Nuke ‘Em
Van Hansis (Luke) and Jake Silbermann (Noah) work together so often that they have lots of down time, which in their case tends to lead to silly arguments. They bickered a lot, so Digest only got a few of their disagreements into our feature interview, on stands 4/15. One subject on which they’ve had many a heated discussion is movies — they both know them well, but here’s what happens when Silbermann challenges his co-star to a game.
Jake Silbermann: We have yet to play the Movie Game — it’s like six degrees of Kevin Bacon, except with movies. I say a movie and you say a person who’s in it and then …
Van Hansis (scoffing): That’s easy.
Silbermann: We’ll see how you do. We can play a little game. Want to do it right now?
Digest: Please do!
Hansis: I’ll start! 28 Days Later.
Silbermann (immediately stumped): Oh, what’s his name?
Hansis (smugly): See?
Silbermann: Cillian Murphy!
Hansis: Now I name a Cillian Murphy movie? [Laughs] 28 Days Later. Uh …
Publicist: I could do this.
Digest: Me, too.
Hansis: He was in, um … oh! Batman Begins!
Silbermann: I’ll say Christian Bale.
Hansis: How come you get all of the actors and I get all the movies?
Silbermann: It switches off.
Hansis (grinning): Empire of the Sun.
Silbermann: Challenge — you don’t know anyone else in that movie!
Hansis: Yes I do. [Confidently:] Mary Steenburgen.
Silbermann: No, she’s not in that movie.
Hansis: Yes she is!
Silbermann: Look it up on IMDb.
Hansis (laughing): No.
Silbermann: I’m right on that one. [He is.]
Hansis: He is. So I lost that game. See, I admit when I’m wrong.
Digest: So, you have movies in common, and you’re both Marvel Comics fans?
Both: Yeah.
Hansis: I grew up with X-Men.
Silbermann: It was Spider-Man and X-Men for me.
Hansis: Marvel’s world is very different than DC’s world.
Silbermann: I think they just gave them all better reasons to be heroes in Marvel’s world.
Hansis: Exactly. They’re not all aliens. Batman is different.
Silbermann: It’s pretty much agreed-upon that Batman one of the best thought-out ones. Because he’s not a superhero. He is, but he’s not.
Hansis: I read somewhere that Marvel heroes’ true personalities were their secret identities and they put on the costumes and DC heroes’ true identities were the hero and the secret identity was their costume. I like that in Marvel, they’re real people who just happen to have these powers.
Silbermann: DC it has its strong points. I got him into one.
Hansis: He gave me this awesome book, which is a movie coming out.
Silbermann: It is?
Hansis: Oh, I thought you meant Watchmen.
Silbermann: I meant Preacher.
Hansis: That was going to …
Silbermann: But it was stopped, thankfully, because it wouldn’t have been good.
Digest: I was all excited, because briefly, Bailey Chase was listed as Gambit in Wolverine on IMDb.
Hansis: Yeah, who’s Gambit now?
Silbermann: There’s someone named Briefly Bailey Chase?
Hansis (laughing): No, no, no. Bailey Chase.
Digest: He was Chris Hughes. And he was going to be Gambit.
Hansis: Now he’s not. Who is it now?
Digest: Tim Riggins from FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS, Taylor Kitsch.
Silbermann: Is he going to play him French?
Digest: I don’t know. He plays a guy from Texas now. So do you argue about comics?
Hansis: Yeah.
Silbermann: What have we argued about?
Hansis: We argued about Watchmen.
Silbermann: What about it? We did not argue about Watchmen!
Hansis: We didn’t argue about Watchmen, we argued about what parts should be cut from the movie.
Digest: You realize that you’re now arguing about what you argued about…. Let’s talk about your first impressions of each other — you met at the audition?
Hansis: It was in the dry rehearsal room. I was told to speak very quietly because the camera was right next to me. So I was whispering everything.
Silbermann: I couldn’t hear him.
Hansis: It’s not my fault. I apologize.
Silbermann: I believe you. I thought you were trying to sabotage me!
Hansis: I was, I was like, “I don’t want this one!”
Digest: Did you know he was going to get it?
Hansis: The weird thing is that one of the guys who came in was actually a friend of mine from college, so no offense, Jake …
Silbermann: You were rooting for him, it’s cool.
Hansis: I wanted my friend to get it. And I think it came down to between my friend and Jake. But he’s fine; he’s on a Lifetime show now and he was in the JOHN ADAMS miniseries.
Digest: So Jake, Van was rooting against you from the start!
Hansis (laughing): I was sending negative vibes your way from the get-go.
Digest: What was your first day like?
Silbermann: A lot of nervous energy. I don’t know if Van remembers this, I was basically not letting him out of my sight. [Hansis laughs.] We had gone to the GLAAD Awards together, so it was like, “Okay….”
Hansis: “I have a friend!”
Digest: That’s right, you went to the GLAAD Awards before you even aired.
Hansis: Long before.
Silbermann: Before I taped. They were in March and I didn’t air until June 1.
Digest: Is that when you first got to know each other?
Hansis: Yeah, we hung out for the first time at the GLAAD Awards and then we had a meeting with GLAAD where we hung out again. And then we went out to lunch before we started taping and then we started taping.
Digest (to Hansis): You took him to lunch?
Hansis: No, he asked. I gave him all of my wisdom, my sage advice.
Digest: What was it?
Hansis (laughing): I don’t know. What advice did I give you?
Silbermann: I guess I asked what it was like.
Hansis: The advice I would probably give would be that it goes very fast….
Silbermann: I asked specifics about rehearsal time.
Hansis: Yeah, you don’t really rehearse. And I think to make it work on daytime, since you don’t have the time to do the work that you would like to do, it’s kind of like a listening and responding exercise. Just be present in the moment with your scene partner because even if your scene partner kind of goes up on a line, maybe you can save it.
Silbermann: And making choices.
Hansis: Yeah, on the spot.
Digest: Did you have a natural rapport or did you have to work on your chemistry?
Hansis: We don’t sit down like, “So, Jake, let’s work on our chemistry. I’m going to glare longingly into your eyes.”
Silbermann: Eyes, lips, eyes.
Hansis: That is a trick, I think. You look eyes, lips, eyes.
Digest: Who taught you that?
Hansis: I made it up [laughs]. But it works! It reads on camera very well.
Conversation
All comments are subject to our Community Guidelines. Soap Opera Digest does not endorse the opinions and views shared by our readers in our comment sections. Our comments section is a place where readers can engage in healthy, productive, lively, and respectful discussions. Offensive language, hate speech, personal attacks, and/or defamatory statements are not permitted. Advertising or spam is also prohibited.