| By Fred Topel
In Theaters January 6
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You’d probably recognize Jay Hernandez if you saw him. He’s played firemen, baseball players and football players in movies you’ve seen, but he was never the headliner. Now he is the star of a movie, but it’s one so graphic and brutal that most of you may still not see it. In Hostel, Hernandez plays a traveling tourist who winds up in a torture chamber.
Blood and gore aside, just starring in a movie was a big task for Hernandez. “It’s a lot of work, dude, but it was cool,” he said. “It was a really great experience and what I’m trying to do is just do different stuff. The fact that I’m going into this horror genre, and experiencing that, I think it was a nice move. It was a risk too to a certain degree because everybody has this nice image of me in terms of the industry. ‘Cast him as a nice guy, the guy with the girl’ so it’s good to get away from that and do something different.”
As a young actor, many horror scripts came his way. “Recently there’s been a lot of them. Every was studio is trying to get one out because they seem to be making money.” Hostel stood out because writer/director Eli Roth was gung ho about pushing the boundaries.
“There was stuff that got cut out too, stuff that would have definitely pushed it over the rating we got, which we didn’t expect maybe. I just thought that it was ‘no holds barred’ and then Eli told me, ‘I’m sticking to it. I’m not going to change it. I want to shoot my movie. I’m not going to let them mess with me and take some of it out so they can broaden the audience. I’m going to make a horror film and I’m going to do it all the way. F*ck that, I’m doing it.’”
Tortures suffered by the cast of Hostel include tendon slicing, eye gouging, drilling and chainsaw dismemberment. Hernandez himself goes face to chain with the chainsaw.
“It’s cool, dude. It’s like classic horror. The sound of a chainsaw on set got everybody amped. I’m telling you, something about the sound of it on a horror film gets everyone’s blood flowing. It gets you into the mood.”
Now, Hernandez is talking about the film in terms like the extreme sports athletes use, but while enduring the shoot, one imagines he wasn’t so laid back. “Being in that institution, that psych ward, or whatever it was, that was really creepy because that was a real place from back in the 1900’s. There were these underground rooms that probably hadn’t been lived in and inhabited in almost 60, 70 years. I keep saying this, but it was true. It kind of freaked me out. I went into one room, I walked off set, trying to get some fresh air and there was this huge room that had these hooks on the wall. I was asking some of the guys what those hooks were for, and nobody could give me an answer. I still, to this day don’t know what those hooks were for. Something was being hung up there. Was it bodies? Was it meat? I don’t know. It was kind of creepy so I went back to set.”
And then shooting his actual torture scene. “I can tell you I was relieved that it was done, that I got through it. I felt like I had been tortured. It’s like a couple days in that chair, those handcuffs, you’re struggling, trying to get out, bruises develop, so with every move, you feel pain. You’re yelling and emotionally you’re in this place where it hurts, so it was rough, those couple of days were definitely rough and when that was over, there was a huge weight off my back.”
Hernandez brought his parents to see the first screening of Hostel, which might seem like an odd choice considering the amount of sex and violence in the hard R cut. “I really didn’t want them to go because of all the stuff that was in there. I just didn’t know how they were going to react. So I let her know what was going on and she was like, ‘I had to cover her eyes for some of the scenes but I really liked it.’ It’s funny, because my dad is a straight dude. He doesn’t cuss, really straight guy. He walks out and I’m like, ‘Come on, Pops, what did you think of the movie?’ He looked at me and said ‘It was weird.’ That was his reaction so I was like that’s classic, dude. It was perfect, if you saw the way he delivered that, it was funny.”
Hostel opens January 6. |
