(pop music)
- I'm Oliver Trevena in studio with The Hollywood Reporter,
joined by this brilliant man, Byron Mann.
- How are you?
- How are you, sir?
- I'm very well. - You good?
- Excited to be here.
- I'm excited because we actually decided to match today,
we did this whole thing.
Byron actually messengered me over a cardigan
to say thank you for the interview,
before the interview took place.
Because time travel and whatever else is going on
in his world, he can do it.
When you're living between four cities, you just told me.
- Right.
- Four cities, - Yes.
- Vancouver, LA, Beijing. - Hong Kong.
- Hong Kong, and he's here today, so grateful for that.
And we want to talk about Altered Carbon.
- Of course.
- Which is this amazing Netflix show.
Everyone's talking about it.
I just had Will Yun Lee in here.
So that was exciting, - Oh, awesome.
- And you guys swap bodies, it's what you do.
You're body swapping, there's flying cars,
there's cyber gangsters, there's pretty much everything
you would want for a sci-fi show is in that.
- Yes, I would agree.
- Yeah.
- Lot of, you know, nice sex and violence.
- And sex and violence, you got a couple of sexy scenes.
- Yes, I--
- I wasn't going to point it out
but you do, you're looking very in shape.
- Yes, yes I recall now, it's coming back to me.
- Yeah, it's coming back to you.
It's on a lot of ladies' minds, it's never left them.
I can tell you that. (Byron laughs)
It's there for sure.
How do you get, when you go into it,
because you're juggling projects
how do you go into a show like this
when you have to be so physically active and fit
and you're always in training
because your resume has involved so much--
- Yeah, action, yes, - Action, right.
- You know, I tell you I've been doing it
for what, 20 years, and this show was probably
the hardest, the staunchest in terms of training.
- Wow, which says a lot. - It says a lot.
- You know earlier they said
you're not going to be wearing much.
- Right, right.
- And so I said, okay, whatever.
And then I realized that oh, okay, I'm actually topless
for a good part of the first episode,
So I had to train.
They had me training with two personal trainers
and I had to get big, I had to ripped at the same time.
So that's a lot of work.
- It's a lot of work. - Eating constantly to grow.
- Right.
- So every day from nine to 10 it was like horror time.
Basically it's nonstop.
I would just be bending over at the end of the hour.
- It's a good thing you're in your thirties.
(Byron laughs) It's perfect.
That's the lucky part, Byron. (Byron laughs)
When you get older than that.
You're just in your thirties, it's Hollywood.
It's fine, it's fine.
- But you know, I think at the back of our minds
we were creating something that was
of a high caliber.
- Right.
- Nobody knew how high it would be,
but we were feeling it.
We would feel that it was something very outside of the box.
Very pushing the envelope kind of a show.
- And that adrenaline would just carry you through I'm sure.
- Yeah, so it was definitely the hardest show
in terms of training that I've ever been involved with.
- Right, and also the script, because there's so much in it,
there's so much happening.
- Yes.
- Going into a show that you're mind's got to be so
in it, I guess.
- Well, at the beginning of the show
before I started filming
I had to sit down with Laeta Kalogridis,
the creator of the show.
And she wrote the first episode,
and she created the show, and I had to sit down with her
for a couple hours just to ask her,
"What does this mean, what does this mean?
"Who am I again, and whose body am I in again?
"How many years have we been in this body?"
All that kind of stuff.
Just to get acquainted with the terminology,
with the world, with the mythology of this show, it's a lot.
- And then you left that and went back
with more questions, I'm sure.
- I'm sure, the next day. - Yeah, the next day.
And there's a lot of questions right now because
no one quite knows season two, what's happening.
- Yes. - Do you know?
- I don't know.
- Do you know?
- If I knew, if I told you I would have to--
- You'd be in trouble. - Yes.
- I'm not going to get any more info off you.
I was going to try, but I know it's not going to happen.
I guess it's exciting when you're involved
in something like this.
The story goes so many ways, and you kind of know
because of the books, you don't know
what's going to happen.
- As I understand, there's three books.
- Yes, three books.
And each one of them is different, correct?
- Right, very different.
So I think there's going to be departures.
But again, it's not being greenlit yet.
So nobody really knows what it's going to be like.
And there's sleeves and stuff.
- And when you change something
and adapt it for TV you have that--
- Exactly.
- You can move it around a little bit.
- Exactly.
- So who knows. - Yeah.
- Well, should you not be in season two,
you have plenty more going on.
Skyscraper with The Rock,
which is this huge blockbuster movie.
I don't know if anyone saw the trailer
during the Super Bowl.
Well, obviously everyone saw the trailer
because it was during the Super Bowl.
It's a very exciting movie.
- And he's a huge man too.
- He's a huge man, in every way.
In size, in success. - In heart.
- In heart, there you go, he's got it all.
He's the package.
I'd love to see you and The Rock actually do
a charity fight match.
(Byron laughs)
I have this vision of you and The Rock
just going in an inflatable ring (Byron laughs)
and just going at it with them, whatever they call them.
- Right, zero gravity too, right?
- Exactly, see you know what I'm talking about.
We can make that happen.
Tell us about Skyscraper.
- It's basically Die Hard meets Towering Inferno
set in the tallest building in the world.
And it takes place in Hong Kong,
which is ironically and coincidentally
where I grew up. - Right.
- So basically his family's trapped in this building,
the tallest building in the world,
and he has to--
- The Pearl, right? - Exactly.
And he has to climb up this building to save his family.
- And he does that so easily.
- Yeah, he does that in every movie.
I play the Chief Inspector, the Hong Kong police.
Initially, I think he's a terrorist
and then eventually I find out who he is
and then I kind of work together with him.
- Right, that's amazing.
So looking back on your career, you think about
Man with the Iron Fist, Street Fighter,
Ryu was my favorite, is my favorite,
will always be my favorite, yes, right?
It's the best, I'm gonna have to get a clip of that after.
Looking back, and then obviously now TV and movies,
how is each one different for you as an actor
to be involved with?
- It's a really good question.
The only reason I became an actor
was because of movies that I saw
when I was a teenager, movies like The Last Emperor,
Black Rain, The French Connection, Serpico, wow!
Just amazing movies.
So that's always all I want to do,
and when I first started, I was doing Street Fighter
and Crying Freeman and all these movies,
and then it was fine, I think today we're seeing really
the amalgamation of television, or television/streaming,
and movies.
The budget for an episode, each episode of
Altered Carbon was practically the budget of a movie.
- Right, right, which shows, it shows on the screen.
- You look at the first episode, and it's like a movie.
We shot with five cameras, normally two cameras
on a television show.
The first episode was shot with five cameras,
and the camera they used was the ALEXA 65,
which is the camera they used for The Revenant.
It's a large screen IMAX kind of a camera,
never before used on a television screen, ever.
- Wow, it's a fact there.
- It's really melding, right?
The two mediums is really becoming kind of a one thing.
As we all know now,
television lends itself to great storytelling.
Whereas movies, there are the Marvel movies,
the superhero movies,
and then there are the small independents.
There's very little in between now, so that space
is filled in by television, or streaming.
- Right, being an actor that's been around for so long now,
and consistently worked, which is a tough part of Hollywood,
to find that consistency--
- Sure.
- How would you say this new media wave,
when you mentioned streaming and that,
is it helping actors, is it better now,
because there's more platforms and stuff like that?
- Absolutely, everyone's busy, if you're an actor,
if you're a director, if you're a writer,
you should be working right now.
If you're not working, something's wrong.
- To put it frankly.
- There's literally three times
the amount of jobs available right now.
Before, there was just ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX.
Now it's Hulu, there's the cable: HBO, Showtime.
And then there is the streaming: Hulu, Netflix.
It's literally three times the amount of work
that's available. - There you go.
- It's a good time to be an an actor--
- As Byron says, if you're not working,
go knock on some doors, because it's there. (Byron laughs)
Just go knock on the doors, knock on his door.
He'll be fine with it, find you some work.
I have five questions, five quick, easy questions.
THR's top five.
If you could have an action scene with anyone,
who would it be?
- I think it would be with Bruce Lee, that's a no-brainer.
I would slaughter him, of course.
- Well, of course, without question,
my money would be on you.
- Exactly, but I just want to see
how long he would last with me.
- Right, I think five minutes, if that.
That would be a good one.
- It would be Bruce Lee, without a question.
- This might be the same answer: favorite actor as a kid?
- Oh...
Goodness.
One of them is actually Richard Gere,
and I have the privilege of working with him
on a movie called Red Corner.
And I still remember, the first time I ever met him was
in a room just to read the script with the director,
and he was half an hour late,
so we were just waiting for him, and the minute he came in,
you could feel his energy, palpable energy, it was like
Wow, that's a movie star.
- It's Richard Gere, Richard Gere.
All the memories are coming back in my head now.
I might watch a Richard Gere movie tonight.
At what point in your career
did it feel like you were in this for the long haul?
Was there a moment when you were--
- Of course. - Oh, okay.
- That's a really good question.
I think once I started,
I did this movie called Street Fighter.
And that was my first big movie,
and that lasted for six months.
And of course, all the money I made, I just squandered it.
Yeah, it was my first big one, right?
- As you should.
- Right after that movie, I did another movie called
Crying Freeman, and I was going, oh okay.
This is actually really simple.
I just do two or three movies a year, and then I'm okay.
I can just save my money and just keep going that way.
I was like,
Oh okay, this is what actors do, okay, awesome.
So, that's the point, - That's the point.
- That's the point where I realized.
- Did you stick to it?
- Yes, I did.
But then I realized it was much harder than I realized.
It was like, oh, you actually don't get to work
every single day of the year.
- Yeah.
- It's like there could be months where you're not working.
- And when you're not working, you're spending money.
- That's right, exactly. - There you go.
- So, work, save your money, keep working.
- Byron's secret to life, there you go.
Movie you watched as a kid that you wish you were in?
- Oh wow, that's easy, so remember this movie by
Bernardo Bertolucci called The Last Emperor?
- Yes, of course.
- The Last Emperor played by this wonderful actor John Lone.
I was watching that movie in Oxford, England,
because I was dating someone who was living there.
- Right.
- And I was watching this guy, I said, "I can be that guy.
"Damnit, it should be me."
I wasn't an actor back then.
- There you go, well, it was,,.
You put it out into the universe.
- Yeah, I said, that should be me there, if I could do that
for a living, that would be a dream.
- Love that.
And last, one word to describe your journey as an actor?
- Wow.
- Do we need anything else?
Altered Carbon, this guy, Skyscraper.
Everything else is coming up.