Are you having a good summer? Charlie Day sure as hell seems to be. His first movie of 2013, Monsters University, tore up the box office, and his second movie, Pacific Rim, is poised to be the most prominent original intellectual property of the summer. Charlie Day plays Dr. Newton Geiszler, a scientist in the near future who is obsessed with the giant monsters – or Kaiju – that are invading the planet, and helps the pilots of giant mecha called Jaegers come up with a plan to defeat them once and for all. It’s a comic relief character that serves a dramatic purpose in the story, and arm sleeve tattoos so you know this nerdy guy is also pretty cool at heart.
I sat down with Charlie Day in San Francisco, CA to talk about his role in Pacific Rim, where he hopes the character will go in Pacific Rim 2, playing a mini-version of Guillermo del Toro and the origin of those badass tats he wears.
CraveOnline: There’s such an obvious opener here that I can’t resist it… Are you having a monstrously good summer…?
Charlie Day: That is exactly the way to put it. It’s been a summer of monsters for me, and so far so good!
You have a great character in Pacific Rim. I feel like in some ways you’re the audience surrogate, who just thinks monsters are cool, man.
[Laughs] I think so. I think he’s definitely less heroic than the big tough guys in the movie, and he’s more flawed and rough around the edges and arrogant. I think he’s sort of the audience’s way into this movie, and certainly the only way to experience these monsters outside of a giant robot.
You’re the one who gets to be vulnerable in front of them, whereas everyone else gets to fight them.
They get to fight them, and I get to almost get eaten by them.
I have this image where your action figure for this movie is just you standing there, scared, screaming.
Yeah, it’ll be a cowering, meek action figure. It’ll be the action figure every kid’s bummed out to get. [Laughs]
You’re the Jar-Jar of Pacific Rim! But you’re a cooler character than that. It’s difficult, because you and Burn Gorman, you have a lot of the exposition in this movie.
That’s true, yeah.
That’s a tough gig, to do that and infuse that with as much character as you do.
Well, I think I hadn’t thought about that until you said it.
I’m glad I wasn’t there on set.
I’m glad you weren’t there to freak me out. But yeah, I think if the exposition’s good, if it’s interesting, then it’s not too tough a gig.
You and Burn, you got this comedy dyad thing going here where he’s very serious, and you’re very enthusiastic. What was it like developing that relationship? Did Guillermo have strong feelings about how broad you could be?
I think it was a casting thing, where he cast people who seemed to fit those stereotypes. And then it’s interesting, because I sort of have a similar odd couple dynamic later with Ron [Perlman] in the movie, but it wasn’t too premeditated. It’s just what came out of the filming process.
Are you a giant monster fan? Is this a geek out project for you?
I’m not. I like monsters as much as the average person, but I don’t collect them, and I don’t seek them out. But I’m entertained by them.
What do you collect? What do you geek out about?
I don’t geek out about much.
You’re very serious.
I’m not very serious, but I’m not like a collector of things. I geek out about golf.
Really?
Yeah, I follow golf and read about it, but that’s about it. I don’t geek out much.
That’s interesting, because it seems like a character who’s designed for the geek community. The level of enthusiasm you’re able to raise about giant scary monsters.
[Laughs]
“Wouldn’t it be cool to stand next to one!” Do you know people like that? Do you base that off of anyone?
Well so much of it’s from the dialogue. You get it from there, and it’s all there on the page. And then Guillermo is… In a way, I feel like he’d sort of written my character as a mini him, with his love of the monsters. So I can’t help but imagine that’s part of why he wrote that character the way he did.
