Michael Vaughn’s (Rich Sommer) minister father always told him: Better to be an honest nobody than a crooked somebody. But Michael doesn’t see the harm in giving people the closure they need with the dead and travels town-to-town professing his abilities as a spirit medium.
One night, Michael is kidnapped. With a knife to his throat, Michael suddenly sees the opportunity of a lifetime in his psychologically unstable captor’s desperation to make contact with the other side. Intent on saving his floundering career, and with his associate Chelsea (Joanne Froggatt) by his side, Michael sets out to become a celebrity TV psychic by solving the mystery of a high-profile crime in the national spotlight. Featuring a pulse-pounding score by Andrew Hewitt, A Crooked Somebody begs the question: Should one strive for an anonymous, truthful life, or for notoriety at all costs?
The Knockturnal: What made you take this role?
Rich Sommer: Well, first off I am always sort of drawn to complicated folks. I mean I’m not comparing myself to him. I could never aspire to be as good as him. I’m just saying Philip Seymour Hoffman always played these roles that were guys that you felt sort of bad for, but also they just kept making the worst decisions and so I would always have my hand on my forehead when I watched Philip Seymour Hoffman. I sort of am attracted to those types of roles, but with this movie it’s a little more personal. I had the idea for something with a psychic medium about 15 years ago and when a friend of mine lost her son and she started spending some money to go and see a psychic medium and it was sort of hard for me to watch, so I have wanted to make a movie about these people, about some of the tricks that they do and some of their motivations for a long time. And when Andy [Andrew Zilch] asked if we could write the story together, then I jumped at the chance to work with hi. He’s one of my best friends. I’ve known him since college and so we sort of wrote the story together and he wrote the screenplay and I had the fortune of getting to play the role.
The Knockturnal: Did do you have a role in contributing to the story, especially with twists and turns in plot?
Rich Sommer: Well, Andy really did the restructuring of the script. We wrote the story together. My integral contribution is that this is something I’ve almost obsessed over for a very long time. I’ve always been a fan of Penn & Teller and their mentor James Randi, who’s the amazing. Randi has written several books on this kind of thing and I used to take those books out from the library until I took them out enough that I figured I should just buy a copy. So he has these books Faith Healers, Frauds, and Flim-flam which kind of really go into these notions. I’m not saying that every single psychic is fake in the world. That’s not what we’re saying with this movie. But we’re definitely saying that this guy is fake and that’s sort of what we wanted to focus on was what some of these people will do to use your loved ones, to use your memories of your loved ones to try and profit.
The Knockturnal: Did you find it easy to play someone like this? Some actors say it’s easy to play your opposite.
Rich Sommer: I don’t know if I would say it was easy to play a pretty despicable guy, but I would say that we’re all pretty complex. I don’t think anyone is a single note and getting to play characters that — I get a little bit of criticism sometimes for never playing a nice guy that I only played characters who kind of make people feel uneasy — And I sort of like that … Not that I want to make people feel uneasy, but it’s not so simple. Like there’s nobody who’s just nice. I mean, they may come off that way, they may be just nice 95 percent of the time, but there’s five percent where they’re alone and they have their own thoughts about someone they don’t like at work or something that happened on the street or whatever. And I liked getting to exercise those moments.
The Knockturnal: I’m a huge, huge fan of The Office. I just binge watched the series again. And so when the movie started at the beginning I was like this is Pam’s friend being a super nice guy helping out all these people. And then when you were at the bar, that theme came in, I was like, oh, here’s the change in character.
Rich Sommer: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think Alex really took a left turn after art school.
The Knockturnal: Were there any challenges to playing Michael?
Rich Sommer: It’s hard to have honesty. That’s my only goal in acting is to be honest. And when you’re playing a character who is never honest, almost always has a second meaning to what he’s saying, that’s difficult because I think there’s a fine line and I’m not suggesting that I was able to walk on the entire movie, but there’s a fine line where you can tip over to sort of showing your hand too much and as hard as you try, it’s difficult to play that kind of duplicitous character while still telling the truth to the audience, if that makes sense. So I think that that little balancing act was, was tough. And again, I’m not suggesting that I nailed it the whole way through, but that was what I was going for.
The Knockturnal: Are there any plot twists that you imagined going differently?
Rich Sommer: No, not really … When Andy and I sat down to write this thing, I had tools to guide the whole entire process. One rule was that there is no real magic in this world that we’re creating. There can’t be any sort of supernatural things. You can’t actually be a psychic, that can’t exist in this world. We have to keep that part clean. And the second rule for me was that this guy does not succeed in what he’s trying to do. He cannot win and I just thought the way that Andy did that with the script was really pretty spectacular that, that live reading I think is as uncomfortable as I wanted it wanted it to be … That stuff is sort of based on real things that had happened. Sylvia Browne who is no longer with us, she used to go on The Montel Williams Show all the time and she had a family stand up in the audience and say their child had been kidnapped. Was she getting anything? And she said she’s dead. She just flat out said, I’m sorry. She said she wasn’t in a lot of pain, but she died. Well a year later or something, I don’t know the exact timeline, that child was found alive, escaped captivity and was alive. So we wanted to shorten that timeframe. Sylvia Browne got away with that bit for a lot longer than Michael Vaughn gets away with his. But that was important to me to see him have to sort of twist like that. So I liked the build that Andy came up with.
The Knockturnal: Speak about working with your follow cast. We know you have collaborated with many of them in the past.
Rich Sommer: Ed and Amy and I was were in play two and a half years ago in New York and I still can’t believe they said yes when we called them. There were a couple other people. It was very generous of them to come and be in our very tiny movie, but Mike Mosley who plays one of the detectives and I were in the movie LBJ together and we just hit it off when we were in New Orleans and we put in that phone call to Joanne Froggatt from Downton Abbey, who plays my partner in crime. Joanne and I got to know each other over the years, when Downton Abbey and Mad Men would be at a lot of the same parties. That whole group hit it off. And my wife was the one who had the idea to call Joanne and the idea to call Randee Heller, who plays the motel manager. Randee had also been on Mad Men at one time. And we were very fortunate she said yes as well. So with the exception of Clifton who we sort of sought with none of us knowing him personally and a couple of others, it was a real friend affair. I called in every favor I had and most of them said yes. And I was really, really fortunate. But Clifton, Amanda Crew, Paul Ben-Victor, those were people who we approached hoping they would say yes. And they did. And I’m very fortunate.
The Knockturnal: Do you actually believe in psychics and mediums?
Rich Sommer: I personally have never experienced anything that would lead me to believe in the phenomenon. That said I’ve had lots of conversations with lots of people who truly believe they have had an experience that is of that ilk and who am I to tell them that they’re wrong? I just haven’t had that experience. So for me, no, but that’s certainly not what we’re saying with this movie. We’re not saying there is no such thing as a psychic medium, we are just saying this psychic medium is full of it and maybe some of the other ones you like are. too.
The Knockturnal: Do you have any upcoming projects you would like to share?
Rich Sommer: I’m in Toronto right now, so I’m about halfway through filming the first season of new CW show called In The Dark. That’s the only upcoming I have for you. It means a lot to me that you checked out the movie that you liked it … So getting the word out is huge. So thank you!
The film is now available on demand.
