, and then there’s your performance. You’re the anchor for the movie. These are the two essential parts to what make the movie function. I’m curious about the effort that went into recreating that setting as the lead.

David Dastmalchian: So, for me, fear is a feeling that I’ve experienced on a wide spectrum my whole life. I was afraid of the dark. I was afraid of being left alone. I was afraid of death. I was afraid of the other side. I was afraid of not being liked. So many of the fears that I feel, and have felt, since I was a little boy are shared by all of us, and there are so many different ways of traversing and surviving fear, and how we are affected by it, and sometimes, if we are able to develop tools, how we are able to navigate it, or how we may choose to allow it to affect us.

One of the first times that I recognized that fear could be my friend was when I stepped foot for the first time onto a film set ever in my life back in 2007 in Chicago, on Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, riddled with so much fear, in fact, and so much anxiety that I had no clue what I was doing, that I had no business being there, that my body wouldn’t stop shaking. My ability through my training as an actor, and some very good luck and an amazing director who helped calm me down, was channeling that into the work in a way that ended up benefiting the performance.

So with Late Night with the Devil, all of a sudden here I am about to embark on playing a role that I, in my deepest, most self-conscious, most self-defeatist inner chatter, was saying, “David Dastmalchian, there’s no way in hell any person in the world is gonna believe that you are a convincing late night talk show host. You don’t have the charisma, you don’t have the personality, you don’t have the look, you don’t have the style, you don’t have the comedic chops. What are you doing?”

That’s a fear that I feel is very important to try and exist and crawl through, as difficult as it is, and I’m so glad I did, because what it forced me to do was big swings and dive into my tools as an actor, and find new tools that I’d never used before, so that I could, if I did it right, hopefully portray someone that authentically felt like they were a real talk show host of the ’70s. That was the launchpad. There was nothing that made me feel confident about going into this, other than the fact that the directors seemed so certain that I was the man for the job. Baffling to me. Absolutely baffling.

That opens up one of the things I want to talk about: I’m with Colin and Cameron. I think that they won the lottery. They and Lee Pickford got the right leading man. It’s nice seeing you in supporting parts, whether it’s Dune or Suicide Squad, or something like Relaxer, but it’s great seeing you at the center of this. I see Jack as a composite of other characters you’ve played. I wondered if the more you got into it and the more production went on, if you started to bring those characters into Jack.

It’s interesting that you saw that, because I saw nothing within the prism of Jack Delroy that reflected or refracted any drop of light from anything I’d ever done before. In fact, what was so terrifying for me is that generally, in a Tarzan-like way, I am at least able to swing vine to vine with my roles and my performances, and I get the encouragement of saying that there were things about that character and that performance that I felt were really useful, and then I swing into the next thing. Going into Jack, I had nothing to swing from. I felt like I had no inherent skills that were going to be helpful to that process.

But I knew a few things that were going to be pathways in. First of all, I had some time, so I was able to spend hundreds of hours downloading into my subconscious all of the musicality banter and rhythm of vintage talk show hosts, just hours and hours of watching that. Secondly, I had the benefit of the fact that I’m a person who’s experienced a nervous breakdown. I know what it’s like to be addicted to both work and substance. I know what it’s like to have grief overwhelm you in a way that you can’t find your way out. I know what it’s like to feel the immense pressure of the world caving in on you, and if you don’t achieve this one thing, it’s all gonna be over. So that was this little furnace in the belly for Jack, and I knew that if I could create and manufacture a persona that felt authentically like a talk show host, when those moments arrive in the film where we cut to commercial break, and all of a sudden we’re in this totally different style of filmmaking, this vérité black-and-white documentary style of movie, I could hopefully strip away everything — performance, ego, any element of presentation that Jack needs to be doing when he’s live. Then I thought I could just be myself.

So I actually did try and play a lot of what was going on behind the scenes as just David. What else do I have? I just have to rely on that, you know?

I’m glad you cited the idea of the performance within the performance, because that, to me, is also key. There’s a rich history of late night hosts being one person on camera and then also being completely different, and sometimes in very unflattering ways, off camera. I don’t think that Jack really fits into the worst extreme…

He makes some ethically questionable choices. Undoubtedly, he is pushing the limits of good judgment in this effort to save his show, to save the legacy of the love of his life, to save his own career. He’s not just this narcissistic monster ruled by ambition, or a need to be approved. He is a person that I hope, if I do my job well, is somebody that we could all maybe see a little reflection of ourselves in, or we could all relate to a little bit. Because I, as David, do this often. I have to be in front of the camera. I have to be talking about things, or I have to be performing as a character, and I have to create a kind of visage to everybody out there. And then there’s me who is at home stressed about being late to pick up my kids from school, or trying to wrestle my daughter out of the Zoom view when she’s got diarrhea, or whatever that thing is. The duality of that is fertile narrative territory, and I think we all get it.

I think whether anybody lives in the public eye or not, with social media, almost, what, 90% of people have Instagram accounts these days? Nobody is posting up on their Instagram account a version of themselves or a vision of themselves, unless they’re really brave or a little crazy, or doing some kind of art project, that is a reflection of anything other than the best version of themselves. And then we put those phones down and our garbage disposal is broken, or our marriage is on the rocks, or our parents are dying, or whatever the thing is that we’re dealing with that day.

Why are we so wrapped up in believing we’re going to get some sense of safety or security from people perceiving us the way we want to be perceived, as opposed to being who we actually are? Think about how much more comfort we could have, about how much more security, serenity and safety we would feel if we were able to talk about things as openly as I wish we could. Like mental health, death and dying, you know?

To get to the heart of that, then, while you’re performing Jack during production, do you keep that thought in mind, that wish of being able to just be open about what is going on for him? About what is really at stake for him?

I do. And I think that that’s the hero’s journey, if you will. That’s part of going into the forest, looking for the talisman that’s going to solve the problem, that’s going to defeat the big dragon, and sadly, what makes this tragic and what makes this horror is that if such a talisman exists, Jack’s journey to find it is so misguided. It is so obstructed by fear, trauma, ego, and that is something, if I’m willing to be honest with myself, that I could relate to or tap into. The biggest mistakes that I’ve made, the biggest errors that I’ve forced upon my own life, professionally or personally, have always come from the same root places that I think Jack’s fatal flaws are arriving from.

I’m always a little wary of bringing personal stuff into an interview. But I know that you had struggles with addiction, and that you’re sober now, and I’m curious: Do you see a little bit of that reflected in Jack? Jack’s whole mission is actually self-destructive, and it’s destructive for everyone around him. I don’t know the circumstances of your own struggles, so I don’t want to apply that to you, but I wondered if you brought your own memories, your own experiences into like Jack’s unraveling?

When you’re building a character, it starts with just a couple pieces of fabric and then hopefully a strong foundation of materials, which are the script and the director’s vision. But you start building more and more patchwork as you start to expand this quilt of what makes up, ultimately, the performance, and as often as I am able to draw upon my own personal life experience or knowledge that I might have gleaned from particular experiences, I think it’s wholly appropriate, beneficial, and useful to incorporate that into my preparation and performance process. I don’t think it’s appropriate or beneficial to the process to utilize acting as a form of therapy, at least not in the professional sense. I think you can do art therapy and it can be wonderful. But that’s a separate approach.

As an addict, 22 years now clean and sober, who recovered from a near-death relationship with heroin and opiates, I am someone who understands what it feels like to be Jack Delroy, who is so addicted to work and alcohol, that it is the only way to attempt, in your mind, to outrun the headless horseman that’s coming from behind you. That, to Jack, would be, again, the trauma of losing the love of his life, the unprocessed grief, the untreated anxiety and depression that he gets from this rollercoaster of a very rocky professional life in the public eye.

And with that drive every night to get those ratings, to get that scotch down his throat, to get that approval, to get Nielsen to give him the score he needs, having those addictive tendencies and believing that they’re gonna help him just get that extra stretch gone, that extra bit of mileage that he’s gotta get to, it’s something that not only I could relate to and bring into the character, but I think a lot of people can relate to it. It doesn’t always take place or manifest itself through heroin, or alcohol, or any other drugs. It could be sex, it could be people, relationships, or obviously work. So I was really grateful.

I’m what we call, in the program, a grateful addict, a grateful alcoholic. I am grateful for so many reasons, because if I hadn’t survived and if I wasn’t here today having gone through what I did, I know I wouldn’t have the same appreciation or perspective on day-to-day life that I do now. But it also really does benefit my work and gives me an insight into the way that the body and the mind react to certain kinds of stress.

Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers the movies, beer, music, and being a dad for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours. He has contributed to Paste since 2013. You can follow him on Twitter and find his collected work at his personal blog. He’s composed of roughly 65% craft beer.

Late Night with David Dastmalchian