BMi: Speaking of huge movies… you are starring as Raphael in the upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. The Turtles fanbase is rabid and they’ve been skeptical of the film ever since it was first announced. What can you tell fans to let them know everything is going to be alright?
AR: From the early leaked scripts, where it’s like an alien generation of this story less true to the origin story, and people thinking the entire time that that’s what this film is going to be about…has sort of been on the forefront of my mind while we’re working on this. The internet’s a dangerous place because people believe what they read and they cling to it as truth and they can assault you with that as if it were real. It’s been frustrating in the sense that people are already dogging the movie and they’ve been dogging it before it was in production. They’ve already written it off as a Michael Bay failure but what people don’t know is that this story is actually really great. Having grown up with it myself, I think we’ve honored the origin story and those diehard fans that want to see the best of what the turtles have to offer. It has been incredible to see the attention this film has been getting. I think we set a record for trailer views the first week the trailer was released. Thirty one million views in a week just for the trailer. People want to see the turtles, they want to see what they look like and they want to see that world.
Another thing, once that trailer was released a lot of people were unhappy with the way that they looked, complaining that they didn’t look like the turtles in the tmnt 2014(1990) film or from the comics. They’re more kind of a humanized version. I can say that I’m pretty certain that there’s a really good reason that they look the way they do and in order for us to really bring the turtles to life with the technology that we have in a way that’s never been done before, which is trying to capture the nuances of a human performance, and copy and paste that onto a turtle there was no other way than to humanize their face a little bit because a traditional turtle’s mouth couldn’t be translated into that human DNA. There’s no way to make that performance translate and what we’re trying to do is to create a truer more real life performance. The look has to do with the fact that we’re trying to get the most nuanced human performance possible which is what somebody is going to relate to when they feel like these guys are a living, breathing thing. I think people, once they connect with these characters and they see how real that experience is, I think all will be forgiven. Honestly, I’m proud of the product that’s being put out there. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun and I think a lot of people are really going to enjoy it.
BMi: Raphael was a huge part of the original 1990 film’s plot because he really did have the most character development in that film. What do you think has been the biggest difference between that character and your portrayal?
AR: In a lot of ways it’s still the same character. He’s still the angry hothead who’d rather take action than think about the implications of that action so in a lot of ways we’re still telling a lot of the same story. I think what we tried to do was to reach deeper and find other layers to these characters so they’re not so “one note”. I think in the past everybody sort of plays a caricature, like one dimension of humanity in a sense. I just think that the individuality and the depth of Raph and the turtles in this story is much, much richer. That’s something that we as actors focused on and I think it’s supported by the technology that’s helping to bring that story to life and the script that we ended up working with ultimately. It’s still a fun action/adventure movie but there’s a lot of heart and truth to the character that I think hasn’t really been expressed on film before.
