Jason Lee - Won't Skate By

By Claudia Grazioso

The first thing you notice about Jason Lee, currently starring in Kevin Smith's Dogma and who made a name for himself deftly portraying cynical sidekicks (most notably in Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy, in which his performance as Banky won him an Independent Spirit Award and stole several scenes from leading man Ben Affleck), is that he is refreshingly without pretense. Need proof? He's a hot young actor who just finished a movie for Cameron Crowe who apologized profusely for being eight minutes late.

Lee is pretty much a local boy, having grown up in Huntington Beach, where he spent a fair amount of time skateboarding. So much time in fact that at 19 he turned professional, competing, touring, and doing demonstrations for the next eight years. He has never had professional acting training. Instead, he was turned on to acting by actors he met while skateboarding. Since then, he's had a pretty enviable and impressive track record. In addition to his strong supporting roles in Dogma and Chasing Amy, and his recent role in Crowe's next movie, Lee has been seen in Smith's Mall Rats, Tony Scott's Enemy of the State, Kissing a Fool opposite David Schwimmer, American Cuisine with Irene Jacob, HBO's Weapons of Mass Distraction, and Lawrence Kasdan's recent movie Mumford. Altogether, as they say in skateboarding land, not a bad run.

Not that he in any way seems to be resting on his laurels. Lee is intense about his acting, which for him seems to be a largely introspective process. "The thing I like most about acting is the process that it takes to come to understand your character, and then coming to understand what you have to do to play that character."

And for anyone who thinks that skateboarders from Huntington Beach might be a preternaturally mellow bunch, Lee's perfectionist side might dispel that rumor: His least favorite part about acting? "Feeling like you didn't do a good job, and then staying up all night thinking about it and feeling self-conscious." He paused, then added emphatically, "That part of it sucks."

The recently released Dogma is Lee's third time working with Kevin Smith and his fifth time working with a writer/director. While he seems to approach all of his work positively, Lee empathically referred to working with writer/directors as his "best experiences. With writer/directors-Lawrence Kasdan and Cameron Crowe and Kevin Smith-there's a sense of trust, because they've envisioned the whole thing 1,000 times in their heads while writing and rewriting. They're never unsure about what they want."

In Dogma, two angels who have been cast out of heaven (and sent to Wisconsin in lieu of hell), scheme to get back into Paradise.  The problem is that, if they succeed, they will wipe out every trace of human kind. This is no problem for Lee's character, Azrael, a demonic being who wouldn't be too terribly sad to see the world end. Though grander in scope than some previous roles he's played, Lee approached Azrael in exactly the same way-by reconceiving him not as a celestial being, or something as abstract as the embodiment of evil, but instead, thinking of him in recognizable and human terms: "Azrael is a miserable creature with hidden agendas," said Lee. "I saw him as someone who is not so much evil as really pissed off and willing to do something about it." He added, "I saw the weakness in him. Azrael is bitter and weak, and those are the sides of him that I focused on."

This approach seems to have helped him to nail the role. Said Kevin Smith: "You couldn't ask for a better villain. Jason became the guy people in rehearsals would measure themselves against." Added Dogma producer Scott Mosier, "Azrael's a villain of the oldest sort and yet you can relate to his very human situation. [Jason] entertains me to no end."

Considering how much character means to him, what would Lee's dream role be? "The guy I play in Cameron Crowe's next movie."  The film, which just finished a six-month shoot, is about a 1970s rock band. Lee plays the lead singer. What about this character was compelling? "His passion for what he did. He put music ahead of everything else in his life. He's a character with a lot of insecurities, and a lot of strengths."

To get ready for this part, Lee "watched documentaries, read old issues of Rolling Stone and talked to Peter Frampton [who served as creative consultant]. That was kind of standard research." But once again, Lee mainly relied on his instincts: "Onstage, I just got into the music. It wasn't about blocking things out so much as it was finding myself through the music."

All this talk of internal preparation may make Lee seem like a pretty heady guy and indeed, that's the dichotomy of him. It's the intensity lurking below the just-like-any-other-guy façade that makes Jason Lee an interesting variable on any screen. "I was just a professional skateboarder, who got in for an audition for a movie called Mallrats," he said matter of factly. And the rest, as they say, is poised to be history.