STACK New Zealand May 2016 Issue

8 / 36

After the cannibal gore-fest The Green Inferno, Eli Roth is set to tackle a very
different sort on man-eater in Meg.
visit EXTRAS NEWS
08 MAY 2016
EXTRAS
WHERE EAGLES DARE
T hat’s what being chubby with glasses will do
for you!” laughs Welsh actor Taron Egerton,
brushing off the fact he’s practically
unrecognisable in his latest film, Eddie the Eagle.
As a slick novice spy in the 2014 box office hit
Kingsman: The Secret Service, Egerton achieved overnight
fame and millions of adoring fans. Uncomfortable with his
pin-up status, he happily adopted a jutting chin, bottle-
glass specs and geeky persona for his role as Britain’s
unlikely ski jumper Eddie “The Eagle” Edwards, who
captivated the world at the 1988 Winter Olympics.
“Nerdy people are likeable,” Egerton, 26, insists when
STACK meets with him in Los Angeles. “It was always
going to be a tightrope walk, making Eddie relatable and
human and three-dimensional.”
But the ice quickly melted after meeting with the
real Edwards. “I just tried to imbibe and absorb a little
bit of who he is. He’s a very different guy now. He looks
nowhere near as characterful as he did back in the late
‘80s. But it was lovely to hear him talk about ski jumping
because his passion for it is totally infectious and that
was the whole key.”
As much as Egerton wanted to please Edwards,
his real mentor – both on and off screen – was Hugh
Jackman, portraying a fictitious, hard-drinking former ski
jumper who reluctantly takes Eddie under his wing.
“Hugh is such an incredibly life-affirming, positive,
enthusiastic person. He’s addictive to be around because
he’s so wholly positive,” he says. “Hugh is a sickeningly
good skier! How irritating is it, how good Hugh Jackman
is at everything!? Absolutely everything!”
Prior to shooting Eddie the Eagle on location in
Germany, Egerton had never skied in his life.
“I came out a couple of weeks earlier and tried to
learn to ski and fell over an awful lot,” he admits. “It was
really fun and then I ended up on a red slope, which was
a source of pride for me. But when we started shooting,
an email came through saying how nobody’s allowed to
ski – at all – for fear we might injure ourselves.
“For sure, I won’t be doing the 90 meter jump in this
lifetime. You have to do it every day from the age of four
just for it to be safe. It’s why Eddie kept hurting himself.
Gill Pringle
Eddie The Eagle is in cinemas now
Chris Cheney mined his
personal travails for The
Living End’s new album
Shift.
A lthough they don’t enjoy quite the same high
profile on this of the Tasman, The Living End
are one of Australia’s most popular groups
and live acts. Since forming at high school
and busking the streets of Melbourne, theiy have won
six ARIA awards (the equivalent of our Tuis) plus
APRA’s Australian Song of the Year and four platinum
plus selling albums.
Shift is their seventh LP and according to singer
Chris Cheney, is no random collection of songs and is
informed by his personal travails over the years – plus
a little bit of internal friction between him and his
long-time bandmates Scott Owen (bass) and Andy
Strachan (drums).
“I don’t know many bands that can just get in there
and produce greatness without any kind of friction,”
Cheney says. “We all butted heads. There were some
doozies. We know each other far too well, and that’s
the reason you can say, ‘No, you get f-cked.’”
An adjudicator came in the form of Woody Annison,
long-time friend and live engineer of the band’s shows.
“He knows how we want to sound live, and that’s
always the initial idea of going into a studio – to try
and catch that common energy,” Cheney explains. “He
was going to be great at being able to say, ‘You’ve
done enough takes for that,’ or ‘That part’s fine, don’t
squash all the energy out of it by trying to perfect it.’
Because that’s the danger: that you can get it really,
really good and then it’s boring. But the only time we
were disagreeing on things was because we wanted to
find the best result,” he asserts. “And that’s definitely
what we got.”
As befitting the title, Shift marks brand new territory
for the band, both sonically and thematically.
“I felt like the more honest and real that the lyrics
seemed to be, the better the song was going to be,”
says s Cheney. “It just felt like it would be doing a
disservice to the songs, I reckon, had we dumbed them
down. It’s the warts and all and it can be a bit ugly, but
that’s life, huh.” Zoë Radas
Swift by The Living End is out on May 13.
LIVING AND LEARNING
Rising star Taron Egerton embraces his inner nerd to play Eddie ‘The Eagle’
Edwards, the real-life underdog English sporting hero who captivated the
world at the 1988Winter Olympics.