Six Shooter Interviews

Bill Oberst Jr.

(Zombieworld, Werewolf Rising, Black Water Vampire)

Check out his amazing career below.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2454994/?ref_=nv_sr_1

He is perhaps most widely-known internationally as the face of director Jason Zada‘s Take This Lollipop, awarded a 2012 Daytime Emmy Award by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in the category of “New Approaches-Daytime Entertainment.” Oberst has been seen by over 100 million viewers worldwide as an online stalker in the interactive application for Facebook users.(IMDb)

 

Road Rash Reviews managed to grab some time in his very busy schedule and put our Six Shooter Questions to him, here is what he had to say.

 Q: Why did you wait until you were in your 40’s to break onto the silver-screen, and what drew you to it?

A: It was all an accident. I’m a theatre actor by trade; made my living on-stage for 16 years. Then I did a video audition as a lark, booked the lead role in an American Civil War docudrama about General W.T. Sherman, and realized I knew nothing about screen acting! I muddled through, but decided I wanted to know how to do camera acting properly. So I dove in. 100 projects later I am still learning. I still know nothing. Life is one big classroom. God is good.

Q: With so many credits to your name in such a short period of time, what shoot or location stands out the most?

My gosh. Where does one start? With chasing a stark naked woman down a Texas parking garage ramp while brandishing a functional cattle prod? With eating live worms and producing real vomit in the woods of Missouri? With putting a barbed-wire noose around Adrienne Barbeau‘s neck on national television? Suffice it to say that I will have no shortage of stories to tell (or scars to show) in the retirement home. I’ve been slimy, wet, cold, bloody, dirty, exhausted, disgusting and painted red head-to-toe at 4 o’clock in the morning in Hollywood. I’ve been lucky.

Q: Do you regard “Take This Lollipop” as your potential legacy or do you have bigger World domination plans?

A: In a business with a 98% unemployment rate I am fortunate just to be consistently working!

Q: What drew you to the Horror genre and still keeps you deeply embedded within its bowels?

A: My sympathies have always been with the monster. My spirit has always been burdened. The latter is the reason I follow Jesus. The former is the reason I love horror. Both are strong enough to withstand the slings and arrows of those who cheapen them, use them for profit and tell lies in their name. Both make me constantly aware that all of us really are, as Dickens said “fellow travellers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on some other journey.” Both are a part of me and both dear to my heart.

Q: Which historical horror character in cinema would you most want to portray and which version?

A. Erik, the Phantom Of The Opera, as he was presented in the Gaston Leroux novel (which, by the way, is in the public domain) and in Lon Chaney‘s faithful 1925 version. The essential element in this character is that he was born looking the way he looked! If you deny Erik his monstrous birth and give him a back-story in which he was disfigured by accident, as most screen versions have done, you lose the power of his cry “Feast your eyes! Glut your soul on my accursed ugliness!” Is he a madman and a monster because of his appearance, or because of our reaction to his appearance? That is the question. Erik says “If I am the Phantom, it is because men have made me so.” I yearn to play Erik.

Q: After all the blood and guts are you excited about Shaun The Sheep: The Farmers Llamas?

A: I am a HUGE Shaun The Sheep fan! Can’t wait for the next instalment. I saw his first movie this summer on a plane to Prague, flying over to play Hitler’s head of nuclear weapons development for a German TV program….I laughed so much at Shaun and the crew trying to rescue The Farmer that when I got to set I had Shaun’s theme song firmly lodged in my head. So I marched around Prague in jackboots singing “He’s Shaun The Sheep, he’s Shaun The Sheep!” Oddly, no one joined in.

I was recently informed that I hold an IMDb record for “Most Screen Credits In A Single Five Year Period.” 

100 credits in 5 years. And 3 of them are actually good!

Very tongue in cheek Bill.

Thank you very much for taking the time to answer our questions and all the best for the future.