Sawa Ages Gracefully

Written by Jamie Portman of the Southam News
The Gazette, Montreal
Saturday, January 26, 2002

Slackers star eschews teen stardom for edgy adult fare

Devon Sawa figures he's not doing at all badly considering he failed Grade 11 drama at high school back in Vancouver.

After all, he's leading the good life in California. His newest movie, an outrageous youth comedy called Slackers, opens next week. And he's earning enough money to indulge certain passions—a DVD collection, which at last count totaled 800, and a vintage pinball machine.

On the other hand, you won't find him zooming along Sunset Blvd. in some sporty vehicle. "I don't drive," the 23-year-old Canadian said cheerfully. He knows that makes him an oddity in a city in which everyone drives, but he's untroubled. "In Vancouver, I lived in Yaletown, where everything you want is in walking distance." When he was 15 and on the threshold of his acting career, he did buy a car- "but my learner's permit kept expiring."

So how does he get around Los Angeles, a city in which the private automobile rules so powerfully that even taxis are a scarcity? No problem: "I've got my girlfriend. She drives."

In person, he seems to have all the trappings of a rising young star — an easy charm. casual good looks, a quiet self-confidence. Then he throws you that unexpected curveball about not being able to drive. Or he openly wonders about what his mother back in Vancouver will think of a raunchy comedy like Slackers.

"This is my first hard-core make-out movie," he mused. He's talking about a passionate love scene with actor James King — a scene that shows he's come a long way since he won over prepubescent female heart in 1995 with a cameo appearance as the human persona of Casper the Friendly Ghost. "I've kissed before in movies, but I guess that this is the first time my mom's going to see me doing it. Oooh! How to explain it?" Then he shrugs. "I don't think she'll say anything. She's very supportive."

For Slackers, he not only had that sexual encounter with King, he also had to appear nude in a shower scene. What he didn't expect was for the producers to order him to lose 20 pounds in order to look presentable. "They had me on a diet — no carbs and working out." When they shot the shower scene, it was "a very closed set...the director, a couple of grips...all men. It was a little nerve-wracking."

In his books, Slackers is definitely not "a fluffy teen movie." He knew that from the moment he first read David H. Steinberg's script. "It had a lot of edge and was pushing the envelope a lot. We have have a dancing penis in our movie and anything more unfluffy than that, I can't imagine."

There's also the style of the film — which reflects the background of director Dewey Nicks, making his feature film debut after carving out a prominent career in fashion photography, commercials and music videos. Sawa was intrigued by Nick's plan to make the movie non-linear at certain points with visually striking escapes into surrealism.

"When I read it and got to the sequence where I'm Peter Pan riding the bike and having these hallucinations, I thought this is really different from what's out there. It's a surreal world — with the three wise men, and a dancing penis and a lesbian make-out scene. I knew it would be a lot edgier, and Dewey — crazy as he was when I met him — is a famous photographer and his pictures are just beautiful, and this movie looks like one of his stylistic pictures."

Sawa, Jason Segel and Michael C. Maronna play the slackers of the title — a trio of con artists who have scammed their way through four years of college and are about to graduate with honors only to find their grand scenario compromised by nerdy Jason Schwartzman, who threatens to expose their lying and cheating. Schwartzman has a price for his silence — that the guys use their dubious expertise to set him up with beautiful, brainy King. But an unexpected wrinkle enters the picture when Sawa's character falls for her.

Sawa values the fact that he's able to go to a public place like a club or go out to a movie. That wasn't the case a few years ago when young teenage girls were madly in love with him because of his brief Casper appearance and because of a cover story in Teen magazine. He was bombarded with fan mail and couldn't go out in public. The problem peaked in 1996 when he was in Georgia filming Wild America and frenzied fans were making it difficult to work. So he took 18 months off to let the furor die down.

"I wanted to make sure I could break out into the adult market, so I took the break and came back and decided to do things that were edgier — like Idle Hands and SLC Punk and Final Destination." In so doing, he made a decisive break from the world of Casper, Wild America and Little Giants. Slackers distances himself from that earlier life even more. "This isn't a Teen Beat film. It's not for 12-and 13-year-old girls."

Back 12.31.2007.