The Cast of "Rent"

In Theaters Now

With musicals making a come back in Hollywood, Rent seemed like an obvious choice. It’s recent, it’s hip and the Broadway cast is still alive. Most of them returned to their roles for the film, including Anthony Rapp as Mark and Wilson Jermaine Heredia as Angel. Making the transition, Rapp said having the full sets of New York City streets, restaurants and loft spaces helped him hone his previous performance.

“I think it just provides a good foundation, but it doesn’t necessarily change the expression of the performance,” Rapp said. “I don’t mean facial expression. I just mean how everything’s expressed. It just augments and supports what we were doing. To be in the Live Café and stand on those tables, you really felt like what the show intended and what the movie intended. These guys come into this restaurant and they’re coming together to celebrate. And sometimes when people get in a restaurant and they celebrate, they get kind of rowdy. In this case, we get as rowdy that we start dancing on the tables. So it just felt like it was a great atmosphere and to have the extras around during those days of ‘La Vie Boheme’ was really great because they were very responsive and very excited to be there. It was nice to have kind of an audience there for us to play to.”

Heredia had more freedom to flip around all over the place in his flamboyant solo number, because the camera could capture him anywhere. He didn’t have to play everything for the auditorium and director Chris Columbus encouraged him to go bigger.

“The choreography changed dramatically,” Heredia recalled. “Even the first day of filming, we rehearsed it for about three months but I just added a whole lot more. I was worried that it was going to be too big for the screen. But the way that they captured it, it was perfect and that’s why Chris Columbus told me, he was like, ‘You know, you can be even bigger if you want to. Don’t be afraid, don’t pull back.’ So if anything, he gave me cart blanche with that.”

Tracie Thoms did not appear in the original Broadway show, but earned the role of Joanne. A fan of the show, she’d seen it performed three times. Being on a real location enhanced her interpretation of the material as well. “The funny thing about it is, I wasn’t a member of the original cast but I kind of imagined what the loft would look like in my head,” Thoms said. “It’s weird. Everybody had their own idea of what the loft looked like because it’s just kind of implied on stage. And once we walked onto the set, it kind of exactly encapsulated what everybody thought it would look like. It was just amazing to have a world to be in the middle of, a world that’s on all sides. It just really helped us. It helps everything. It helps you flesh out your character, helps you really understand all the moments that you’re playing because you’re actually in a real place with real chairs and tables and things.”

Introducing new actors into a theater troupe could be a tricky prospect, but veteran Rapp said that newcomers like Thoms fit in well. “We embraced them and they embraced us,” Rapp said. “There was none of that kind of, which I think some people in their position might have had, like a chip on their shoulder or a defensiveness about being new and wanting to prove something and wanting to make it their own at the expense of what we had before. So it was I think a really nice blend of what they had to bring to it that was new as well as an honoring of what had come before.”

From her perspective, Thoms was able to bring new insight to her character’s relationships with other cast members. “You learn new things with every new person, so for example, Idina [Menzel] and I really tried to do everything we could to really explore the love in the relationship between Joanne and Maureen in a way that they weren’t able to do on stage because the relationship between them is kind of incomplete,” she said. “Jonathan Larson passed before he really, really finished it. ‘Take Me or Leave Me’ was the last song he wrote so he was starting to turn his focus back to that relationship but he never got to finish it, so while Freddie [Walker] is amazing and I stole from her in many cases, there were certain things that I changed because I’m very different from her in certain things. The way I look at things are a little bit different.”

One difference between stage and film was that Angel’s female getup would be under much closer scrutiny. Heredia had to pay attention to his five o’clock shadow, which you wouldn’t notice in the nosebleed seats. “There were some shots that sort of lent to having a little bit of shadow,” he said. “I don’t remember specifically at what point, but I do know that I know with New Years, the New Years segment, there was a little bit of shadow coming in, but if those characters were actually partying all night, Angel’s facial hair would come in as well. Again, it just added to the realism of it that Angel wouldn’t just all of a sudden go, ‘Hold on for a second, shave break.’ If facial hair came in, it came in but I don't think he would have bothered very much to shave all the time.”

Of course, there isn’t room for everything in a two hour movie, so some of the memorable songs from Rent had to go. Even the non-veterans missed them. “As a [i]Rent[/i] head, I love all the songs so I miss all of the songs that aren’t in it,” Thoms said. “And it was very hard for me to accept when I heard that the second two parts of ‘Goodbye Love’ would be cut. But I completely understand why Chris cut them because if they didn’t cut them and ‘Halloween,’ there would be six slow, sad ballads in a row. That can really weigh down a film and make you emotionally shut down. Your emotion will peak too early so by the time the end of the song comes, you just don’t have anything left. So I understand and respect the fact that pacing in film is different than pacing in theater. And when you’re close up on somebody being emotional or draining and going through grief, then it’s a harder thing to take in than being far away and being in a balcony watching somebody go through that.”

Heredia got specific. “I miss ‘Christmas Spells’ a lot,” he said. “It was such a great number but it became a pacing problem to insert that there. I know ‘Halloween’ is gone. I miss that. And ‘Goodbye Love’ is missing from there. I essentially love all of them, so any song that wasn’t in there I was going to miss.”

Rapp also misses ‘Goodbye Love,’ but since it was actually shot for the film before it was cut, he takes comfort in the knowledge that it will appear on the DVD. “After talking to Chris about the nature of the film and how the film works as opposed to the stage play, I understand why it’s not in the film and I don’t really miss it in the context of how the film works. It was in the cut for a while and then when he took it out he realized just the way the film flows that there are textual things that can happen on stage because you have a little more distance from it. Characters can express things through words on stage that aren’t as easily supportable always on film because you’ve gotten the visual information so you don’t need people to say things as much on film. It didn’t feel like it was moving things forward as much as it did on stage. So without it, he felt like the film moved through that space and it didn’t lose anything. It just kept moving forward in a way that I do understand that you have to be rigorous when you’re making an adaptation to make sure that you’re being true to the medium and to the demands of the medium.”

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