While watching The Last Exorcism I was very impressed by the entire cast. Jones really stood out to me, even though at the time I didn't recognize his name and put it together that he was cast as Banshee in Matthew Vaughn's First Class.
While talking to MTV, the director of that movie, Daniel Stamm, was full of praise for the young actor..
"He was a real find, because I wanted the character to be slightly off, but where you couldn't really pinpoint what's off about him. There's some weirdness about him, and his doesn't have that in real life at all. He's the smartest guy."
"He's going to be great in 'X-Men.' I can promise you that. I can't wait. But it's going to be very different than this movie."
Stamm also revealed how Jones got on in his audition..
The first time he came in to audition for us, I had the feeling, 'I found my guy, but he's completely stoned!' We said goodbye and I was like, 'Dammit, he would have been so good.' I ran after him in the street and said, 'Caleb, can we just wait for two, three hours and do it again?' And he said, 'Why?' And I said, 'Because you are completely stoned!' He said, 'Oh man, that always happens to me! My manager is always screaming at me for that. I always come across stoned when I improvise. I'm not stoned at all! Let's do it again!'"
"And we did it again and the same thing happened again. He had the slurred speech, sometimes he didn't answer straight away, and he wouldn't look at me. So I said, 'Let's just do one problem at a time. Why don't we first have you enunciate? It doesn't matter what you say, just enunciate to get rid of the slurred speech.' So we did that and that worked. Then I said, 'Just look at me. Stare at me the entire time,' and he did that. And the third thing was just, 'Immediately answer me. It doesn't matter what you say. Just be quick.' And suddenly it was brilliant."
Yeah sure, Caleb, an excuse to get away with a few sneaky puffs before auditions I'm sure! Seriously though, it's an interesting insight into the casting of yet another young actor in
First Class that is being hailed as somewhat of a revelation along with
Winters Bone star Jennifer Lawrence. Between an established group of fine character actors and these young up and comers, Vaughn has assembled quite an ensemble. Still, It will probably suck because Cyclops isn't in it. ;)
About The Author:
Mark Cassidy is a writer, photographer, amateur filmmaker, and Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic from Dublin, Ireland.