Hi, guys. Renee Pezzotta,
here, Acting My Age. If you're new to the
channel, please hit 'subscribe' and come back
every Wednesday for a new episode. This week,
I'm sitting down with actor Matt Cwern and
we're gonna talk about his journey and how
he's making it out here in Los Angeles as
an actor. You may not know his name off the
top of your head, but I guarantee you, you've
seen him in something. This guy works a lot.
Hollywood Palm's been evacuated.
All members of the 118 are safe and accounted for.
Thank you.
Hands behind your head. Hands
behind your head.
This guy jumped me. He could've killed me but he let me go. Why would he do
that?
Way to jack up your prices,
Abdul.
What the hell? Take it easy, Hicker.
Why, I didn't do nothing.
No, you did a lot.
Matt!
Hey, Renee!
Thank you so much for sitting down
and having a chat with me.
Thanks for having me. It's
a pleasure. It's a very comfortable room,
comfortable chairs.
Nice.
First time I'm trying these
flavored waters, Hint, blood orange.
I love when people promote
Hint, one day they will sponsor me.
It's great. I'm not a big
soda drinker so flavored water is right up
my alley.
All right, let's talk
about you.
Yes, me.
And you're journey.
Tell me about, how do you pronounce your last
name?
Cwern.
Cwern.
Yeah, it's Polish.
It's almost exactly as it looks.
Yeah, exactly.
Matt Cwern.
The C is pronounced like
an S, Matt Cwern.
You never know, when
people have C's and W's together, you're like,
are one of them silent?
People sneak in H's, Z's,
they make the E and I, there's been all kind
of variations over the years which is why
originally I didn't go with it. I went with
my middle name until I realized, no, I take
a lot of pride in who I am, where I'm from.
I wanna bring that name back into my actual
profile.
That's good. I stuck
with Pezzotta. When Renée Zellweger made
it, I was like okay a Renee with a long weird
last name can do it.
It's a great name because...
It's Italian?
Yeah.
Yeah, when they're looking
for real Italians, people with the last name
Pezzotta are gonna get called in. I noticed
after I made my name back to Cwern, I started
getting in called more for Eastern European
roles, believe it or not because people, I
don't think you could look at Cwern and know
what country it's from but people can tell
it's a bunch of consonants, it's Eastern European.
The MacGyver that I just did, they were looking
for a Czech actor, I'm not Czech but the last
Cwern, that sounds Eastern European.
Bastard sent me to meet with
some guy who had something for him. I came
for the meat but when the guy saw it was just
me, he got pissed, thought he was meeting
the boss face-to-face. But that just doesn't
happen. Boss doesn't meet with anyone he doesn't
know.
Where's your boss?
Did you have to learn
Czech?
I did. I had to learn one
line in Czech but for the audition since I
didn't know Czech, I did a short film a couple
years ago. Good to do those short films sometimes,
you don't know what skills you're gonna pick
up. I would play the Serbian and I had to
learn two lines in Serbian and whenever I
have to learn a language for a role, I never
forget it. So in the MacGyver audition, instead
of Czech I spoke Serbian and I booked the
job.
They didn't know the
difference.
They didn't know. But then
once I booked it they sent me a mp3 file,
they said these are the actual lines that
we want you to say, it's in Czech and we think
you can learn it, you'll be fine.
And you do a lot of
voice over work?
I do. I originally started
out in just doing commercials but because
the voice over industry in the landscape has
changed so much, the more things you can do,
the more work you can get, so I worked on
accents and dialects, post 911 and I hate
to say this but people were telling me, there's
gonna be a lot of work for middle Eastern
actors, there's gonna be a lot of terrorist
roles and stuff. You should start learning
them 'cause you look that way and I did and
I played those parts sometimes.
How do you feel about
that? 'Cause a lot of people, a lot of actors,
I don't feel this way, I'm like put me in
a box I'm perfectly okay with that, if you
want me to be your nurse 17 thousand times,
I will do it.
Do you feel that same
way, do you feel like a job is a job and every
opportunity to act is an opportunity to act?
I do and early on in my
career I was type cast and I tried to get
out of that mold. I was in the fire department
and my early roles I could only get were only
EMT roles because I was in New York, soap
operas were looking for real EMT's to play
EMT. You could ask [inaudible 00:05:13] they
just hire real actor and teach him what to
do, 'cause they don't have time.
A soap opera shoots one
episode every single day and they don't have
time to teach someone how to use a stretcher.
They'd rather hire actors that are the real
deal so they don't have to, the actors know
how to use stretchers, how to hang IV bags,
if they have to bounce ideas off of them to
be like a medical consultant they can do that
too.
I was only playing EMT's
for a while. I would have been fine, if that's
gonna be my career, working is working but
I knew that I was capable of more and I didn't
only wanna be an EMT. At some point, maybe
the way I was taking head shots, somehow it
just changed. They started seeing me more
as the bad guy, as the loser. Not the bad
guy that runs the multi-million dollar company,
maybe like the henchman who works for the
guy who runs the multi-million dollar company.
One can say that, that is
type cast but you know what, cast is cast.
That I'm okay with.
That's very true.
I do get frustrated
myself with, I love all the casting offices
first of all, let me just say that. There's
one casting office that has brought me in
several times. I've booked two of their shows.
But you can see in the breakdowns though,
they'll have guest star roles and they'll
say, guest star actors only, do not submit
co-star actors. Co-star roles to me, are way
harder than guest star roles.
I'm reading Michael Caine's
book right now, 'Blowing the Bloody Doors
Off', phenomenal book. I just read his chapter
on how smaller roles are harder.
Oh, so hard. They do
have to bring everything behind it, you know
what I mean? There's no, and yet you can't
show any of it. You're literally, sometimes
you feel like you just parroting lines and
then other times it's like if you want to
make it creative for yourself, it's all internalized.
I used to create all kinds
of motivation that isn't necessarily evident.
It's all in your own back story. No one really
cares. You have one or two lines, one of them
doesn't come out right, that's it, you have
one other line to say and that's it. When
you have a much bigger part, a line here,
a line there might not, you might not deliver
like you like it but you have all this other
thing stuff to build on. With your little
small role, you got your little small role
and then you just leave and that's it.
I got involved in the L.A.
theater scene, that a lot of people who don't
work gave me flack for it. Why would you do
L.A. theater. Well, 'cause it's rewarding
as hell. From when you start rehearsing until
the end of the performance, that can be a
three months process. You're rehearsing for
two months and then you're on for six weeks.
All that time now, at least every single week
you get to act and you don't just get to act
and come in and do a co-star and live a line.
You live a whole life for two hours. Those
arks that we were talking about with guest
stars, that's what you get to do.
I did one play and then
I got into Shakespeare and that made me realize,
'cause I didn't have any classical training.
Shakespeare, that's a lot of fun. And then
I started working more in television because
television auditions became so much easier
after learning Shakespeare. Oh my God, I wish
I learned this younger. But you know what,
you gotta do those things whenever you're
ready. I wasn't ready when I was younger,
I was just not in the right frame of mind
and now I am. I'm always looking for learning
something new.
You mentioned you were
reading a Michael Caine book.
I like to get people to bring in quotes, I don't do it every
time but this time you happen to have one
and it happened to be from Michael Caine.
"Someone once asked me the
secret of my success and my answer was survival.
I'm still here, I'm still going even if sometimes
I'm going through hell, in the end success
is survival."
He's not the first person
that I heard say that. Harrison Ford was famously
quoted as saying something among those lines
and I think it was Vin Diesel that asked him.
The story goes, Vin Diesel was an extra on
a Harrison Ford movie, went up to Harrison,
I'm a new actor and I was wondering if you
have any advice and Harrison Ford was just
saying I came to L.A. with 20 other friends,
five years later, there were 15 friends, 10
years later there were 10 friends, 20 years
later it's just me. That was it.
It just means, sometimes
you just got to withstand the test of time.
You just gotta stand it, you gotta survive.
That's it for this episode.
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I'm Renee Pezzotta,
Acting My Age.
