Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows Cast Interviews

Jun 1, 2016 | Articles

The latest and highly anticipated Paramount film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows will hit theaters everywhere this week and superfans can’t wait for this new installment from this pop-culture franchise. Traditional media and bloggers along with their families were invited to a private screening of the film last weekend and had the pleasure of attending a press junket to interview the cast the next day at the Ritz Carlton here in NYC which undoubtedly was pretty dang cool to attend as a long time fan of the cartoons and movies myself.

The participating cast members were such a down to earth group of guys {Meagan Fox was under the weather} to spend the morning with . Right from the beginning, session 1 of the conference started off with laughs and the jokes continued to flow throughout the entire morning. Can you imagine what days on set must have been like for these guys?
Moderated by Erik Davis, Editor at Fandago.com & Movies.com, he jokingly called himself the 5th Ninja turtle before starting off with actor Will Arnett  who was the only returning cast member from the 1st movie in attendance.

Canadian actor, Arnett has a really sarcastic, yet really funny sense of humor, and it was hysterical listening to him as he joked about his friend, actor Jason Sudakeis being not so smart, He called Arnett up during a real, live Knicks game that was a part of the film and believed Arnett was losing his mind. He was confused by Arnett’s repetitive, awkward movements (in the scene he’s being shot in the face multiple times with a pea shooter by Michelangelo) during an interview on the court, not realizing that in fact he was just acting in the pro- new york city sequel of TMNT.

When asked what was important to him in terms of the evolution of his character, Vern he responded “ I think it was important overall for everybody that we kind of knew what we’d done right in the first movie and what we’d done wrong, and we wanted to kind of capitalize on the things we did right, we wanted to have more fun and kind of tell a story that really resonated and made sense within the, you know, the sort of the canon of the Turtles. For me, personally, for Vern, it was kind of fun to be able to come back and do something a little bit different. He’s kind of on this path that you think is kind of shady but ultimately has a sort of a little bit of redemption, so that was good, had a little bit of something to do. But overall it was important to kind of make a bigger, more fun exciting Turtles.

Just like his character the villainous Shredder, Brian Tee was pretty quiet and he seemed like a pretty laid back type of guy, almost sinister like. When asked “What did you want to bring that’s new that we didn’t see in the first film in terms of Shredder?” Brian said “ I wanted to bring a groundedness, I guess a humanness to Shredder ‘cause I think over the years even in the movies in the ‘90s you never really saw a face, there was just this mask and this kind of presence, and to bring that, along with this groundedness and this human form is really what I wanted to do, you know? He’s got to be kind of the baddest of badasses……”

Having a son, Tyler Perry wanted to be in a movie that his child would enjoy and jumped at the opportunity to play mad scientist Baxter Stockman, an ally of Shredder. Growing up as the underdog he could relate to the character. When complimented on the characters awesome laugh, Perry Explained “That just happened one day on set and I was sitting there flirting with Megan’s character, with April, and that laugh showed up and everybody’s like, keep the laugh, keep the laugh, so ‘cause I thought it was hysterical that this guy thinks he has a chance with somebody like Megan, you know?”

Stephen Amell is probably most  well known for his television role as Arrow and enjoyed his first major movie role as vigilante and bad ass Casey Jones. Amell was asked, as far as a TV versus film, doing all this action stuff, what was the biggest differences for him? To which he explained  “They let me do whatever I wanted on Turtles, and I didn’t know that they would. I ended up doing every single stunt in the entire movie. My first fight with the Foot Clan went so well that the director and the producers got together and they were just like Mel’s last fight with Bebop and Rocksteady needs to be bigger, and so they brought in a second unit director and an entire unit and we were out there at Pier 92 for five days just going wall to wall the entire time. And that sequence and that week of filming is probably the thing that I’m most proud of in my entire career. So it was really – I felt really grateful that they allowed me to do the physical side of Casey Jones. Very cool.

You’d think he’d be thrilled at the idea of being able to keep the infamous Casey Jones hockey mask but in actuality Amell told us “I don’t want to keep the mask. It doesn’t fit. You think that in the midst of this gigantic film we would have taken a mold of my face but nope. And I wore it for two straight nights and it pushed on this part of my face and I would complain and Megan would tell me that I was a sissy so I would stop complaining. By the way, that’s not the word she used. And then the next day we were filming in an alley, same alley in New York City, and I got a sinus infection and almost begged off work for the first time in my life. So if I get to don the mask again, we’re gonna get that sucker fitted.

Once Gary Anthony Williams {BeBop} and Stephen Farrelly {RockSteady} entered the room you could tell they had great chemistry and seemed to be the life of the party & we were ready for an entertaining series of questions and answers. Gary, who admitted to probably being too old to have been watching the Turtles, was a true fan of the 80’s cartoon and was absolutely hysterical from the very initial moment the cast walked into the room. The casting of these two guys  made for a perfect duo and they admitted to sitting around in a local cafe studying the behaviors and movements of various animals to get into character as a mutated larger than life Rhino and Warthog who were brought to the big screen in a live action film for the very first time. I bet we could chalk their great chemistry up to them doing voiceover work in the booth together.

When Farrelly was asked how did he manage to juggle his WWE schedule as Superstar Sheamus, he first jokingly mentioned fighting off the urges to brokicking  a turtle and described his hectic travel schedule of driving out for live shows, handling press, hopping on a plane at 4am to be on set at 7am for filming as something he was concerned with but “It was just so much fun working with all these guys that, you know, no matter how tired you were, as soon as you hit the set the energy was up and it was time to play.”

Farrelly was asked how’d he manage to juggle his WWE schedule as Superstar Sheamus, he first jokingly mentioned fighting off the urges to brokick a turtle and described his hectic travel schedule of driving out for live shows, handling press, hopping on a plane at 4am to be on set at 7am for filming as something he was concerned with but “It was just so much fun working with all these guys that, you know, no matter how tired you were, as soon as you hit the set the energy was up and it was time to play.”

When in contact with the mysterious purples ooze it helped release the dominant animal that we are each believed to have inside and each cast member gave us their spirit animal before the interview wrapped. Stephen Farrelly and Gary Anthony Williams fought over the fastest animal in the world, the Peregrine falcon. Not wanting to sound like the macho man by answering with a “Lion”, Steven Amell went with a giraffe, Tyler Perry, The lion (lol) Brian Tee, a killer whale. Of course Will Arnett would give the best answer of them all with a black lab. Why not be a domesticated animal who has somewhere to leave, given food everyday and is surrounded by people who love him .

There was no shortage of laughs and it was great to get to experience the energy these actors all had together in one room.

Synopsis
Michelangelo, Donatello, Leonardo, and Raphael return to theaters this summer to battle bigger, badder villains, alongside April O’Neil (Megan Fox), Vern Fenwick (Will Arnett), and a newcomer: the hockey-masked vigilante Casey Jones (Stephen Amell). After supervillain Shredder (Brian Tee) escapes custody, he joins forces with mad scientist Baxter Stockman (Tyler Perry) and two dimwitted henchmen, Bebop (Gary Anthony Williams) and Rocksteady (WWE Superstar Stephen “Sheamus” Farrelly), to unleash a diabolical plan to take over the world. As the Turtles prepare to take on Shredder and his new crew, they find themselves facing an even greater evil with similar intentions: the notorious Krang.
Director
David Green
Cast
Megan Fox, Will Arnett, Stephen Amell, Tyler Perry, Noel Fisher, Jeremy Howard, Pete Ploszek, Alan Ritchson, Brian Tee, Stephen “Sheamus” Farrelly, Gary Anthony Williams