STACK Mar #137

98 / 99

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is a scene where he has to show off
his muscular physique so that Ferrari
[Guillaume Canet] can say it’s not right
– the amount of work that must have
gone into that, and then he just has to
lose that physique and change it again.
He’s very focused.
Has working on The Program
changed your opinion of sport at the
highest level? Are you more cynical
now?
I am a big sports fan and I don’t
know if it has changed my opinion
of sport. I think of top-level sport like
this as entertainment. I come from
a country where our biggest sport is
Gaelic football and hurling, which are
both amateur sports, and it’s almost like
the truest form of sport – like people
from one village competing against
people from another village. The fact
that Lance took drugs has never been
something that annoyed me. That’s not
my problem, personally, with it, but
I’m sure that’s the way it is for some
other people. The fact that he didn’t
let people [on his team] not take drugs
and he ruined people’s reputations and
careers deliberately to hide his cheating
is what makes me not like him. So I
think there is part of me that doesn’t
trust any endurance sport. I don’t
know if it necessarily ruins them as a
spectacle, but it definitely makes them
less engaging. Like David says, I’ve no
interest in watching chemists compete.
It’s like watching Formula One – you can
be into Formula One and I get it, but it
just doesn’t do anything for me, it’s just
engineering.
So what is your sport?
I love soccer. I’m a Liverpool fan. I’ve
been checking scores today [laughs]. I
also love a bit of rugby and tennis.
Why was it so important to you that
he was happy with the film?
It’s a film about integrity and it would
have been embarrassing if we didn’t
use some ourselves. David has done so
much research for us that it only made
sense. For me it was very important.
Also, it’s based on his source material,
so it would have been crazy not to
involve him in the whole process.
Can you talk about working with Ben
Foster? He clearly immersed himself
in the role – he was talking about
how he took some performance
enhancing drugs as part of his
research.
I didn’t know that he had done that
until a journalist mentioned it to me.
But I think that makes complete sense,
he has to spend so much of the movie
on them; it doesn’t surprise me at all.
He is a very immersive actor and very
focused. If I’m perfectly honest, we
kind of collectively decided that there
was no point in us hanging out very
much because it wasn’t going to help.
David and Lance didn’t get on so we
didn’t really hang out at all until the film
was nearly over. But I love what he was
doing and I thought he did a great job,
particularly what he did physically. There