‘The Man of the Hour’: An Interview with Sebastian Cruz, Ellie Holt, and Charlie Sims

by Will Hurst, Contributor

Illustration by PPOOK Gibble, Head

The Man of the Hour, a short film directed by Asher Kaye, premiered this Thursday the 17th at the Apollo. Before the film’s premiere, I interviewed with the main actors of the film in order to get a sense of the experience of being involved with the project. Sebastian Cruz played the main role of Michael, an engineering student caught up in a campus conspiracy, while Ellie Holt and Charlie Sims played the roles of Bianca and the President respectively.

Will: What did you guys do to [prepare] for your roles? What do you guys do to get in character? 

Ellie: I feel like once I put on the costume, I felt very grounded in my character.

Sebastian: Yeah, and also just coming onto the set itself, there was this shoot where we were in this kind of gross, decaying, bedroom of one of the characters, and the [room is covered in] trash and [there’s] all this junk on the tables and on the walls, and this same weird poster… being in that environment, you know, whether it's there or something that [has less production design], it kind of helps to visualize the space that you're taking up and that you're interacting with because I feel like there's a lot of environmental aspects to this movie. 

Charlie: I think just being in the suit for every single scene that I was in, helped me visualize the man I was supposed to be. And I don't know, I think the amount of makeup and the costumes, everything was just so go big or go home on this shoot. And I think it really will show in the final product just how much love and care was put into this.

Will:  In your performances, do you feel that you've changed the roles of the characters [from how they were originally written] in the script? 

Sebastian: Asher was pretty forthright … about [insisting that] if you don't get a line completely right, it's fine if you ad-lib part of it as long as you get the general idea down. It’s a small detail, but I think it [helped me] feel more comfortable lifting [the character] off the page, because there's only so much you can capture in the written form. 

Charlie: I had a tendency to really trip over a lot of my lines, just because they’re so intricate … I had to kind of improvise a lot of what I was saying just to get the point across because I was very, very not good at memorizing my lines for this shoot. But I think the character really shines through based on just how he was written by Asher. And we were able to work together and make sure that everything that I was saying still had the same intentions in the end.

Will: Were there any notable problems that arose in

production, or at least was there anything in production that turned out to take much more effort than previously believed?

Charlie: Yeah, the whole Root Room scene, I think, was by far the most complicated. And it took the longest … it was supposed to take one day, which turned into several days. But that's often how it is, when it comes to trying to get that many people together, doing all the practical effects, especially all that makeup, and a whole number of things needed to go right for that scene to work. 

Ellie: We were shooting in something called the Freak Room. We had a smoke detector for half of the shoot and no smoke detector for the second half of the shoot. It set off the fire alarm and the fire department had to come and they confiscated it.

Charlie: And you had to explain the Freak Room. 

Sebastian: We were just pumping it full of smoke, because it looks awesome when all the lights are shining through. It's very atmospheric. And then we just went a little too hard. Of course, everyone in the whole building had to evacuate. It was a little embarrassing … We were very clearly doing a big thing, and were just kind of hanging out outside and had to wait for Campus Safety. They were very understanding and nice, even though they had to confiscate some things, because they just can't go into the Freak Room … and not be like, “okay …we got to make sure that these kids are scared straight”.

Will: Is there any part of your performances that you felt most proud of? 

Sebastian: I think I felt very proud of … that scene we did in the Freak Room.

Ellie: We did not freak.

Sebastian: No, no, no. We were very much separated from the freak. Obviously, like

involved in the mystery of the freak.

Charlie: We were onlookers to the freak. 

Sebastian: But not participants. But anyways, that scene is very much a culmination of the mystery …And the relationship between us is very interesting, because [me and Ellie’s] characters are very old friends and they had a falling out. And so we got kind of roped back into this wild goose chase because of [Charlie’s] character. 

Charlie: Oh, you don't have to give me that much credit. 

Sebastian: The great organizer. Come on. You're done selling yourself short. But there's this tension in it [because it’s this moment] when my character realizes he needs help and that he can't do it alone. Because a lot of the time, it's just him having this conception of himself as this ultimate savior …. and I think that him coming down to earth and trying to portray that fall back into reality was really rewarding for the character, because it was a lesson. And I don't know. Call me a woke moralist, but I like lessons. I like a story with something to say.