#I really relate to kurt in this one I have a crippling fear that I push people away

[samanthasroberts]

Meet Wyatt Russell, Hollywoods Most and Least Likely Leading Man

Wyatt Russell walks into a room and it’s almost too easy to make assumptions about him. Luckily, he upends nearly all of them.

The star of AMC’s big-swing summer series, Lodge 49, which debuts Aug. 6, towers a few inches above a tall-and-thin six feet, with hair down to his shoulders, a scruffy beard, and a languid surfer beach drawl to complete the stereotype of the SoCal beatnik—which he plays very well, but hardly fills.

No, this is the son of Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn, and his foray into Hollywood would seem a formality had the 32-year-old actor not spent the majority of his life rejecting the family business in pursuit of a career as a hockey player.

When we meet in Beverly Hills to discuss his new series, which is also his first leading role, the person we encounter is not the strung-out stoner his looks might betray, nor is it the entitled heir to Hollywood royalty you might expect from a person with as much celluloid history in his bloodstream.

Instead, the Wyatt Russell we meet is as wide-eyed and enthusiastic as a breakthrough actor experiencing the spoils of Hollywood for the first time, but with the self-awareness and intelligence of a person who knows how brutal the industry can actually be.

Maybe that’s because, for all the ways he’s seen his mother, father, and half-siblings Kate and Oliver Hudson navigate the business, he’s also churned through perhaps the only industry more ruthless: professional sports. Before he started seriously pursuing a career in acting eight years ago, he had spent over a decade as a promising hockey goalie, until an injury set him on a new path.

It’s perhaps fitting, then, that Russell’s debut as a leading man is in a TV series as unconventional as Lodge 49. As Russell tells it, he wouldn’t have it any other way.

The official logline for Lodge 49 describes it as a “modern fable,” centered on Russell’s character Dud, a lost soul trying to rebuild his life after a surfing injury, the death of his father, and crippling debt have left him homeless. One day, while spelunking for treasures with a metal detector on the beach, he discovers a lost ring that takes him to the doorstep of Lodge 49, “a dusty fraternal order which offers cheap beer and strange alchemical philosophies.”

So what you have is this unusual mix of a series about this eternal optimist, Dud, who is either blind to the fact that he’s hitting rock bottom or manifests a trampoline from optimistic delusion to bounce him back up again. He lands at a Masonic Lodge, of sorts, that provides a lifeline yet espouses just enough woo-woo philosophy to make you fear: Is Dud in a cult?

Nonetheless, for all the talk about this six-foot surfer boy with Hollywood lineage in the starring role, it’s because Russell so intrinsically telegraphs a glass-half-full kind of gumption that the tonal gymnastics of the show sticks the landing. More, that it still feels at home on AMC, a network that has pretty much defined its brand in dark, disturbing drama: Mad Men, Breaking Bad, or The Walking Dead.

Ever exuberant, Russell sees a throughline.

“Everybody starts from an honest place of who they are: Don Draper, Walter White, and Dud,” he says. “It may be easier to utilize a character who has darkness in them because you can find a lot of interesting qualities in those people. It’s harder to find the interesting qualities in optimism, because it’s not something that we necessarily gravitate towards in our everyday lives, especially in our 24/7 news cycle where, constantly, what grabs our attention is negativity.”

So bless Dud’s gumption. And, really, Russell’s, too.

This isn’t a profile about the little boy who grew up on a movie set, and whose scrapbook of school-play star turns hinted that he’d one day follow his parents’ footsteps all the way to the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In fact, he tells me, despite his family’s careers, Russell only recently  “after many years of thinking it wasn’t,” began to think of acting as “a fantastic way to make a living.”

He lived in Santa Monica until he was 15 before moving to Vancouver to play hockey, at the advice of coaches who saw Russell’s potential. Kurt and Goldie moved with him. (The reasons that Russell emerged a well-adjusted Hollywood kid should be apparent.) Cute side story: Kurt Russell once told The New York Times that he took the role as coach of the heroic 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team in Disney’s Miracle in homage to Wyatt’s passion.

After two years of playing college hockey at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, he headed to Europe to go pro, first in Germany and then in the Netherlands. His stories from that time are about as wild as you’d expect from a guy in his twenties touring tertiary European cities with busloads of hockey players. “ I lived with a heroin addict named Harm," he told The Ringer last year. “That was the life experience, watching somebody shoot up heroin while you’re eating potatoes he made."

A series of groin injuries and a broken hip, exacerbated by cramped bus rides and the general body wear-and-tear accrued by a goalie, brought an early end to his hockey career. It dropped Russell smack-dab in the throes of a mid-life crisis a good 20 to 30 years before most men find themselves at a similar crossroads: “Alright. What now?”

While recuperating from his injuries in Groningen, Netherlands, he binged movies. Maybe, he thought, he’d direct. He had acted in one film before throwing himself into hockey—a scene in his father’s film Escape from L.A. when he was 10—and, more than a decade later, still remembered that he didn’t like being in front of the camera.

“I liked playing hockey and being a goalie because it was numbers related,” he says. “You’re either the best or you’re not. It’s numbers. You have the best goals-against average and save the most pucks and win the most games, or you don’t. It’s not subjective. So going into this world, I didn’t like the subjectivity of it because it meant that other people were going to put what they thought about you onto you.”

Consider his decision to try his hand at auditioning, then, a whim—albeit the most epic of whims, one perhaps buoyed by his family’s pedigree. His first audition was for a role in Captain America: The First Avenger. He didn’t get that one, but he started getting others. There was Law & Order: L.A., Cowboys & Aliens, and his first big breakout, a part in 22 Jump Street.

Early on, though, there was a pattern. In 2010’s High School, he played “Drug PSA Stoned Teenager.” In This Is 40 he was “Flirty Hockey Player.” As his roles expanded, the “type” he was cast as didn’t necessarily follow suit, whether it’s a spaced-out pitcher in Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! or a backpacker roped into a video-game horror show in an episode of Black Mirror. Lodge 49, too, sees Russell working in that mold again.

But take a closer look at those projects he’s been cast in, and what’s impressive is not so much that he’s been routinely cast as a surfer-stoner-laid-back-bro, but that each time he has, it has been in wildly diferent genres.

In the last year, he’s starred in Blaze, a biopic of country musician directed by Ethan Hawke, finished work on Overlord, a World War II/sci-fi hybrid produced by J.J. Abrams, and was cast in The Woman in the Window, a thriller adapted by Tracy Letts, directed by Joe Wright, and starring Amy Adams. Then there’s Lodge 49, a prestige cable drama that escapes tonal definition.

“It’s been 7 or 8 years since I started doing it,” Russell says, of acting. “For the first time now I probably just last year felt like I might be able to do certain things.”

He remembers getting cast in High School as a hippie-like stoner because he knew how to play guitar.

“From that, you gain confidence to say, ‘Well, I did that, I can do a different version of it,’” he says. “I found myself always trying to find the different version of the guy you had done before. Because that’s the way it works. Somebody sees you in something that they like you in, and they go, ‘Oh he would be great in this.’ It’s up to the actor to give it dimension. Inside the dimension you give it, sometimes somebody else sees an aspect of that dimension and says, ‘I bet you they could do that.’”

In the early episodes of Lodge 49, there are distinct themes that emerge. Russell’s favorite is the way that the show honors the blue-collar population of Long Beach: the plumbers, pool servicemen, and trade workers who give the area life. More, it shows that the emotional weight stressing a family business can be as important, and as volatile, as the finances.

The character of Dud doesn’t just miss his father, he misses the normalcy that the family business—pool cleaning—provided. Russell’s own family business operates from an obvious extreme in relation to Dud’s, but he understands, especially in these last few years, the comfort that comes from normality.

Yes, Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn’s actor son can refer to the family business as normal.

“It did seem normal to me because they never made what they did abnormal,” he says. “They never made themselves abnormal. They never looked at themselves like, ‘I’m special because I do this.’”

“The normalcy of who we are came from the core values of who my parents were when they grew up and transferred it into their parenting styles for the way we are. It’s definitely not a normal thing, to do this. People can get caught up in it. It’s hard not to sometimes.”

When we talk, Russell is wrapping up a week that had him travel back and forth between Los Angeles and New York four times. He’s engaged to Search Party scene-stealer Meredith Hagner, whom he met while shooting the indie Folk Hero & Funny Guy. And he’s promoting his first leading role, an achievement some might rule destiny given who his parents are, but that others might rule unlikely, given the unique story of the actor who sits before me. An actor who still can’t help comparing things to hockey.

“There’s almost nothing else that’s truly numbers-related,” he says. “That game was. That’s what special about sports in a way. It’s an equalizer. This is not that. I didn’t think about ‘I’m going to be a leading man,’ because I just wanted to do something that made me as happy as hockey did.”

Now, he’s doing it.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/meet-wyatt-russell-hollywoods-most-and-least-likely-leading-man/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2019/01/02/meet-wyatt-russell-hollywoods-most-and-least-likely-leading-man/

[adambstingus]

Meet Wyatt Russell, Hollywoods Most and Least Likely Leading Man

Wyatt Russell walks into a room and it’s almost too easy to make assumptions about him. Luckily, he upends nearly all of them.

The star of AMC’s big-swing summer series, Lodge 49, which debuts Aug. 6, towers a few inches above a tall-and-thin six feet, with hair down to his shoulders, a scruffy beard, and a languid surfer beach drawl to complete the stereotype of the SoCal beatnik—which he plays very well, but hardly fills.

No, this is the son of Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn, and his foray into Hollywood would seem a formality had the 32-year-old actor not spent the majority of his life rejecting the family business in pursuit of a career as a hockey player.

When we meet in Beverly Hills to discuss his new series, which is also his first leading role, the person we encounter is not the strung-out stoner his looks might betray, nor is it the entitled heir to Hollywood royalty you might expect from a person with as much celluloid history in his bloodstream.

Instead, the Wyatt Russell we meet is as wide-eyed and enthusiastic as a breakthrough actor experiencing the spoils of Hollywood for the first time, but with the self-awareness and intelligence of a person who knows how brutal the industry can actually be.

Maybe that’s because, for all the ways he’s seen his mother, father, and half-siblings Kate and Oliver Hudson navigate the business, he’s also churned through perhaps the only industry more ruthless: professional sports. Before he started seriously pursuing a career in acting eight years ago, he had spent over a decade as a promising hockey goalie, until an injury set him on a new path.

It’s perhaps fitting, then, that Russell’s debut as a leading man is in a TV series as unconventional as Lodge 49. As Russell tells it, he wouldn’t have it any other way.

The official logline for Lodge 49 describes it as a “modern fable,” centered on Russell’s character Dud, a lost soul trying to rebuild his life after a surfing injury, the death of his father, and crippling debt have left him homeless. One day, while spelunking for treasures with a metal detector on the beach, he discovers a lost ring that takes him to the doorstep of Lodge 49, “a dusty fraternal order which offers cheap beer and strange alchemical philosophies.”

So what you have is this unusual mix of a series about this eternal optimist, Dud, who is either blind to the fact that he’s hitting rock bottom or manifests a trampoline from optimistic delusion to bounce him back up again. He lands at a Masonic Lodge, of sorts, that provides a lifeline yet espouses just enough woo-woo philosophy to make you fear: Is Dud in a cult?

Nonetheless, for all the talk about this six-foot surfer boy with Hollywood lineage in the starring role, it’s because Russell so intrinsically telegraphs a glass-half-full kind of gumption that the tonal gymnastics of the show sticks the landing. More, that it still feels at home on AMC, a network that has pretty much defined its brand in dark, disturbing drama: Mad Men, Breaking Bad, or The Walking Dead.

Ever exuberant, Russell sees a throughline.

“Everybody starts from an honest place of who they are: Don Draper, Walter White, and Dud,” he says. “It may be easier to utilize a character who has darkness in them because you can find a lot of interesting qualities in those people. It’s harder to find the interesting qualities in optimism, because it’s not something that we necessarily gravitate towards in our everyday lives, especially in our 24/7 news cycle where, constantly, what grabs our attention is negativity.”

So bless Dud’s gumption. And, really, Russell’s, too.

This isn’t a profile about the little boy who grew up on a movie set, and whose scrapbook of school-play star turns hinted that he’d one day follow his parents’ footsteps all the way to the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In fact, he tells me, despite his family’s careers, Russell only recently  “after many years of thinking it wasn’t,” began to think of acting as “a fantastic way to make a living.”

He lived in Santa Monica until he was 15 before moving to Vancouver to play hockey, at the advice of coaches who saw Russell’s potential. Kurt and Goldie moved with him. (The reasons that Russell emerged a well-adjusted Hollywood kid should be apparent.) Cute side story: Kurt Russell once told The New York Times that he took the role as coach of the heroic 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team in Disney’s Miracle in homage to Wyatt’s passion.

After two years of playing college hockey at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, he headed to Europe to go pro, first in Germany and then in the Netherlands. His stories from that time are about as wild as you’d expect from a guy in his twenties touring tertiary European cities with busloads of hockey players. “ I lived with a heroin addict named Harm,“ he told The Ringer last year. “That was the life experience, watching somebody shoot up heroin while you’re eating potatoes he made.”

A series of groin injuries and a broken hip, exacerbated by cramped bus rides and the general body wear-and-tear accrued by a goalie, brought an early end to his hockey career. It dropped Russell smack-dab in the throes of a mid-life crisis a good 20 to 30 years before most men find themselves at a similar crossroads: “Alright. What now?”

While recuperating from his injuries in Groningen, Netherlands, he binged movies. Maybe, he thought, he’d direct. He had acted in one film before throwing himself into hockey—a scene in his father’s film Escape from L.A. when he was 10—and, more than a decade later, still remembered that he didn’t like being in front of the camera.

“I liked playing hockey and being a goalie because it was numbers related,” he says. “You’re either the best or you’re not. It’s numbers. You have the best goals-against average and save the most pucks and win the most games, or you don’t. It’s not subjective. So going into this world, I didn’t like the subjectivity of it because it meant that other people were going to put what they thought about you onto you.”

Consider his decision to try his hand at auditioning, then, a whim—albeit the most epic of whims, one perhaps buoyed by his family’s pedigree. His first audition was for a role in Captain America: The First Avenger. He didn’t get that one, but he started getting others. There was Law & Order: L.A., Cowboys & Aliens, and his first big breakout, a part in 22 Jump Street.

Early on, though, there was a pattern. In 2010’s High School, he played “Drug PSA Stoned Teenager.” In This Is 40 he was “Flirty Hockey Player.” As his roles expanded, the “type” he was cast as didn’t necessarily follow suit, whether it’s a spaced-out pitcher in Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! or a backpacker roped into a video-game horror show in an episode of Black Mirror. Lodge 49, too, sees Russell working in that mold again.

But take a closer look at those projects he’s been cast in, and what’s impressive is not so much that he’s been routinely cast as a surfer-stoner-laid-back-bro, but that each time he has, it has been in wildly diferent genres.

In the last year, he’s starred in Blaze, a biopic of country musician directed by Ethan Hawke, finished work on Overlord, a World War II/sci-fi hybrid produced by J.J. Abrams, and was cast in The Woman in the Window, a thriller adapted by Tracy Letts, directed by Joe Wright, and starring Amy Adams. Then there’s Lodge 49, a prestige cable drama that escapes tonal definition.

“It’s been 7 or 8 years since I started doing it,” Russell says, of acting. “For the first time now I probably just last year felt like I might be able to do certain things.”

He remembers getting cast in High School as a hippie-like stoner because he knew how to play guitar.

“From that, you gain confidence to say, ‘Well, I did that, I can do a different version of it,’” he says. “I found myself always trying to find the different version of the guy you had done before. Because that’s the way it works. Somebody sees you in something that they like you in, and they go, ‘Oh he would be great in this.’ It’s up to the actor to give it dimension. Inside the dimension you give it, sometimes somebody else sees an aspect of that dimension and says, ‘I bet you they could do that.’”

In the early episodes of Lodge 49, there are distinct themes that emerge. Russell’s favorite is the way that the show honors the blue-collar population of Long Beach: the plumbers, pool servicemen, and trade workers who give the area life. More, it shows that the emotional weight stressing a family business can be as important, and as volatile, as the finances.

The character of Dud doesn’t just miss his father, he misses the normalcy that the family business—pool cleaning—provided. Russell’s own family business operates from an obvious extreme in relation to Dud’s, but he understands, especially in these last few years, the comfort that comes from normality.

Yes, Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn’s actor son can refer to the family business as normal.

“It did seem normal to me because they never made what they did abnormal,” he says. “They never made themselves abnormal. They never looked at themselves like, ‘I’m special because I do this.’”

“The normalcy of who we are came from the core values of who my parents were when they grew up and transferred it into their parenting styles for the way we are. It’s definitely not a normal thing, to do this. People can get caught up in it. It’s hard not to sometimes.”

When we talk, Russell is wrapping up a week that had him travel back and forth between Los Angeles and New York four times. He’s engaged to Search Party scene-stealer Meredith Hagner, whom he met while shooting the indie Folk Hero & Funny Guy. And he’s promoting his first leading role, an achievement some might rule destiny given who his parents are, but that others might rule unlikely, given the unique story of the actor who sits before me. An actor who still can’t help comparing things to hockey.

“There’s almost nothing else that’s truly numbers-related,” he says. “That game was. That’s what special about sports in a way. It’s an equalizer. This is not that. I didn’t think about ‘I’m going to be a leading man,’ because I just wanted to do something that made me as happy as hockey did.”

Now, he’s doing it.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/meet-wyatt-russell-hollywoods-most-and-least-likely-leading-man/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/181638817272

[allofbeercom]

Meet Wyatt Russell, Hollywoods Most and Least Likely Leading Man

Wyatt Russell walks into a room and it’s almost too easy to make assumptions about him. Luckily, he upends nearly all of them.

The star of AMC’s big-swing summer series, Lodge 49, which debuts Aug. 6, towers a few inches above a tall-and-thin six feet, with hair down to his shoulders, a scruffy beard, and a languid surfer beach drawl to complete the stereotype of the SoCal beatnik—which he plays very well, but hardly fills.

No, this is the son of Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn, and his foray into Hollywood would seem a formality had the 32-year-old actor not spent the majority of his life rejecting the family business in pursuit of a career as a hockey player.

When we meet in Beverly Hills to discuss his new series, which is also his first leading role, the person we encounter is not the strung-out stoner his looks might betray, nor is it the entitled heir to Hollywood royalty you might expect from a person with as much celluloid history in his bloodstream.

Instead, the Wyatt Russell we meet is as wide-eyed and enthusiastic as a breakthrough actor experiencing the spoils of Hollywood for the first time, but with the self-awareness and intelligence of a person who knows how brutal the industry can actually be.

Maybe that’s because, for all the ways he’s seen his mother, father, and half-siblings Kate and Oliver Hudson navigate the business, he’s also churned through perhaps the only industry more ruthless: professional sports. Before he started seriously pursuing a career in acting eight years ago, he had spent over a decade as a promising hockey goalie, until an injury set him on a new path.

It’s perhaps fitting, then, that Russell’s debut as a leading man is in a TV series as unconventional as Lodge 49. As Russell tells it, he wouldn’t have it any other way.

The official logline for Lodge 49 describes it as a “modern fable,” centered on Russell’s character Dud, a lost soul trying to rebuild his life after a surfing injury, the death of his father, and crippling debt have left him homeless. One day, while spelunking for treasures with a metal detector on the beach, he discovers a lost ring that takes him to the doorstep of Lodge 49, “a dusty fraternal order which offers cheap beer and strange alchemical philosophies.”

So what you have is this unusual mix of a series about this eternal optimist, Dud, who is either blind to the fact that he’s hitting rock bottom or manifests a trampoline from optimistic delusion to bounce him back up again. He lands at a Masonic Lodge, of sorts, that provides a lifeline yet espouses just enough woo-woo philosophy to make you fear: Is Dud in a cult?

Nonetheless, for all the talk about this six-foot surfer boy with Hollywood lineage in the starring role, it’s because Russell so intrinsically telegraphs a glass-half-full kind of gumption that the tonal gymnastics of the show sticks the landing. More, that it still feels at home on AMC, a network that has pretty much defined its brand in dark, disturbing drama: Mad Men, Breaking Bad, or The Walking Dead.

Ever exuberant, Russell sees a throughline.

“Everybody starts from an honest place of who they are: Don Draper, Walter White, and Dud,” he says. “It may be easier to utilize a character who has darkness in them because you can find a lot of interesting qualities in those people. It’s harder to find the interesting qualities in optimism, because it’s not something that we necessarily gravitate towards in our everyday lives, especially in our 24/7 news cycle where, constantly, what grabs our attention is negativity.”

So bless Dud’s gumption. And, really, Russell’s, too.

This isn’t a profile about the little boy who grew up on a movie set, and whose scrapbook of school-play star turns hinted that he’d one day follow his parents’ footsteps all the way to the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In fact, he tells me, despite his family’s careers, Russell only recently  “after many years of thinking it wasn’t,” began to think of acting as “a fantastic way to make a living.”

He lived in Santa Monica until he was 15 before moving to Vancouver to play hockey, at the advice of coaches who saw Russell’s potential. Kurt and Goldie moved with him. (The reasons that Russell emerged a well-adjusted Hollywood kid should be apparent.) Cute side story: Kurt Russell once told The New York Times that he took the role as coach of the heroic 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team in Disney’s Miracle in homage to Wyatt’s passion.

After two years of playing college hockey at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, he headed to Europe to go pro, first in Germany and then in the Netherlands. His stories from that time are about as wild as you’d expect from a guy in his twenties touring tertiary European cities with busloads of hockey players. “ I lived with a heroin addict named Harm," he told The Ringer last year. “That was the life experience, watching somebody shoot up heroin while you’re eating potatoes he made."

A series of groin injuries and a broken hip, exacerbated by cramped bus rides and the general body wear-and-tear accrued by a goalie, brought an early end to his hockey career. It dropped Russell smack-dab in the throes of a mid-life crisis a good 20 to 30 years before most men find themselves at a similar crossroads: “Alright. What now?”

While recuperating from his injuries in Groningen, Netherlands, he binged movies. Maybe, he thought, he’d direct. He had acted in one film before throwing himself into hockey—a scene in his father’s film Escape from L.A. when he was 10—and, more than a decade later, still remembered that he didn’t like being in front of the camera.

“I liked playing hockey and being a goalie because it was numbers related,” he says. “You’re either the best or you’re not. It’s numbers. You have the best goals-against average and save the most pucks and win the most games, or you don’t. It’s not subjective. So going into this world, I didn’t like the subjectivity of it because it meant that other people were going to put what they thought about you onto you.”

Consider his decision to try his hand at auditioning, then, a whim—albeit the most epic of whims, one perhaps buoyed by his family’s pedigree. His first audition was for a role in Captain America: The First Avenger. He didn’t get that one, but he started getting others. There was Law & Order: L.A., Cowboys & Aliens, and his first big breakout, a part in 22 Jump Street.

Early on, though, there was a pattern. In 2010’s High School, he played “Drug PSA Stoned Teenager.” In This Is 40 he was “Flirty Hockey Player.” As his roles expanded, the “type” he was cast as didn’t necessarily follow suit, whether it’s a spaced-out pitcher in Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! or a backpacker roped into a video-game horror show in an episode of Black Mirror. Lodge 49, too, sees Russell working in that mold again.

But take a closer look at those projects he’s been cast in, and what’s impressive is not so much that he’s been routinely cast as a surfer-stoner-laid-back-bro, but that each time he has, it has been in wildly diferent genres.

In the last year, he’s starred in Blaze, a biopic of country musician directed by Ethan Hawke, finished work on Overlord, a World War II/sci-fi hybrid produced by J.J. Abrams, and was cast in The Woman in the Window, a thriller adapted by Tracy Letts, directed by Joe Wright, and starring Amy Adams. Then there’s Lodge 49, a prestige cable drama that escapes tonal definition.

“It’s been 7 or 8 years since I started doing it,” Russell says, of acting. “For the first time now I probably just last year felt like I might be able to do certain things.”

He remembers getting cast in High School as a hippie-like stoner because he knew how to play guitar.

“From that, you gain confidence to say, ‘Well, I did that, I can do a different version of it,’” he says. “I found myself always trying to find the different version of the guy you had done before. Because that’s the way it works. Somebody sees you in something that they like you in, and they go, ‘Oh he would be great in this.’ It’s up to the actor to give it dimension. Inside the dimension you give it, sometimes somebody else sees an aspect of that dimension and says, ‘I bet you they could do that.’”

In the early episodes of Lodge 49, there are distinct themes that emerge. Russell’s favorite is the way that the show honors the blue-collar population of Long Beach: the plumbers, pool servicemen, and trade workers who give the area life. More, it shows that the emotional weight stressing a family business can be as important, and as volatile, as the finances.

The character of Dud doesn’t just miss his father, he misses the normalcy that the family business—pool cleaning—provided. Russell’s own family business operates from an obvious extreme in relation to Dud’s, but he understands, especially in these last few years, the comfort that comes from normality.

Yes, Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn’s actor son can refer to the family business as normal.

“It did seem normal to me because they never made what they did abnormal,” he says. “They never made themselves abnormal. They never looked at themselves like, ‘I’m special because I do this.’”

“The normalcy of who we are came from the core values of who my parents were when they grew up and transferred it into their parenting styles for the way we are. It’s definitely not a normal thing, to do this. People can get caught up in it. It’s hard not to sometimes.”

When we talk, Russell is wrapping up a week that had him travel back and forth between Los Angeles and New York four times. He’s engaged to Search Party scene-stealer Meredith Hagner, whom he met while shooting the indie Folk Hero & Funny Guy. And he’s promoting his first leading role, an achievement some might rule destiny given who his parents are, but that others might rule unlikely, given the unique story of the actor who sits before me. An actor who still can’t help comparing things to hockey.

“There’s almost nothing else that’s truly numbers-related,” he says. “That game was. That’s what special about sports in a way. It’s an equalizer. This is not that. I didn’t think about ‘I’m going to be a leading man,’ because I just wanted to do something that made me as happy as hockey did.”

Now, he’s doing it.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/meet-wyatt-russell-hollywoods-most-and-least-likely-leading-man/

[ohioguru03]

Let’s Talk About Anxiety...

If you are anything like me, you have those moments, days, or even weeks where your mind is on overdrive. As the mind begins to race, anxiety starts to amp up. It doesn't take long for anxiety to reach top speed and we begin to think about all the things we have to do and when we try to fight the anxiety/worry/fear in our own strength, it just gets worse.

Plain and simple, it snowballs quickly. I'm sure some of you know what I'm talking about. It comes out of nowhere. We are anxious about one thing, which leads to other things that are often small but anxiety doesn't know the difference between big or small it just runs roughshod over anything in its path. It can be crippling and paralyzing, and all the self help techniques are useless when anxiety has built up for hours and days. Often times, there is a root, and the anxiety spills out and spreads. So, throughout the years, I've found that finding the root is the best way to attack it. That requires some digging, which often times can be painful much like digging a ditch. 

There is no denying that anxiety/worry/fear and being overwhelmed is a part of life or the Bible wouldn't say so much about it. Jesus knew we would do these things, which is why He spoke about it often. It's no surprise to God. 

Just like any other area of our life, this is a chance for us to grow. We can learn so much about ourselves in times of anxiety especially when we allow God into the situation. I may be different in my thinking here, but I look at dealing with mental health differently than most. I look at it as a great opportunity to trust God and lean on His power and not mine. I truly believe God is honored when we rely on Him through our struggles, because when we are weak then He is strong. Some people are more prone to anxiety/worry/fear than others, and you know what, it's okay. We all have are stuff, our junk, our messes, and our things. 

I've learned more about myself through anxiety/worry/fear/obsessions than anything else in life. Have I mastered it, absolutely not, but I've continued to put one foot in front of the other and day-by-day I learn more and more. The way my mind is wired allows me to be great at certain things such as analyzing players or analyzing data/figures/numbers, but I’m sure you can see how this can be troublesome at times. See, being an analyzer doesn’t just stay in its lane when it comes to things I want to use it for. Oh no, I tend to overanalyze in all areas of life. Some of you may be able to relate...here is a quick example. 

“Did I say that correctly?” “I hope they didn’t think this when I said that.” You over analyzers know what I’m talking about. 

Perhaps, for me, this will be that one thing that I deal with to one degree or another throughout life, and if so, I will just continue to become a better me through it. Look, if God wanted to completely take this away from me, He could in a split second. However, at times, I think if He completely took this from me, I wouldn’t rely on Him as much. 

God works in mysterious ways, and I would never begin to think I know His ways, but I know there are certain things in my life that keep me close to Him no matter how far off the path I stray. Over the years, specifically (mind struggles), this has been that one thing which keeps me closest to Him.

For far too long, we have hidden and shied away from talking about anything that deals with the mind. To me, that just enhances the problem. People need to talk about their issues and see they aren't the only ones struggling with this or that. The enemy wants us to stay isolated and believe there is something so wrong with us, that if someone found out, we wouldn't be seen the same. 

Let’s be honest, no matter how much we try to hide it or doctor ourselves up, we are all a mess and a group of imperfect people striving to follow a perfect God. Whether you are Christian or not, we can all agree that we have issues (big or small). The only way to get healthy is to be able to connect with other people that struggle with similar things, and like my buddy said to me, how would people ever know what you struggle with if you never tell them. We can’t connect with others when we continue to hide who we really are. 

Sure, we all like to post our perfect pictures on social media and talk about all the awesome and amazing things in our life (MYSELF included), but at the end of the day we know we are hurting people in a hurting world. 

I think at our core, we are longing for authentic. I don’t know about you, but when I meet someone that is authentic, they are magnetic. I greatly admire authentic people. I strive to be more and more authentic, because I want people to know the real Kurt Stubbs II, not some imitation or the facade I put on. I will be the first to admit, I can be persuasive with words, which would allow me to put on a great front. However, I want to use my gift of being able to use words to be authentic and real. 

Trust me, I’m not saying don’t be positive or celebrate the wonderful things are happening in our lives, because God wants us to honor Him with the amazing life He has blessed us with. There is definitely a time for that and I thoroughly enjoy reading all the successes and joys many of you post on a daily basis. 

I’m solely writing about getting real with people with the things that weigh us down. In life, we will have peaks and valleys, but as much as we talk about our peaks we also need to mention our valleys. Personally, I’ve grown more in the valleys. 

My hope and my prayer is that if you struggle with any mental health issue, you will begin to see it in a different light. Use it as a gift and view it differently. Men especially have a hard time talking about this issue, but I’m here to tell you today, that it’s okay to talk about it. You never know, telling someone that you struggle with a particular issue, could just be the connection to save someone’s life whether physically, mentally, or spiritually. 

(This is a photo of my friend Bob Drew, a guy I met about two years ago at Grace Group. He has been a rock for me over the last couple years, and hopefully I’ve been able to do the same for him. He has a deep passion for serving the Lord and I greatly admire that about Him.) 

It’s not embarrassing, it’s not shameful, it’s not something to feel guilt about, rather it’s admirable, courageous, and brave to admit our struggles. We ALL have them, but most chose to hide them. Watch and see, when you begin to tell someone you struggle with issue X, it will only be a matter of time before they say either “me too” or “I’ve been struggling with....”

Let’s start making connections through our struggles and get real/transparent/honest with people. We can enhance and impress others with our strengths, but we draw the deepest connections through our shortcomings. 

Let me preface, I’m not saying to go spill your guts to anyone and everyone, that is not what I’m saying at all. Be wise about it, but also don’t be afraid to open up in a safe, trusting, and judgment free environment. There are people that want to help. There are people that want to hear your story, because it will help change their story. 

I pray for each and every one of you today, that whatever you are struggling with, you will find someone that is trustworthy to share your story with. I pray that your story will help countless others overcome their struggles. 

I put together this list of Bible verses that you can print out and have readily available when anxiety is overcoming you like the waves of the ocean. There is so much power in these scriptures when we say them out loud. I truly believe our fears tremble when they hear the Word of God spoken by His children. Please, feel free to print this out, and hang it or keep it somewhere nearby. 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VK8UIRLQJVmAlyF9olLBSdIKqjwGUmh8ViyR0TIRelw/pub

With love,

Kurt