Vice Vieluf – Love Is All We Need

Q.  What are the current projects that you are working on?

A.  Well, I just finished doing Firewall, which is a Harrison Ford and Paul Bettany movie.  That took six months to shoot, that’s like my first serious role.  Like I play the guy who stands there with a machine gun and doesn’t say much.  Which, I wanted to do because I’ve been beating pots and pans together for the last five years now, you know what I mean.  So, I’ve been doing that and this show “Love, Inc.” which is going to be on UPN the third week in September.  It’s sort of like a bunch of maniacs in charge of people’s love lives.  We’re very good at our jobs but our own love lives are really screwed up. 

Q.  What can you tell us about your character Barry?

A.  Barry takes place on a whole different dimension, this guy is very innocent but he’s not remotely naive.  He sees himself as someone who is kind of hovering above the earth, if that makes any sense whatsoever.  So everything I say comes from left field but it really makes sense to me, plus I’m the luckiest guy in the world.  I’m the only guy on the show, that’s really how my character was described, the luckiest guy in the world.

Q.  What made you want to be a part of this show?

A.  Well, I actually got this script while I was doing Firewall and I was getting kind of confused as to where exactly my career was going because I never had any thought process involved with that.  I just kind of did whatever came along and just had fun, and I wanted to try something serious.  It’s like in a comedy, you have to be up and you have to be positive and in a good mood for your timing no matter what’s going on in your personal life.  I felt like doing a drama you just had to be in a bad mood for the duration of the thing.  So, when this came along the script was strictly about love, like these people are kind of looking for a connection.  But, really what the story turns out to be is what is it in their life that is blocking them from having that connection.  So, it just felt like a little bit higher than what I’m used to reading, plus it was just funny.  It’s Adam Chase and Warren Littlefield, the guys who were behind “Friends” and all of their success.  It’s just a real laid back show and it had to do with this higher aspect of love.

Q.  What is it about Barry that makes him so quirky, charming and eccentric?

A.  This guy grew up on Sci-Fi movies, I personally grew up with all sisters so I was raised around women.  My grandma, my mom and my two sisters, and my dad was around and he’s very loving and cool.  He was working quite a bit though growing up so Barry is really in touch with his feminine side but he’s also extraordinarily hetero.  Just being so into Sci-Fi movies, this that and the other thing, but just having read Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret, the guy is just totally different than anyone could ever be.

Q.  How is the dynamic of the cast, is there a lot of chemistry?

A.  Yeah, well during the pilot episode we had Shannon Doherty playing a lead character named Denise.  So, the story was going to revolve around her, sort of like Hitch maybe.  We would be the crazy people around Shannon and after the pilot they thought maybe that people would get tired of a show that was only about the mishaps of one person’s love life.  So, they scrapped that idea completely and now they have made it to where the show is about our business.  It’s more of an ensemble now and so we all get along as coworkers get along but also two of the girls are roommates in the show.  It just made it more like lost souls are looking to do this so that maybe they can find out themselves what the secret to love is all about.  There is a character, Francine, she speaks a whole different language as well, so there is a connection between me and her character.  All of these people are very different and we’re very different in real life too so it’s strange.

Q.  What is your favorite moment from filming “Love, Inc.”?

A.  My favorite moment so far is in episode two, this is the fourth episode now.  In episode two a lady comes in who is very, very structured and very precise about what she’s looking for in a man.  She’s not willing to bend on any of these requirements because she’s fed up with getting involved in no where relationships.  So, we sort of remind her that love is more about chance, more about magic.  They set me up as the guy who has every one hundred and seven million elements that she’s looking for.  In essence, I kind of show her what she looks like, so I become this girl’s soul mate and when she sees what she’s created, she’s horrified by it.  It’s kind of like going incognito, you know.

Q.  You’re also starring in the movie Firewall, what can you tell us about the premise for the film?

A.  This movie is about a man named Jack, played by Harrison Ford, who is sort of the chief of security for a big world bank.  He is kind of a flawed character taking his family for granted.  Maybe a little tired with his job and suddenly four young punks with some computer savvy have come to the realization that money is no longer paper, it’s no longer based on gold, it’s just zeros and ones and computers going around the world.  Not to give anything away in the movie, but Harrison Ford’s character finds himself having to deal with that.  We go to any lengths and as that money becomes more and more real to us, the stakes become higher.  It gets more and more dangerous so this guy has to wake up, that’s what that movie is about.  I don’t want to give anything away because I’m not really starring in this thing, I just thought it’d be bad ass to just hold a gun and be quiet for about ten minutes.

Q.  How was working with director Richard Loncraine?

A.  He was cool, he was very cool, he did The Gathering Storm, which I really liked, Winston’s Churchill’s story.  He kind of found himself in a bit of a mess because we had Virginia Madsen, Harrison Ford and Paul Bettany and we’re all really big stars.  We were all locked up in a house together for months on end.  We were terrified of the mosquitoes so he’d walk around the set for six months with netting like all over him.  He had all of these movie stars around and he was really a trip to work with, he was such an outlaw when he was little, he just had tons of stories about his fearless upbringing.  He’s a cool guy, a really cool guy.

Q.  Since “Love, Inc.” involves a dating service, how effective do you think dating sites and companies really are?

A.  Too many of my friends are involved in dating services.  I think with the way everybody is working so hard chasing after a piece of American cheese right now they don’t really have any friends to go exploring that gene pool, you know what I’m saying.  So, it’s like love is the last thing to be incorporated in this country.  You have government incorporated, you’ve got religions incorporated and now we’ve incorporated love.  So, I think it’s one of the best places for people to meet strangers.

Q.  You’re great with physical comedy, is this something natural or are you constantly working at it?

A.  I would say naturally, I am probably the worst over-actor currently making money in this business.  I mean like, I grew up loving people like John Ritter from “Three’s Company,” Monty Python movies.  The first play I ever did was “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” and so I always thought acting was more about letting go then concentrating.  It comes very natural to me, and the best stuff I’ve ever done, like Rat Race for instance, I had a genius director like Jerry Zucker who was constantly toning me down.  If they could get me to hone down on one thing, that’s really great, but naturally I have like no inhibitions whatsoever.

Q.  What music groups are you currently listening to?

A.  I am listening to a lot of Gothic music lately, listening to a band called The Awakening.  Also, listening to sort of this loungey Goth in my opinion, a band called Blonde Redhead, they are really good.  A local band called Control Alt Delete, which I am completely obsessed with their keyboard player named Lela.

Q.  What would you like to say to your fans and supporters?

A.  I’ll say thank you because after Rat Race I got a lot of letters from a lot of cool kids!  I didn’t work for about two years after Rat Race because I went through a real crazy personal time.  Like, I had a friend pass away because of cancer and I got a lot of letters from my fans.  When I wasn’t caring about my career everybody in my life like my managers, and certain studio people, saw that there was a lot of interest in me and it got my career going.  I really want to say thanks to that man, and I try to answer whom ever writes to me, with a question or a picture!