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Of playing late rocker, he says, “There are people who are not going to be happy unless he’s there, dead and propped up and stuffed with his own voice being piped through his dead body.” “I’m Gossip Girl,” Penn Badgley says, laughing and shaking his head. “It is kind of funny. I wasn’t just on it. I am Gossip Girl.” The 26-year old actor, wearing a day or two of stubble and a navy blue cardigan, is sitting in a hotel room in his native New York City, the town where he grew up in front of a generation of swooning girls on the CW’s premiere teen soap opera. He’s here to discuss his movie Greetings From Tim Buckley, but he can’t yet escape the show. The show ended this past winter after six seasons of bourgeois intrigue and private school drama, finally revealing the identity of the diarist that chronicled the excess and early onset adulthood, unmasking the mole that narrated the tangled web for viewers over those years. |
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Thanks to @Roughrider92 & @Rali55! |
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If you think of Penn Badgley in terms of Dan Humphrey, the character he played for five years on the CW Network’s Gossip Girl, prepare to have your world rocked. The actor is about to make the transition from television to film look easy with a big performance in a small film: Greetings From Tim Buckley, which opens in New York and Los Angeles on May 3 and in other select markets later that month. Badgley plays Jeff Buckley, the remarkably talented musical artist known for his album Grace and a much-adored interpretation of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”, who, like his singer/songwriter father in the movie’s title, died much too young. Directed by Daniel Algrant (People I Know), Greetings From Tim Buckley is about Jeff’s attempts to get out from under the long shadow cast by his late dad (played by Ben Rosenfield). Buckley pere died from a drug overdose at the age of 28, but, despite his short life, left behind a substantial, mostly critically acclaimed body of work, including nine studio albums. Jeff was working on his second album in Memphis, Tenn. when he drowned while swimming in the Wolf River there in 1997. He was 30. The story is a rich one, but Badgley was at a distinct disadvantage from the get-go. Greetings From Tim Buckley did not have permission to use Jeff’s music in the film — a second planned Buckley biopic, Mystery White Boy, will have that privilege — which meant that the actor had to convey the singer’s immense talent and charisma without tapping into his songs. He more than rises to the occasion thanks to a tour-de-force a cappella performance at a record store that moviegoers surely will be talking about in the weeks to come. I spoke to Badgley late last year after I saw Greetings From Tim Buckley at the Toronto Film Festival. With the movie premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival on Tuesday and opening commercially, it’s a good time to hear what he has to say. The actor spoke candidly about how he came to his interpretation of the singer, how falling in “real, true earth-shattering love” with actress Zoe Kravitz helped his performance, and why he says he’s “done” with TV. Penn Badgley: Jeff was seductive and alluring and daunting and huge in my mind, but ,specifically, the story appealed to me. The film obviously doesn’t have a lot of his music in it, and there’s so much about his father whom I didn’t know anything about. But it was very clear that the screenwriters had captured his voice. They had captured his essence and his soul and his art and where it all came from. The quiet, organic snapshot of him felt very right. Well, yeah, it was included among the audition scenes that they sent to everybody. And I remember reading it and thinking Jesus, this is certainly bizarre and specific. I couldn’t imagine that many people knew what to do with it. But, there was something about that scene that spoke to his voice and spoke to his qualities so beautifully. I knew that if I didn’t do it for my audition scene I would still have to do it later if I remained in the running for the role. So, I just knew: I’ve got nail this. We did three takes total. They were all different but all evoked the spirit of that scene. And there really was no way to prepare for it. Thankfully, the thing that saved me is that I knew the material. I went through a Led Zeppelin phase as a teenager, and I was really familiar with that stuff. Honestly, if the scene had required me to sing something that I didn’t really know, I don’t know how I would have done it. I think I might. I don’t know my actual range but it’s similar. I just happen to have a deeper voice. So, Jeff could go higher than I can. But I can go lower than he could. I knew that I couldn’t mimic him, because Jeff had this beautiful, high, lilting speaking voice. If I had to do just three minutes of Jeff Buckley, I guess I could have tried to do more of an impersonation, but I felt that if I had to augment my voice in every scene I wasn’t going to be able to be that free. So, I thought, okay, why is it important that he has a high speaking voice? If he had a low voice, people would have said he had a beautiful, low, lilting voice. So, I chose to figure out what was it about him that made people respond the way they did and work with those qualities in a way that was totally honest with myself. He was a quiet, ecstatic, gentle and, yet, full of rage. He was also in some ways very immature. The way that he seemed to interact with people was infinitely endearing but, at the same time, on paper, it should have been almost annoying. It’s like he was always on a tightrope as an artist and as a person. I think because of the talent that he clearly had, he believed in himself so much that he almost had this certain arrogance. At the same time he was painfully, painfully self-conscious and self-aware. Everybody is full of contradictions but he was an extreme case of that. It’s like all of those strange contortions of his voice and his body and his face were expressions of the tension between those contradictions. It was him acting out, and so we’re telling part of the story through my body language and voice, too. It was like adopting he body language of feral cat. It’s something that I’ve been madly in love with and dreaming about for two decades, but until recently, I didn’t really know any other musicians. What’s beautiful about this movie is that, because of it, I now have a lot of friends who play. In fact, almost all my friends in Brooklyn are musicians and they’ve been inviting me to play little opening sets for them – just unannounced little gigs. And I definitely am going to pursue it. I’ve always been quietly writing and playing in private, and it’s like everything that I was experiencing before and during the shoot allowed me to finally realize some of my own music. So, yeah, I think I will definitely be doing something soon. I don’t know about an album. I mean, the music industry is in a weird state. What I really want to do is play live and create an experience in a room that you can’t necessarily capture and play again. The first time you and I talked, you said that falling in love with Zoe Kravitz at the time you were playing Buckley helped you really put yourself out there for the part. How so? At that time I was falling madly in love in a way that was changing me and opening me up. And it was an integral part of playing Jeff. Technically, I could probably play guitar and sing better now because I have a year of consistent experience under my belt, but, at the time, I was kind of going through what Jeff was going through emotionally in the movie in the sense that the worlds of music and love and women and art were opening up to me. Honestly I needed it. It was like this cosmic intervention where, if you’re going to play somebody like Jeff you’ve got to at least be in love, you know? Yeah, very much. And being in love, real, true, earth-shattering love – even though it sounds hyperbolic I really was going through it — helped me be as good as I could be. I suspect this role will lead to more film offers for you. After so many years in television, are you now concentrating on movie roles? For me, this movie is a beautiful step forward. Gossip Girl has given me everything that I have now. It gave me the opportunity to live in New York and to be in a position to get this role. It also put me in New York City so I could meet Zoe. And it’s put me in a place where I haven’t had to do a bunch of other shit just to make money. I’m super grateful for it, but this movie has come at the right time to take a step forward. I have been working in television for 13 years now, and you know, I’m just done with it. I have nothing against television, but I’m done. Source, thanks to @Rali55 |
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Actor Penn Badgley has been acting for more than half his life, most recently as Dan Humphrey on the hit television show “Gossip Girl.” But the 26-year-old actor says his first passion has always been music. “It’s been something I’ve had to keep on the back burner for a long, long time because of my acting career,” he says. But all that’s about to change. First, “Gossip Girl” ended in December. “I have time to play now that I’m not on the show anymore,” Badgley says. Second, in his new film “Greetings From Tim Buckley,” Badgley plays Jeff Buckley at an early, relatively unknown period in the musician’s life. In the film, Jeff discovers his own relationship to music while wrestling with his relationship to his late father, Tim. “I was forced into the head space that was deeply emotional and spiritual, where I just was trying to honor this guy and trying to also evoke him and live a little bit like he was,” Badgley says. “I mean trust me, I was well aware of the task ahead of me. It was a tall mountain to climb, but you’ve got to start climbing and just do it.” “Greetings From Tim Buckley” will have its U.S. premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on Tuesday. Badgley, who is based in Brooklyn, talked with Speakeasy about the film. There is a scene in a record store when you sing Led Zeppelin III a cappella. It’s so primal and seems like you went off script. What’s interesting about that is that in the script it says, “Jeff does a 60-second sonic impression of the entire record. It’s beautiful. He collapses on the floor.” But it’s like okay, how the f— do you do it? [laughs] That was where I read it and I was like, I bet you not many people even know where to begin with this and for some reason, I know exactly what they’re talking about. I get that part of Jeff. You played guitar and sang all the songs yourself in the film. Is that your true singing voice? I don’t use as much falsetto as Jeff did and I have a much lower voice than Jeff did. His speaking voice for instance was almost an octave higher than mine. He could go higher than me, but it was something that I knew was within me to reach. It just required me to be singing constantly in a way that I never really had the opportunity to do. My vocal coach and my guitar teacher both told me, “you have it. You just need to play. Do it more.” Because you look at somebody like Jeff, you look at any great artist, I mean they put time in. They put years of training and playing with experience. I basically just had to catch up on like a decade of experience in about a month and a half, which obviously I wasn’t going to be able to do, but I did what I could. So you took lessons and practiced mostly on your own? Yeah, both my guitar teacher and my vocal coach, we didn’t ever play anything that you see in the movie. My vocal coach gave me ways to warm up my voice and then we wouldn’t sing anything else, and then we’d warm down. And then the guitar teacher taught me some scales, and he taught me some progressions and different things. Gary Lucas – the real Gary Lucas who Jeff was playing with in the movie – he and I would just play together the same way that he and Jeff did 20 years prior, because if it’s all going to be live it needs to have that spontaneous quality to it. It needs to have that authentic vibration to it. There was no real way to rehearse or prepare other than just hoping that I would be as ready as possible by practicing other things. Did you listen to the recording of Jeff’s performance at the 1991 concert portrayed in the movie? I did but then I actually had to let it go because in some ways, if I had mimicked that performance spot on, I think people would have been like “that’s not Jeff Buckley.” Because when you listen to it, it does not sound like the Jeff Buckley that people know. He was still very much finding his voice. So I listened to it and then just had to take it for what it was, and then just move into a different place so that we could tell the story a little more accurately, even if it’s fudging some of the facts. What you see is not actually spot on, but I think the energy is spot on. The feelings that it evokes are spot on. The film captures a time in Jeff’s life when he’s still finding himself, and he’s not always very likeable– Yeah, right. Exactly. –did you even need to listen to his album “Grace” or “Hallelujah,” since that came well after this period? I did not. I listened to a lot of him before but basically after I understood how to emulate his voice in certain ways, I really left all that behind. I was like, look I have all that, and that is all after what we’re doing. I just have to go on my instincts here. Jeff was, as he says in the film, a million different things, as anyone is. I think he was a person who really struggled with the fact that people couldn’t know every part of him. He didn’t present every part of himself. He was mysterious. He would be I think different things to different people. The icon that everyone makes him out to be is a very small part of him. I think a lot of people seeing this movie are seeing little clips of it and are like, “that’s supposed to be Jeff Buckley? Are you kidding me?” But I do think that this is a pretty honest, simple portrayal of a real, whole person. Source, thanks to @roughrider92 |
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In honor of it being our “Sweet 16″ Beautiful People issue, we asked some of this year’s BPs to share what they did on their special day. Watch Penn Badgley, PAPER Cover Girl Jessie Ware, Joey Bada$$ and male models Cory Bond, Chad White and Brian Shimansky talk about their big 1-6 and hear who celebrated with a tea party, who had a surprise bowling party and who got drunk on “vodka that’s meant for vodka sauce.” MTV’s My Super Sweet 16, these were not. Source, thanks to @chandlerdillon |
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H&M enlisted eco-friendly babe Ashley Benson to help them launch their Conscious Collection at their 5th Avenue Flagship store yesterday evening. A line manufactured exclusively from sustainable materials, the Conscious Collection is a part of the H&M’s larger Conscious initiative and just one more reason to adore the Swedish megabrand. Unfortunately, the Spring Breakers star came down with the flu and was unable to attend, but lucky for H&M, being environmentally friendly is tremendously hot amongst young Hollywood, and the always lovable Penn Badgley stepped in at the last minute. We braved the throngs of fashionistas vying for a photo-op with Badgley to ask how he lives consciously, and his charmingly unprepared response made us fall for him all over again (the first time being when he accidentally collides with Serena van der Woodsen in the Gossip Girl pilot, obviously). BULLETT: What do you do to live consciously? PENN BADGLEY: Oh shit… that’s a hard question. Probably not enough like anyone else. I mean… there’s a real answer that’s very long. I guess what I’m doing just in my life and my thinking is I’m trying to work towards pairing everything down so I can actually live sustainably off the land in like 5 to 10 years. We would be honored to pitch in on your wind-powered dairy farm, Penn. Source, thanks to @roughrider92 |
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And the Greetings from Tim Buckley promotion begins! Huge thanks to @chandlerDillon and @roughrider92 for gathering all these updates! Penn is in the latest issue of Paper Magazine and Nylon Guys (with Adam Levine on the cover). Scans will be added as soon as I find both issues!   
GALLERY LINKS: Penn Badgley channels Jeff Buckley in this clip from “Greetings From Tim Buckley” as he sings Buckley’s famous cover of his father’s song, ‘Once I Was.’ Penn’s article from Paper Magazine: “I’ve been working every day since I was 12,” 26-year-old actor Penn Badgley says. “I could use a break and a little time to recalibrate. I’ve paid my dues.” In December, the final episode of Gossip Girl (the cult CW drama Badgley starred on for six seasons) aired and it was revealed that Badgley’s character, Dan Humphrey, was the famously anonymous Gossip Girl. (“I had no idea it was me until the night before we shot.”) Before that, he was on at least 11 different TV series, from a tiny part on Will & Grace to multiple appearances on The Young and the Restless. He’s also had film roles in Easy A and, memorably, as a doomed Wall Street analyst in Margin Call. “Right now,” he says, “I’m just working on myself.” On the day of the interview, Badgley, who lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was preparing for a trip to Brazil with girlfriend Zoë Kravitz. He won’t be able to rest for long, though, as his next movie, Greetings from Tim Buckley, comes out in May. In the biopic, Badgley plays late musician Jeff Buckley, who comes to New York for a tribute concert for his father, musician Tim Buckley, whom he never knew. The actor did his own vocals and guitar-playing in the film, and the similarities are extraordinary. Badgley, who’s been a Buckley fan since he was a teenager, calls getting the part “the most electric chapter in my life so far.” “It’s hard to put into words,” he says. “But I was starting to grow as a person beyond Gossip Girl. I was also falling in love and I was also moving. I was exorcising a lot of the same demons that Jeff had. It was a lot and it was beautiful.” |
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