Interview: Actor Stephen Lang on Taking a Leap of Faith for DON’T BREATHE

Veteran actor Stephen Lang has played his fair share of strong and confident characters over the years, and his latest work in Fede Alvarez’s upcoming home invasion horror film, Don’t Breathe, is yet another formidable performance from the thespian with a long career both in film and on the stage.

As a blind war veteran who unleashes hell onto a trio of thieves (played by Jane Levy, Daniel Zovatto, and Dylan Minnette) who break into his home with hopes of scoring a huge payday, Lang’s work in Don’t Breathe is top-notch and truly unforgettable, and I’m excited for horror fans to get a chance to see him in action later this summer.

Daily Dead recently had the pleasure of speaking with Lang about his work in Don’t Breathe, including how he prepared for the role, what he loved about the film’s script and his character in particular, as well as the differences between working on a project like Avatar versus shooting Don’t Breathe last year.

Check out our interview with Lang below and look for Don’t Breathe in theaters everywhere on August 26th.

Great to speak with you, Stephen. I had the chance to see Don’t Breathe at SXSW and I absolutely loved it. When Fede and I were talking about the movie, we thought the best way to sum up your performance was to call you “Jaws with a beard.”

Stephen Lang: Oh, that’s great [laughs].

I’m glad you approve [laughs]. I'm curious about your approach to this character because it's a very subtle role. You don't have a ton of dialogue and you’re mostly just working as this physical presence—a force of nature. Can you discuss that and also what you initially loved about the script when you first read it?

Stephen Lang: I was very impressed with the script. First of all, I started reading it and I loved all the silence that was there on the page. I loved the fact that he didn't have hardly any dialogue. I don't know why, but I just did. I thought that right away, the challenge of portraying a character that’s mostly silent was pretty provocative.

Then, when I got deep into the script and saw all these twists that are in there, it was so shocking to me. It just changed all the preconceptions I had conceived of this character on this first read on my gut instinct. Everything changed, but it didn't eliminate what I liked about him at all, either. All the empathy and all the sympathy that I had for the character, it was still there, but now he’s just functioning on this whole other level, which was, as you know, very twisted and dark.

I was intrigued with it from the moment I read it. When I was done, I felt really committed to wanting to play this role. It was a frightening role, but I've been around long enough to know that that's a good thing. If you're intimidated by it in a way, that's a good reason to do it. I just felt an immediate connection to it and I was really quite thrilled by the surprises in it, and everything that Fede throws at you, too.

Don't Breathe does some really interesting things with the concepts of heroes and villains, and who the real victims are. We see your character as this threat, but there's a hint of sadness to his story, too. Do you have to go into a character like this without making any judgments about who he is as a character? Do you see him as the victim more so than you see him as the villain?

Stephen Lang: There's a number of ways to approach that question. When you embrace the character, to the extent that you can become the character, you don't conceive of yourself as villainous or heroic. You don't, and I'm not sure that you conceive of yourself as a victim or as a perpetrator, even.

Now, leading the thing, sure. You're absolutely right that one of the things that's very, very cool about Don’t Breathe is that it plays with the notion of who the good guy and the bad guy are—who's the hero and who's the victim? Very, very clearly, my character is victimized. He's had outrages perpetrated upon him before this story begins. His blindness, his experiences in the war, and the experience with his daughter have clearly marked him as a victim.

Does he conceive of himself as a victim? Possibly. I think that there is a point in a prior story when he went through a real major self-pity stage, but that's long gone. He's decided it's useless, it's boring, it doesn't get him anywhere, and he's hardened out of that. He's become something else.

What he has become is all he can become given his circumstances, given his physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual circumstances. He's in a dire spot, but he has defined his own morals. He has become the master of his own dark universe. There's nobility to the character. Maybe that sounds strange, but there's something about him.

Going back to your analogy of Bruce the shark from Jaws, he is a relentless and formidable kind of predator, too. There's nothing heroic about Bruce, but there's majesty to the creature. And there very much is that feeling with the blind man, too. Whether that's perceived by anyone or anybody else feels that way is kind of irrelevant, because it's my approach. It's what I bring to it. If that gets transmitted to other people in some way, not an overt way, I think that's a good thing.

It deepens and enriches the story a lot because if you don't care about these people, the blind man included, then it's something else. Maybe you’ll get an entertaining 85-minute horror spectacle, but you're not emotionally engaged in anything. If you care about the people, whether it be the blind man or Rocky or Money or Alex, then you get invested. That's the power of storytelling right there. That's when the movie gets powerful.

You’ve talked about the fact that this is a character who is blind and you are not in real life. How did you physically prepare for a role in which you had to basically ignore your own senses in order to achieve authenticity?

Stephen Lang: Whatever I may say to you, at the end of the day, what you end up doing is making a leap of faith that you can do it. Having said that, I worked closely in concert with Fede, because he's the one who's looking through the lens. He's the one who can tell me if what I'm doing is believable. I did my homework too, though, so I could have an understanding of what some of the physical behaviors are.

I remember seeing one lecture by a blind guy and he kept his eyes closed. Basically, he said that to him, there's really no point in opening them. It was easier not to open them and I thought that was interesting. I saw a lot of different ways that people dealt with the situation and I decided to approach this where I wasn’t making it an extraordinary condition, but just making it the condition in which I exist, making it as normal as I could.

I was given a good opportunity to do that, because within the confines of this house, I know what's what. I know where things are, where they're supposed to be. He actually has a very orderly house. There's one shot that's very moving to me. It's in the living room and the camera is panning across the objects, the furniture in the house, and it goes onto the mantelpiece. That’s where we see a picture of my daughter and it's upside down.

I find that to be very telling of who this character was and an emotional footnote to him, reflecting his sadness. I got to know the house really well, too, as well as I could. When we weren't shooting, when the crew was off or something like that, I'd spend a good bit of time just going through there. It got so I knew how many steps it was up the stairs and down the ladder into the basement. I could negotiate things quite well.

You have a new Avatar film coming up that you have to prepare for and I'm curious about the differences between working on a project like that versus something like Don’t Breathe. You mentioned taking a leap of faith earlier. Does it take a bigger leap of faith when you're working on big CGI projects like Avatar, where you need to imagine that certain things might be there, or do you prefer those tangible worlds? Do you have to change your approach as an actor on something like that versus a project like Don't Breathe?

Stephen Lang: Well, they both have different requirements, for sure. For Avatar, when you are working in front of a green screen, it just calls upon the fundamental resources of an actor. It calls deeply upon your powers of imagination. Also, it requires tremendous collaboration and specificity between yourself and your colleagues, and of course, your director, because you have to work very hard to establish what you are experiencing at that moment.

It's very, very important. I remember long discussions about the weather. Just how hot is it? How big is this creature that’s in this scene? Is it slobbering? What about its breath? Just all kinds of stuff like that, and as an actor, there are no stupid questions, because you're trying to specifically delineate the world you are existing in. That's something that one needs to do when you're doing a film like Avatar.

Then, a film like Don't Breathe has a different set of requirements. It was all real. I was in a room. I had a gun in my hand that was firing loads and I was grappling with human beings rather than a 14-foot-high blue person or a creature. I was going to say that it's more similar than it is different, but the only thing I mean by that is that in the end, whatever it is you're doing, you fill yourself with the belief that it can be done. That you are who they say you are, that you are who you say you are, and that your mission in that particular scene will be fulfilled.