'An American Pickle': Geoffrey Cantor answered last-minute call to play Seth Rogen's dad
It is not every day you get the call to play Seth Rogen's dad and his grandson at the same time. In an exclusive interview with MEA WorldWide (MEAWW), Geoffrey Cantor, known for playing Mitchell Ellison in Marvel's 'Daredevil' explained how he got the part. "I was hired all of a sudden. I was having lunch with an author friend of mine and looked at my phone... because I don't keep my phone on when I'm at lunch. I look at my phone after [the meal] and it's blown up with [calls from] my agent, my manager and I have to get out to Pittsburgh the next day. I didn't know anything about the script. I didn't know anything about anything other than I was playing Seth Rogen's dad, which is not a bad way to have to end a lunch, you know?"
Cantor's character, David, is not only the father of Seth Rogen's character, Ben Greenbaum; he is also the grandson of Herschel Greenbaum (also played by Rogen). Speaking about his character in the film, Cantor said that he appears in flashback sequences, having died in a car crash by the time Herschel wakes up from his pickled sleep and finds Ben. "He exists in the movie, mostly in conversation and the memory between the two generations. So he's the one generation you don't really see much of except in flashbacks," he explained.
Shooting for the film was a breeze. "I had just had toe surgery and so, I just remember [thinking] 'am I going to wear my own shoes?'. So my head was wrapped up in all that. But once I got on set, it was lovely. He [Seth Rogen] was friendly and kind, and it was a lot of people because it was a college graduation scene and it was really easy... it was fun with a bit of ad-lib. It couldn't have gone off any more smoothly."
It was only when he got the script that he realized that film was centered around the magical premise that allowed a 1920s Jewish immigrant from the "old country" to meet his millennial great-grandson. "When I first read the script, it was hard to buy. I got to say that it is a hard sell. But when you watch the trailer... once you buy that premise, then all of a sudden the rest of it, it kind of makes weird sense. It is something so silly, but the rest of the film tries to maintain the truth and honesty about it. That's where the 'funny' is. It's not going for the joke. [Instead], the film goes for the disconnect. Real humor really comes from taking something familiar and putting it in an unfamiliar context," he said about how the film sets up the generational clash.
"I'm a huge fan of pickles. I don't know how you feel about pickles. So, I love that. The culture, the pickle culture, is its own thing. And, the idea that pickling agents will preserve a human being for a hundred years allows someone who's a hundred years old to come to the future, while somebody from the present day gets to meet basically his doppelganger, who's really from two generations earlier. His incredulity about the absurdity of that situation is already shared by the audience. And I think that's where the humor really is," said Cantor.
In a way, Cantor was the perfect fit for the role. "As a middle-aged Jewish man with college-aged kids, it's not a big stretch to play a middle-aged Jewish man with a college-aged kid. So I guess I would have taught him [Ben Greenbaum] the same things I taught my kids. In the little video clip, you see of us at his college graduation, we're doing selfies and we're clearly loving parents who understood the importance of education and family." But overall, he believes that the film itself is really about "the immigration story". Talking about the film's themes, he said: "Like every other person in the United States with the exception of the Native Americans, everyone is an immigrant in some way. It's just how we self-define. So I think what I hope the movie does is look with some humor and some empathy and some sensitivity at the issue of things that would affect all immigrants through the specific story of this particular Jewish immigrant. So I'm hoping that it speaks to some of the issues... not all of them, certainly, but some of the issues that every immigrant in any nation has faced."
'An American Pickle' airs on August 6 on HBO Max.