Email
Print
FeedHere and There
Hollywood has yet to fully embrace Charlie McDermott—but that could change soon.
(page 1 of 3)
Back in West Chester for just two days, Charlie McDermott spent last night at a multiplex watching Tropic Thunder, a Ben Stiller comedy about self-absorbed actors who get kidnapped by drug lords while filming a war epic in the jungle. Everyone else he was with—younger sisters Erin and Grace, neighbors, friends, a cousin—missed the movie’s wealth of film-industry jabs. But not McDermott.
“I see just about every movie there is in the theaters,” he says. “When I watch a film, it’s to see it. But subconsciously, I notice things.”
Two years ago, at 16, McDermott left for Hollywood. Now he spends more time working there and relaxing here—though he’s never changed the East Coast time on the watch that was a going-away
present from neighbors. In just about every way, the two environments require polar-opposite mindsets.
“It feels like I’m living two lives,” says McDermott. “All I do is work out there, and here there is no industry. When I’m working (and paying his own rent for his Burbank, Calif., apartment), I love it. But I love this place more.”
That much is obvious on this Labor Day weekend, as McDermott gently sways in a wicker rocking chair on a back porch overlooking a lush green backdrop and a built-in pool the family installed last summer. He isn’t wearing shoes.
When home, McDermott provides comic relief for the family. “They all say they miss me being funny,” he says.
At work, he’s been as busy as all get-out. The lifestyle is hectic, sometimes frantic, and he often reflects his distaste for the industry’s “fake” folks, and the pollution and limited open space in Los Angeles. Yet McDermott can’t deny how quickly his career has soared. Catch him at theaters now in Sex Drive, a comedy starring another locally bred Hollywood success story, Seth Green. On Nov. 1, McDermott appeared with Ed Asner in the Hallmark Channel’s made-for-TV film Generation Gap.
Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize winner Frozen River opened in theaters this summer. In it, McDermott is the teenage son of a character played by Melissa Leo (21 Grams, Hide and Seek), who some suggest will be an Oscar nominee.
McDermott’s appearance on the Emmy-winning comedy The Office aired in May. And if the TV gods smile down on him, the $8 million ABC fantasy pilot Captain Cook’s Extraordinary Atlas will be picked up this fall and become a primetime series by January. McDermott’s role as a ghost requires a three-hour makeup job and special black contact lenses. Depending what happens to his character, a season of episodes could keep him filming through March.
Described as Harry Potter meets Pan’s Labyrinth meets Indiana Jones, the pilot—directed by Tommy Schlamme, an Emmy winner for The West Wing—centers on a 13-year-old girl who discovers a secret supernatural world. She can see the ghost, though she’s scared of it. McDermott pops up and says one line he honestly can’t remember right now. “It’s creepy, vague and monotonous,” he says.
The filming for his lead role in For the Love of Jade, an independent production shooting in nearby Easton, will depend on his Captain Cook schedule. Jade is a 45-year-old prisoner who flashes back to life in the 1970s and the events that put her in jail. McDermott, who plays a young Jade’s love interest, says it’s the best script he’s ever read. “It sucked me in,” he says.
