By now some of you have seen The Room Actors Where Are They Now. It’s a funny, and at times grotesque look at how the biggest film cult phenomenon of this century affected the actors who starred in it.
This is Robyn Paris’ creation, who played Michelle in The Room. She wrote and directed it and now it is showing on Funny or Die. Four webisodes are launched (I am in two of them) and four more are to come. The story of this web series began a few years back and now it has come to fruition!
In my episodes, this hilarious parody tells the story of how the Room fucked me up so much that I had to retreat from normal society to live as a recluse and the shit just gets worse from there.
I highly recommend going to Funny or Die and watching the first half of the web series. The rest of the series has not been shot but will follow soon!
Now, I can’t talk about The Room or the Mockumentary without talking about Los Angeles. If you read my comic book you quickly learn that LA is inextricably locked up in my story, practically a character in the narrative itself. From the beginning, from the minute I laid down roots in LA, I had a love-hate relationship with the city. I got some big bumps and bruises during the four years I lived there, tattoos that have made me who I am today. I came of age there and walked away from there a better man today because of it.
So when Robyn asked me to come to LA to shoot my two installments of The Mockumentary, I didn’t think it would be the emotional ride it was. I have been back to LA numerous times since I came back to Phoenix in 2004. Sometimes just the action of driving around the city can spur wonderful memories … and not so wonderful memeories. Even still, when I returned to shoot the Mockumentary, I didn’t think it would be so difficult. Obviously, Denny is not me and The Philip Haldiman I play in the Mockumentay is not the Philip Haldiman of real life. But the characters required reaching down into the real Philip Haldiman to provide an authenticity for the audience. And people laugh because the emotion is real. That is one of the great things about the friends in the Room who I worked with. We all performed our jobs with earnest conviction. And we did it with source material that was very difficult to work with. Initially they called us bad actors. Fifteen years later they gave us an award for ensemble acting from Hollyweb Festival. What a strange world!
So check out the Mockumentary on Funny or Die. Watch and laugh and enjoy a cast of actors who once upon a time only wanted to do the best job they could on a movie they thought nobody would see. Oh, watch all four episodes and don’t forget to vote FUNNY.