The Taproot Podcast - Actor Toby Huss on His Photo Essay American Sugar Gristle

Starting point is 00:00:00 the the the the the the the the the the the

Starting point is 00:00:40 the the the the of it. They seem to belie what I was hearing in the media and you know for the last 20 years is what this all you've heard is the separation and how people are so radically different and and being the country's being torn apart and it's it's not being torn apart it's this it's just a it's a strange place we're in right now where we're trying to, I think, culturally understand what's real and what's not, and what's important and what's not in a bigger way, I think, than we had before.

Starting point is 00:01:12 There's personal identity, and then there's a cultural identity and a national identity. And it's out there, but you have to look for it. It doesn't come easy. You have to go find it. And I think there's such a problem now with people that will sit back on their couches and just let it come to them. the the different beauty there that I'm not completely used to. So it took a while to sort of jump into it, but you can find it there as well. You know, they have their own version of it

Starting point is 00:02:11 as every country does and every state does. But I think in the bigger picture, it's the connectivity of people. And you know, when I would approach these towns to take a photo in a little small town with 6,000 people in the middle of Nebraska, Florida, or California, or wherever, I would approach it.

Starting point is 00:02:32 I had to approach it from a neutral spot and to know that there was something beautiful there that I couldn't dismiss it. Like I tried to dismiss Palmdale, California early on being an awful, like not a photogenic, not a pretty place. But I couldn't dismiss it. I had to find its beauty and then I had to see the beauty that was there and know that it was there when I approached it and then to be able to to find its specific beauty and then I realized that sort of to translate

Starting point is 00:03:10 accidentally equal afterwards so that was part of the connectivity too. Well thank you that's a beautiful intro I'm I'm here with Toby Huss who's an actor a photographer writer painter and star of so many things I love you in Halt and Catch Fire I love you in Sort of Trust the cops in the smokey room on the neo noir or one of the one of the guys in the back set and I think Houghton catch fire and sort of trust maybe two of my favorites and then you know king of the hill is great which I guess is coming back on soon but coming back on sort of trust has a visual language that looks very similar to your photo essay that we're talking about American sugar gristle I mean I think if you look at like cinematography or something that seems to be the closest to kind of what your,

Starting point is 00:04:08 was there any kind of cross inspiration or anything there? And you mentioned Lynn Shelton in the book in one passage it looks like. Yeah. Yeah, she was a buddy of mine since 91 or something like that. We were in a theater company in New York together. So I've known her, I'd known her forever.

Starting point is 00:04:26 And she's just great. We did together on Glow and then we worked together on this thing and oh yeah, Dickinson. She directed an episode of Dickinson. It's just great. And she's an old pal and she's really talented. And like we never got to spend as much time together. We were only like together on sets

Starting point is 00:04:45 when we were hiking one time. But that was the first time in 10 years. We'd have breakfast now and again, but it was never like a relationship that, you know, it's hard with her because you want more of her. And I'm sure everybody felt that. She's one of those people that you're around her.

Starting point is 00:05:04 You're like, yeah, let's have more of this, this is, she's just that wonderful kind of human that, you know, had a lot of friends and a lot of people that, that cared about her and were invested in her. And in that way, you kind of invest in your friends. And, and sometimes it, it, it comes back and sometimes not, but that's not why you invest in that. You just do it because you like that thing, that person. And there are some people that just have such a generativity and an expansiveness. It's just like you feel like you could just go forever almost.

Starting point is 00:05:38 They're always just kind of pulling everyone in. Yeah, we had that way about her. Well, so a lot of American Sugar Gristle, the stuff that you write is not quite poetry, not quite prose. It's almost dreamlike, trying to orient yourself into what you're hearing and where you're coming in. It's interesting, they're almost like conversations that maybe you had in this place. Maybe you're just looking at the setting and you're thinking about

Starting point is 00:06:01 conversations that may occur there, these characters just emerge out of the ether. It's really pretty, but like your character in sort of trust hog jaws, that almost seems like it would be a line from American Sugar. Some of those lines would kind of accompany. I think that that's what I bring to the things that I make is something that's pretty specifically the That's not why you hired me. You hired me to do all this husnus and now you're trying to squash it. Yeah, I think that I've always loved language like that and some of the stories are autobiographical or they start with an autobiographical seed. And some of them are just like the one toward the end

Starting point is 00:07:05 where it's about the guy shooting the other guy to avenge his sister. That's an autobiographical story. That's my old roommate in New York who's since passed away. Made a pretty rough life, but that's what we figured happened to him. And I'd lost touch with him a little bit toward the end of his life. That's a true one.

Starting point is 00:07:29 Then the penis that somebody spray painted on the Shell gas station. There's a lot of penises in the book. I like all of the dick graffiti. That's one of the more American elements to me. You don't see that. Well, you think it's American. the the and I thought of course like every other dude which I didn't want hey I should run in the shape of a big cock through my wonderfully pure aisle, I think too, and very organic and authentic about things like that that you see when you drive around the country. And the reason why I included the one, the gas pump, not because I think graffiti dicks are hilarious, but just I immediately thought of the conversation

Starting point is 00:08:57 of the two dudes who were hanging out. They were like 16, 17 year olds slackers from, I think, Duke and Kerry, something like that. It could have been Duke and Kerry, but it was one of those little the the I started laughing more thinking that's hilarious. And then wrote it at one point it was four or five pages long. And yeah, inane dialogue. But I love those kinds of conversations that people have over things. I got stopped on time taking photos, these cops in, I think it was Georgia or something, could have been Alabama, but I think it was Georgia

Starting point is 00:10:02 and it was over there more. They pulled me over. I was taking photos of a gas station that was over here and there was a school, like a kids school, elementary school over here and there are no kids outside playing. It was just a school that was there. And I took photos of the gas station and got, and I came up and got back in my car and started driving away and they lit me up and I pulled over and there was a cop came up on the the the the the to say the word pervert. And that's what it was. I went, yeah, well, you know, you can't, like, it's like you can't, yeah, you gotta watch out for those, yeah, yeah, the perverts, yeah,

Starting point is 00:12:09 you gotta watch out for the perverts. It was all about listening to the rhythm of his voice and then not finding him a dumbass, finding him kind of, you know, just a dude doing his job, but just to see how many times he could say pervert. That was good fun for an average Tuesday afternoon somewhere in Georgia. Well, yeah, I mean, you are really cracking through to a humanity of it. I mean, like like the like the Dick Graffiti, like the just kind of conversations

Starting point is 00:12:36 that go nowhere that begin nowhere. You know, there's something that's ahead of a head of Latin professor that told me when they excavate like the bad parts of town from Rome, the archaeologists aren't really that excited because there's not anything like super impressive there But the entomologists get really excited because the graffiti is what teaches us what a lot of those words mean that we don't Like older latin dictionaries will will have a sexual term and it'll just say elude act But then in the 90s or the 2000s they would excavate something and be like, oh, that's what it is. Okay now we know Little illustration there and then now. There's a little illustration there.

Starting point is 00:13:06 And then now the dictionary is a little bit more filled in from the graffiti. Well, I think that's, you know, because I call a lot of the photos to me seem like a language, the photos that I take, that there's some language that you have. And it's the language of the sort of collective aesthetic idea of that town or that area. And you have to, or I have to be able to decode that really quickly to understand lexicon. And that's what I'm doing a lot when I go across. So sometimes the language is visual with me, and then sometimes it's written. So then I write something and sometimes it's one word

Starting point is 00:13:46 and sometimes it needs 300 words to tell the story of this thing. And there's always, like the graffiti, there's an impression that's left, I think in that area that sometimes you can, I don't physically see it, like I'm not hallucinating or anything, but you can see that there's some lives that have passed through there and you can see what they are and you might

Starting point is 00:14:08 be wrong. But if you open up to that idea, whether there's something happening or not, but you open up to the idea of perhaps discovering a real life that walked through there. To me, that's the way to go. Yeah where they grow headstones is a beautiful photo and just such a short perfect description. Long riding. I think that's in South Carolina somewhere. Yeah I saw this building and went right swerved over to the side of the road and I passed it so I had to walk back because there were four lanes of traffic and crossed it and walked over and just took photos the the shape of it and the way it was just standing on this green grass and it had been loathed and it was so pretty and had great light on it. It was shining like this grave. Yeah,

Starting point is 00:15:14 that's the thing. Thanks. Yeah, that was a good one. Well, your book break is completely to my taste in art because I like the grounded abstractness and I like when the art is like very well thought out and kind of pointing you at something, but it's also just not adorned. I mean, it's almost kind of like folk art photography and it's just not, there's nothing pretentious. There's nothing like there's tons of deep thinking

Starting point is 00:15:39 and feeling and ways of being, but it's just not kind of dressed up or overly thought out. I mean, it's just like so much of that kind of just connection to a place and really like feeling, setting as so much of what I look for really in any media. And it's fantastic and so funny. Like there's the restaurant that's just called restaurant

Starting point is 00:16:02 and then you imagine the conversation of the people in the restaurant. the irony would have ruined that book if there was even one photo that was ironic where I thought I was smarter than the photo or smarter than the words or any words. And I was winking to the audience like, can you believe this? These fucking hillbillies. It fell over. You can share in the wonder of that photo or the wonder of those characters or those people, you can share it, but you can't talk down to it. And that's a huge problem too, because there's so many lefty friends I have out here and I've been on the left side of the political world

Starting point is 00:16:57 my whole life and I will continue to be, but there's so many of my lefty friends out here that are convinced that the people on the right are just not as smart as they are. They're just dumber. And you can't talk them out of it. They don't because they don't get out of LA. And if they do get out of LA, they go to New York and then they come back.

Starting point is 00:17:17 And the same thing on the right. They're convinced that they just have a really great practical view of the world. And the lefties are fucking psychotics and just different blind spots different types of projection you know but it really is and those to me are the same people I don't know why they vote differently I think they should have both stopped voting and let the people in the middle vote I think they're avoiding different things like CNN and Fox News are selling two different kind of like easy avoidant narratives

Starting point is 00:17:45 that don't really make you engage with each other, you know. Well, yeah, but their job is not to engage with each other. Job is to sell soap. And we think that it's a news gathering organization and it's a money gathering organization and both of them are money gathering organizations and they've just positioned themselves to rake in the most money they can from their side. So yeah, I think both of those, not to get too political here because that's the work. Well, no, that was the next question that I had written was like, you know, is the book political? Not red, blue political, but there is like a call back to just a common humanity and a way of listening without looking down. I mean, like there's there's other books like this that I don't like because the person acts like I'm going to go put my safari hat on

Starting point is 00:18:29 and go from New York into Kansas and then photograph the natives and then go back to the city. And that isn't the way that this one's written. I mean, you're really kind of embedded in these like things. And I mean, like the picture of the rock shop, it's like I could have seen that rock shop. It's so familiar. I maybe I did. And a lot of people have taken photos of it I've seen that online yeah well there's so many like it I mean it's just so much of a common you know thing

Starting point is 00:18:54 uh that it is sort of making something familiar to everybody you know whether or not we have those experiences we're kind of aware and like you said, not punching down, not looking down on anybody. The cynicism would have been the death to the heart of something like that. Yeah, it wasn't a political act on my part because I didn't want that to, in this work, I didn't want it to be anything near there.

Starting point is 00:19:22 I think if anything, it might've been a, there's not a political bent, but there might be more of a spiritual bent to it, sort of an American spiritual bent, not a Godhead per se, but more this sort of collective idea we all have about what America is and be able to touch that thing and to see that thing. I think that might be that might be more of what it is to me.

Starting point is 00:19:52 More of a transcendence than like a, you know, mountaintop experience. I think so, like an Emersonian transcendent thing, you know, that that ideal that. There's something mountaintop about it, but the mountaintop is in the rock shop. You know, and if you can't find the mountaintop in the rock shop, I think you're in trouble. I think you have to be able to find the mountaintop in the rock shop or in the penises on the gas station. You have to be able to see that as a,

Starting point is 00:20:29 if not a spiritual, it's not really a spiritual message, but I have to be able to, I've challenged myself to be able to find beauty in that. And the ultimate expression of that beauty, I think, is to be able to embrace all of that stuff. If it's the side of a Shoney's restaurant, it just has a weird shadow on it. And that's it. But I think that's as legitimate as, you know, taking photos of the, you know, the Louvre, taking photos in the Louvre or something, or taking photos in Paris. It's a different

Starting point is 00:20:59 aesthetics. But I think- Well, we've seen that photo before. We haven't seen your photos. I mean, like, you have the same street in Paris, you know, like, how many times has that been photographed the I don't know if you've ever been, but it's kind of in the desert and it's got giant, super flat, there's some mountains right on the edge. And it's just a basin and today it'll be 104 degrees there and it'll be 82 in LA. And it's ruthless, it's a ruthless town and there's a lot of one story buildings because anything over that costs too much to air condition. And there's 800,000 or a million square foot warehouses where they make airplanes and airplane wings

Starting point is 00:21:51 and McDonald Douglas and Skunk Works and shit out there. So I thought taking photos out there years ago, it was hot, it was in August, it was just wasted. You really have to drink a gallon of water while you're driving around there during the day. If you're getting in and out of your car car taking photographs like a dummy. And I was taking photos and thought this is this is not a pretty town. This is an ugly town. I thought boy a kid growing up here and you know Christmas time and this is his Christmas. They drive

Starting point is 00:22:19 down the street and they pass the 800,000 square foot fiberglass building where they make jets. And the kid gets to see that, and it's just a gray building with a white strip going through. And I thought, well, that's ugly as hell. As in my hometown, little town, Marshalltown, Iowa, beautiful little downtown there, old brick buildings built.

Starting point is 00:22:38 And I mean, before the tornado hit it a few years ago, kind of fucked up that town. That town's been fucked up a number of times, but regardless, when I was a kid in the 60s and 70s, it was beautiful. And I thought, well, that's a beautiful downtown in the winter for Christmas time with snow coming in. And I thought, well, wait a minute,

Starting point is 00:22:56 not to bang on Paris, but some kid growing up in Paris looks at my hometown and Marshalltown and goes, what a dump, you gotta grow up in that. Oh, it's just a measure of your aesthetic to what your visual aesthetic that you grow up in. And that kid in Palmdale looks at that building and he sees some beauty there. He knows that it's not Rome.

Starting point is 00:23:18 He knows that. He knows that it's not Fouquet. He knows what the story is, but he finds joy in that and it informs his visual aesthetic. And I thought, well, can I change my visual aesthetic to find that town beautiful and towns like it beautiful and these liminal places that are like that? Can I find that beauty? Can I find beauty in that? And that's what sent me on this whole kind of journey. Well, yeah, so much of your book is like the photographs of like the side of a building or the back of a building or the exit doors. But then there is a personality and a story that comes from, you know, somebody was painting and they made a mistake, and then they tried to do it, and then they didn't do it right right or they put this here or, you know, just this, you know, not the, so much personality in the exit door,

Starting point is 00:24:09 you know, it's really interesting. Do you, what are you shooting on? Do you think about equipment too much? Is the technical bit not really the point for you or? Technical bits never been the point for me. There's guys who know a lot more about cameras than I do and love shooting on film. the the And you know, it has to, for me, it's all about the story. And I guess there's technically good photographers, but if they're not telling a story, then no one cares.

Starting point is 00:25:16 I mean, really, a friend of mine sent me a photo from, he just started taking photos and I encouraged him. And he sent me some photos of a homeless dude in New York. And he took photos of a dude on the street. And he was an African-American guy. And he had some tears tattooed in his face and some other lightning bolts. This is a rough time in life.

Starting point is 00:25:37 And he said, hey, what about these? How are these? And he sent me two photos of the guy. And I thought, what are you doing? Why are you, why did you wake up and take photos of anything today? Do you know why you took photos of the thing? You have to ask yourself that and is it the right medium? If you want to write a play, maybe a play is the right thing for this. You see filmmakers all the time just desperate to make films and so many films I see I go well that would be a great short story.

Starting point is 00:26:05 It's not a film. It'd be a great short story or a cool sculpture. You could make that into a sculpture but you decided to use film. I don't know why. People don't ever question the medium they use. And for me I have this camera in my hand and I'm always asking myself why are you taking a photo of that? What are you doing? What are you doing here in a little town in Oklahoma, you know, in July taking a photo of that dog with a weird leg? Why are you doing that? I can always answer it, you know. I have to answer it. It's my job to be able to answer it to myself, not to you or anyone else, but I have to be able to answer it. Like when I was younger, there was this company, Walden Books, Walden Bookstore,

Starting point is 00:26:49 that if you couldn't get a Barnes and Noble or couldn't get a legit bookstore in your town, you got a Walden Books in your mall. In Marshalltown, we had a mall, we had a Walden Books. And they had a few books, a lot of romance novels, and a couple of bestsellers, but nothing really great. But it was the only access to a bookstore we had. And there was of course, no Amazon.

Starting point is 00:27:08 And they would always have knickknacks and mugs and coffee cups and things. And they had calendars. And every year there'd be an Iowa barn calendar. Oh, Iowa barns. Oh, look at that barn there. Oh, it's a barn up on a hill. Look at it in the sunrise.

Starting point is 00:27:22 Oh, look at the way the sunrise hits that barn. It'd be a Look at the sunrise. Oh, look at the way the sunrise hits that barn. It be a beautiful barn and sunrise. Okay. Yeah. Then you go to, you know, October. Oh, look at the leaves fell around the barn. Oh, beautiful at

Starting point is 00:27:36 sunset. The leaves, the orange leaves around the barn and years later, I was taking photos of a barn out in Iowa and it struck me. I remembered that calendar and I went, what the fuck are you doing taking photos at sunset? What has happened? What's going on? Yeah. Why am I taking this photo of a barn? Because it looks, why does it look cool? Because it's bathed in this sort of orangey yellow light. But what are you adding anything to the discussion about Barnes? No. Are you adding anything to the aesthetic idea about Iowa Barnes? No. Well, then why the fuck you taking a photo of an Iowa barn?

Starting point is 00:28:12 What are you adding to this conversation? And I was adding nothing. And I thought, well, maybe I need to take photos of things that I can either start a conversation with or add to a conversation. So this is the area that I can either start a conversation with or add to a conversation. So this is the area that I chose. Like it's the same thing goes for guys taking photos of nude women. Like good, I guess, but what are you doing?

Starting point is 00:28:36 You just found a different girl to pose nude for you? Like what the fuck is the point of this one? Oh, you lit her differently with shadow? Ooh, look at that. Oh, she's not super sexy, she's kind of big. Okay, we've seen that. Like all of it's been done, which doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, but.

Starting point is 00:28:53 But why are you doing it? What of you personally are you adding to the conversation? Are you just being another dude taking photos of barns and nudes? Or are you adding something? Are you looking at this in a different way? And that's what I've tried to do with these, is look at the world that I saw in,

Starting point is 00:29:12 not necessarily a different way, but it was a way that I started to, it was a vein of aesthetics that I started to mine, and I'm still kind of mining it. Well, and it looks like the things that you would have seen growing up in the 60s through the 80s on a road trip, like it looks like the things that you would have seen growing up in the 60s to the 80s on a road trip. It looks like when you look out the window as you're going from town to town.

Starting point is 00:29:31 I think my dad and a lot of people of my dad's generation, they just love to get the family in the car and go for a long trip for a couple days and just see the countryside. You really would just come to this spot, you come to the next spot. The book feels like a road trip. There's a Paris the in that direction really. It just hasn't, I haven't pursued it and it hasn't popped up in my in my vision but it might soon. We'll see what happens. Well you're acting like a lot of the roles that I love, Halt and Catch Fire. It's one of my favorite shows of all time. I mean to me it's up there with Mad Men and the Sopranos in like a different way just because there's something about watching history happen and then repeat itself and watching technology kind of reflect emotional needs. And I mean, there's I always try and get people to watch it and tell them like, this is just this is about computers in the same way that the hustler is about pool. You know, exactly. Jumping off point. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:30:40 Examination of the thing that gets you to the thing. But sure. I mean, that role, a lot of roles, you have kind of a folksy, not quite con artists, but putting on a performance that maybe you're not aware of, putting on a performance that you're not putting on a performance is like the kind of Toby Hus thing when you're like, what was his, there's kind of a like a carnival barker,

Starting point is 00:31:02 showman folksy, getting people's confidence, not always for the wrong reasons. I mean, how much of that is you or how much of that is, and maybe I'm totally misreading the performance, but is that, could you say anything about that? Well, let me understand what you're saying, that I'm choosing to portray the character in a, that has sort of two facets or that I'm projecting a thing onto it. No, well, I don't know exactly how it ends up there, but what I see a lot is like a character that's kind of doing a performance of not doing a performance, you know, trying to make people feel comfortable, trying to make people feel at ease, but also sort of in a way that not necessarily

Starting point is 00:31:47 and manipulative in a bad way all the time, but is kind of trying to be folksy to put people at ease to sell something to, I don't know. I mean, do you? I think some of the things are possibly that, but it's not that, it's not as direct as that. It's much more opaque. And I think sometimes people fall into these kind of modes of behavior that are performative. And I think sometimes Bosworth, like in the Halt and Catch Fire, he needed to be performative because he was a salesman, a real timey salesman. So that is a lot of performance. But then back off like the scenes I had with McKenzie Davis, when he'd back off and talk to Cameron like a human, I think that would get dropped. And then through his, through the arc of the whole

Starting point is 00:32:41 seasons, you saw this guy kind of get crushed under the weight of how he was before and how we were before his old technology physical technology cbs and radios and such and then his old kind of performative behavior and toward the end he lost all that shit and he was this he sort of became a different version of himself i mean all the characters are very stripped down by the end of that I mean, I'm really glad that that show got the last season because it slows it down. Yeah best way But I mean I guess kind of what I mean is when Bosworth it is at his most Performative when he's really trying to sell something to the Texans or get into the room It's on like, you know, that is a performance that is a sale, but it's like the exact same energy as the most raw and

Starting point is 00:33:29 earnest moments like when Cameron pushes the IPO and Bosworth is like, you're breaking my fucking heart, or yeah, the radio at the very end, where he's like, I'm going to live to the 20th century. It's like, it's the same thing. When it's the you know, the the the the sale and and the person I don't know that it's a really great- Well, he was that kind of a guy, and I thought, to me, it didn't make him,

Starting point is 00:33:51 to me, that was his authenticity too. There are people who were, I mean, maybe he wasn't really a born salesman, but there was something in him that drew him to that way of living and that way of life and that way of kind of constructing his personality, I thought. And I know sale, I have a cousin who's a salesman has been, he's, he's that guy in his real life,

Starting point is 00:34:11 whether he's talking about his, his kids or whether he's talking about, you know, getting cut in on a $4 million deal that he's doing for a software company. He's got that kind of energy and it's, it's now part of him. He turns it up a notch when he goes in for a sale and when I hear him on the phone. But he's kind of that guy. And I think Bosworth is that kind of a guy. I think that animal, some animals need, the way that I've run into people in my lives that need a certain level of chaos to feel engaged in life and to feel that they're alive when they're dealing with this chaos and it makes them feel like their life has value and they have worth. So they need to keep this chaos going.

Starting point is 00:35:01 And if they can't find a way to turn a situation chaotic, then they would draw and they're unhappy and they're awful. And I think maybe in an almost similar way Bosworth was a little bit like that. Like he had to be cutting a deal somehow, whether it was with Cameron or whether it was with Joe or whether it was with his own conscience and his divorce and that sort of thing. He couldn't keep it going because that's the way that guy felt engaged. He did a lot, you know, toward the end of the season, it was like three and four. He did become engaged in a real different way. Like even when, you know, Scoot goes away, you know, even when Gordon goes away, he's

Starting point is 00:35:44 engaging what he's making to Chile. He's engaging everyone. The sentiment in the Chile is really great. He's selling the idea of love and care and community to these people and compassion. He he's taking care of in the way that he knows how It's really delicately ridden those things Look King of the Hills coming back are you on them on the re reboot of that one? Are you gonna be voice acting for it? Yeah Yeah, they con is gonna be played I'm not playing con anymore. Yes

Starting point is 00:36:22 Con is going to be played. I'm not playing Con anymore. Yes. They're just not going to do that. But I did a cotton in a few episodes in flashbacks. But then I took over the voice of Dale cause Johnny Hardwick passed away. I mean, like two years ago now. And he was a buddy and I did it a couple of times

Starting point is 00:36:43 or read throughs and they were gonna maybe AI the voice or get someone else to do it and they said, why don't you just do it? Okay, that's great. It was really humbling that they asked me to play Johnny and it's really heartfelt stuff. Yeah, cause you can't, it's funny, like when I bring up Bosworth,

Starting point is 00:37:02 there's one time when I do, okay, sorry, the wardrobe lady, she said, Hey, we're going to get you some cowboy boots to wear. I'm fine because I was asking for them. So they got 12 pairs of cowboy boots and they lined them up. And they said, all right, which one? And she said, I was thinking about these. And I went, those are his boots over here. And I picked the boots and he went, well, these are, I said, no, no, no, no, no, none. I understand me. I pick the right boots every time. You're very good at what you do.

Starting point is 00:37:28 And they're great wardrobe people on that show, but I have to feel that when I'm playing a character, I know more about the character than anyone. And chances are I do. And it's not your character anymore. It's fucking my character. So the, when I was doing Cotton on King of the Hill, it just so happens their writing was so good, or like with Halt and Catch Fire,

Starting point is 00:37:49 the writing was so good. We agreed on what the character was gonna do 99.9% of the time, but that last, you know, 0.01%, that's me. And I know what that character is. So when I went to do Dale's voice, because I'm the expert on that character, so I went to do Dale's voice. I did it and I can sound like Johnny well enough.

Starting point is 00:38:14 We probably smoked the same amount of cigarettes over our lives. Well, he doesn't smoke anymore and I don't smoke anymore either, but he was a really unique, wonderful guy. Johnny was with a really interesting take on his character. He didn't start out as an actor. He started out as a as a standup.

Starting point is 00:38:34 And he was also just a wonderful goofball and a sweetheart and a nut. So he had these really other takes on lines that were just great and weird boys. OK, you can never get that out of AI. the When I did it, I did his voice and I got close enough and I thought, this sounds like Johnny, that's enough, sounds like Dale. But I'm never going to be the expert on that character the way that I was the expert on Boz or someone else because the expert on that character passed away. Johnny's not here. So he's the expert on Dale.

Starting point is 00:39:22 He took that with him. And that's the end of the story. So all I can do is try to honor his idea of Dale and try to be there emotionally and hopefully vocally as close as I can to that guy. So you look for creatives that are going to be more kind of actors, directors, and even let the intuition kind of inform the role instead of their vision or their kind of preconceived idea of what a character is? Is it, do I... Do you look for directors that are more of an actor's director,

Starting point is 00:39:54 that let the actor bring the intuition into the role? I don't really look for directors so much as, you get a project or something's offered to you and you look at it and go, who's this guy? Okay, I don't know. We'll jump in there and see what happens. So it's always different. I'm always amenable to that.

Starting point is 00:40:08 I just shot, worked with a really great director in Boston shooting this thing. And I hadn't worked with him before, but I knew his work. I really liked what he did. And he was super easy to get along with him, really great. And came about it from an angle that I'd never thought of. And it's just, it's so nice to get opened up to someone you've never really worked with before and find,

Starting point is 00:40:33 oh yeah, I never thought about working like that, that's great. You know, as I think, part of my job is to, you know, know my lines and stand in the right spot, but part of it is to be open to somebody else's idea and somebody else's vision and somebody else's words and define like the same way that I find beauty in those photos. I have to start with the fact that it's beautiful and then understand it. So I got to start with the fact that this man or this woman knows what they're doing

Starting point is 00:41:04 and let's go forward, this is great. So when you, and you've done stage stuff too. So when you do voice acting, when you do film acting, when you do your voice acting, stage acting, play acting, is there anything that is kind of different or you just kind of go in and the same process for any of them of them of finding the character. Yeah, the processes are just so different.

Starting point is 00:41:36 If it's a film, it's a finite amount of time. And the luxury of something like Halt or carnival is you're living with this character month after month while you're shooting. You have a lot of time to get into it. And the same thing with the stage thing. You have a lot of time to investigate that character. And you can investigate it too with a film. And sometimes you watch your films afterwards and go, well, okay, you did something there.

Starting point is 00:42:03 It might not have been what you really would have done if you had lived with that character for six more weeks, but it's still okay. Through the process, a little bit different. Yeah. And you paint too. I mean, do you still paint or was that something else? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:42:19 So what, can you talk about that process? Or, I mean, I've read, I think, two interviews in the past where you talked about painting as kind of a way to heal trauma or be engaged with the body. And I don't know if that was it was something that had popped up in one of the interviews that I'd read by you. Yeah, I did. I had a solo show a couple of years ago in L.A.

Starting point is 00:42:39 of these of these kind of line paintings that I'd been working on. And I come to a crossroads a couple of years before that show and I went, well, I don't know what I'm gonna do. And then I ran into this woman who was a mom at my daughter's school and she had a gallery. I went, unless she said, yeah, you wanna do something? I said, yeah, sure. So standing in front of a canvas,

Starting point is 00:43:02 not knowing what I was gonna do. And for a long time, I'd been drawing this kind of squiggly line that I would draw it on envelopes of letters that I typed to friends for 40 years. And I'd do it on pieces of paper. Anybody that ever lived with me over the years, oh yeah, I remember those scraps of paper that had these little lines on them,

Starting point is 00:43:24 these little squiggly things. I went, yeah, listen and I had kind of realized I'd been doing it, but not really. It was pretty unconscious. And then, about, before the painting, about five years, I've been painting for, you know, 20, 30 years around,

Starting point is 00:43:40 just on my own. And, but I started some MDMA sessions, some therapeutic MDMA sessions with a guy in New York. You know, been researching that a lot. And then, you know, when you go through that stuff, I don't know if you've ever experienced something like that, but it's pretty.

Starting point is 00:43:59 Was it helpful? We work with, I'm a social worker by license, so we help prepare people for either doing MDMA or IV ketamine or psilocybin sometimes and then they come back but they you know it's more of a preparatory thing we can't administer it. Right the MDMA stuff is pretty profound I found it to be but I haven't done you know IVA gain or I did Ayahuasca down in Costa Rica a couple summers ago. That was pretty profound as well. But the MDMA therapeutic process was releasing a lot of

Starting point is 00:44:31 stored trauma I found and man, it was good. But then I, you know, I was, I was standing in front of this canvas and remembering those lines started squiggling this line. I went, this is not a legitimate way to make a painting. To me, it didn't seem like a legit. I went, that's not a lot. It's not the beginning of a painting. That's just you do. Well, can that be enough? And I didn't know if it could be enough or not. And well, you have to explore that because you're feeling it in your body. So I had to. So I started painting like that. I went, son of a bitch, this is looking like a thing. This feels right. And I kept going and my body kept going and adding color and adding things to it. And I painted a lot of big canvases like that. And I think there was a physicalized trail. It seems

Starting point is 00:45:20 to me, speaking of language and lexicon and following those signs, that this line that I've been drawing for 40 years that had been appearing in my life for 50 years almost, that that was connected to, had a real squiggly line connection directly to some childhood from childhood trauma that I've been working through MDMA sessions. And some guy at 89.3 in L.A. didn't did an interview with me and he made like the headline of the article about he's working with childhood trauma. And I was like, well, that's kind of a little bit cheap. But I get it. He had to call it. Well, that's what I was going to call the title of the podcast.

Starting point is 00:46:03 Exactly. I feel the childhood trauma by doing a bunch of shit. the in New York, I was just there with this guy. It was my ninth session in the last five, let's see, it's 25, so six years, yeah, six years I've been doing it. But it wasn't to find childhood trauma useful. I wasn't going about it like that. I wasn't intentionally using it as fuel or a tool or it's just that you can tap into a reaction to it. It was really the examination of that stuff and how it's been physicalized in my body and how my body was releasing it. And it's going to be on your own or is going to release it with a paint brush or a camera flick or in a character or something.

Starting point is 00:47:02 And not to say that everything comes from that or a camera flick or in a character or something. And not to say that everything comes from that source because it's not the source of everything. I don't think trauma is the source of everything. A lot of the times, you know, it's how you cope with these things that can be a lot of the source of something. There can be unconscious things that are the source of it too.

Starting point is 00:47:24 But, you know, I think a lot of the source of something. There can be unconscious things that are the source of it too. But I think a lot of coping mechanisms to deal with whatever you've dealt with in your life, if you want to call it trauma or just being a kid, getting raised in America and having a great family, you're going to find ways to cope with your life and use things to your advantage. Sometimes that will let you ease into becoming a tax accountant because that's exactly what you want, which is super legitimate and very fulfilling for you.

Starting point is 00:47:53 And sometimes it makes you want to paint, which can be legitimate fulfilling as well. Well, I think I'm not like a huge fan of that like tortured artist myth that the trauma is the source of the creativity But I do think that what happens is that the intuitive Function gets kind of bound up with trauma in a way that you have to go back through the trauma to access the intuition Under it and that you know kind of until you do that there's

Starting point is 00:48:18 You know places it takes you back to a place where you remember things that you've kind of forgotten and it's an interesting way Look at it. Yeah, but that intuition might be well, maybe, maybe you know the intuition is there, but the trust isn't there with you. Exactly. Yeah, maybe it's a matter of going back in there to that place and finding that initial trust you had with yourself before it was, you know, broken, separate with your parents or the world or whatever. Well I think that intuition and trauma both come from that you know really subcortical brain stem stuff and we can't tell them apart and we get kind of afraid of them and the real kind of healing somatic work helps you tell the difference between the intuition response and the trauma

Starting point is 00:48:59 response and you have to go back with the trauma response to kind of do that but I mean when I do somatic work with my patients, I tell them, you know, like whatever this thing is, you know, if your heart feels like a black hole and it's under your shoulder blade or the gut is locking up or, you know, the arms want to just kind of fight and elbows want to fight, whatever it is, make contact with that. This sounds crazy, but you will find your medium, you know, try and sing, try and write a poem, try and journal it, try and draw it.

Starting point is 00:49:23 And while you're there and you you're gonna go on a lot of failed dates, a lot of these are not your medium, but there's gonna be one that you just, all of a sudden, it's gotta come out that way. And you never would have known that was there. And it is wild. I mean, there's people that have never painted, never written, never whatever, they come in with this thing

Starting point is 00:49:39 and it's beautiful and they're better. But there is something about the contacting the semantic and then going all the way through it and it just kind of has what it wants to say. And I don't know, like some people do that with a line and painting and other people kind of connect to it different ways, but it is neat that that is in everybody.

Starting point is 00:50:01 I think it is, and I think a lot of people, you say they they they don't allow themselves to engage with that just because not because they're they're terrified or anything. They just it's just not they're in their worldview to to do that. Maybe they love golfing for fuck's sake, you know, and those four hours of golfing every every Sunday with their buddies, that's their way to kind of be connected with that thing. And if they thought about the world in a different way, maybe they would take those four hours and say, hey, wait a minute. What if I started painting something, 180 degrees from where they're sitting at this point.

Starting point is 00:50:45 Maybe they try this other thing. I don't know if that's in our culture to really do that. More now than ever before, I think, to be able to try that 180 from you. I think these alternative modalities are really coming online now in a way like never before. There's more people that, if you bring up MDMA to party or MDMA therapy to party, people go, shit, I heard about that and that guy and this and Rick Doven and all that. It starts to go and more people as opposed to even four years ago, more people now are aware of it at the very least.

Starting point is 00:51:21 If you get in those algorithms on Instagram, that's all you get for days on end, and it can bash your head in a good way to just open you up to this other idea about the world. Does there's something besides lots of titties? Yeah. Nothing wrong with lots of titties, but God, when you get stuck, if you look at some girl who's standing around in her bikini on your Instagram stories or something, and she's some influencer or something, the the and changing. They don't know that I'm controlling it. And a lot of that stuff, I just never really would have ever thought that that would work. And now it's like being, you know, kind of validated.

Starting point is 00:52:49 Some of it is validated in research, other, you know, places it catches on clinically. But a lot of people are like, well, you should do psilocybin or something. And it's like, you know, the red tape of that in Alabama, I don't want to mess with. But even if it was 100%, you know, green light, I'm not going to get, you to get a Baptist minister to take mushrooms, but I can make you look at a stick and you'll peel the meat off your soul and talk to God. Those reactions are wild. It's kind of interesting. You might need to work on that.

Starting point is 00:53:16 You might need to get some carnival barker in you to get that Baptist minister to take psilocybin. That's the fucking truth. Because when he starts going in there and seeing all the color of the blood up like the the the the the the the the

Starting point is 00:54:34 the the the the the the the I want to be respectful of your time. You have any future projects that you want to pitch? We'll definitely link to the book. Thanks. Is there any other rabbit holes you want to go down

Starting point is 00:54:51 or new projects you got in the works that you can talk about? There's a couple of pictures come out in August that I'm in. One is called Americana. This guy, Tony Toast, directed a really great road and directed a really great indie feature. Lord is in it. This guy, Eric Dane is in it. I have a small part in it, but it's a good kind of rural American thriller about a ghost shirt, a Native American ghost shirt that's very valuable, but everybody wants to get their hands on. And then another movie that's coming out the end of August, I believe, or mid-August, and

Starting point is 00:55:28 the beginning of August, a movie called Weapons is coming out. And that's a really great, this kid, Zach Craig, kid, he's something, he's in his mid-30s or something, but so he's a kid, yeah. But he did this movie called Barbarian, a horror movie that some people have seen. Man, this one, Weapons is a giant leap forward creatively and storytelling wise and filmmaking wise. It's just a great leap he's taken and it's a really dark, really kind of slow moving, hypnotic, pull you in kind of thriller almost horror movie kind of not it's not a real, you know Stake through the heart horror movie, but it'll it'll really mess you up. It's great

Starting point is 00:56:15 It's a great picture and they were gonna release it in You know January or February I think Paramount was and they they saw a cut of it They went oh shit. We got to get this out in the biggest weekend of the summer. Come on beginning of summer So that'll be fun. So those things are coming up. Okay So the and so the weapons is coming out this summer next summer this summer this summer weapons Weapons in American are both coming up this this August. Awesome. Yeah, well, I'll link to it if there's a page up for it Yeah, man, cool anything, you know kind of about your history the the we just say the topic is consciousness so we can put a bunch of stuff underneath underneath that. The topic is life.

Starting point is 00:57:32 Well, thank you so much for your thoughtfulness and your work. It's it's it's always always a pleasure when I when I see you in something. I know I'm in for a treat. But so we have to please check out the book American Sugar Gristle, we'll link to that and then the upcoming movies in the in the in the show. Thanks, man. Appreciate it.

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The Taproot Podcast - Actor Toby Huss on His Photo Essay American Sugar Gristle

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