It’s a good time to be Austin Stowell. Last year he co-starred in the Oscar-winning drama Whiplash, and this year he’s co-starring in the TV series Public Morals and a new Steven Spielberg drama, Bridge of Spies. It certainly seems like things are looking up for the 30-year-old actor, but to hear him tell it, this sequence of events has as much to do with luck as it does with anything else.
We spoke on the phone with Stowell a few days before the release of Bridge of Spies, in which he plays American pilot Francis Gary Powers, who was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960 whilst taking photographs for the CIA. The film tells the story of attorney James B. Donovan, who orchestrated the prisoner exchange which ultimately brought Powers home. We spoke about working with Steven Spielberg, falling from the air while strapped to a destroyed airplane, and more.
Related: ‘Bridge of Spies’ Review | Exchange You Can Believe In
Crave: Can you tell me how you got a role in a Steven Spielberg movie? How would I go about doing that?
Austin Stowell: [Laughs] Have you ever been struck by lightning?
Not yet!
You just have to keep waiting! [Laughs.] Yeah, it was a lot of luck. It’s a lot of circumstance, being in the right place at the right time with the right character. I can’t do anything but say that I got very lucky. I had the absolute pleasure of being a part of Steven’s show, Public Morals, and when he saw what I was doing for that show he asked if I would be interested in coming over and doing Bridge of Spies with him, and of course you don’t even think twice about it. You just say “Yes.”
Did he tell you about the character he wanted you to play, or did you find out about that later?
I was sent the script and of course, you get your hand on a Coen Bros. script and it’s like a hot potato. You just can’t put it down. You just start burning through the pages. My brother and I read it that night, out loud together, and got to the end of it and of course the smile is a mile wide across my face, thinking “This is the movie that we are going to do, and the story that we are going to tell to the world.” I think what makes Steven so great is that he finds these stories that have somehow gotten kicked to the curb a little bit and swept under the rug, and brings them to life with some of the greatest actors on the planet.
Like Austin Stowell?
Your truly not included. [Laughs.] It’s been a real honor to be a part of it all.
Walt Disney Studios
When you’re reading the script, and you get about halfway through this movie – which is very much about men drinking booze and talking about spies and politics – and then you see that YOUR character has to plummet through the air for about five minutes… can you tell me about that experience? Maybe what it played like in the script, versus what we saw in the film?
It was actually very close to what I read. So often that is not the case but the action of the sequence was actually very close to what you see on the screen, so that was a lot of fun to get there and to not have it be shortened or cut out. Because 70,000 feet is a long way to come down, and when you’re strapped to a plane for 35,000 of those feet… [Laughs]. You can only imagine what Powers was going through. So I’m glad that Steven allowed the audience to go through every anguishing second of that plummet as well. I’m very happy with the way that sequence turned out.
Was it anguish shooting it? Were you up on a wire the whole time, just hoping for the best?
I was, yeah. I was up on a wire for three days. So two wires to the ceiling and then one wire on my back that four stunt guys were pulling on, in order to pull me away from the plane. So we shot it all inverted, because of course with gravity you’ve got to turn everything upside down. We didn’t shoot an actual fall. So when the shot is flipped around it looks like I’m being thrown towards the Earth at a blinding rate.
The other scene I kept thinking about, from your perspective as a character and an actor, is at the end, during this whole spy exchange. You’ve been off being interrogated by the Russians, acting against this completely different cast, and now all of a sudden here you are. You’ve got Tom Hanks there. What’s that experience like, of doing that one bit?
On the plane, you mean?
I guess whichever one filmed first. I was thinking about the scene on the bridge, but maybe the plane filmed first, I don’t know.
Actually that scene on the plane was the very first thing I shot on the movie, the exchange between Tom and I. It started at the end and worked our way backwards, I guess. But to be on that bridge… that’s actually where the [prisoner] exchange occurred. You felt the history. You felt the power of the area and you felt the energy of history there. It made for some incredible shots and a fantastic end to this epic story.
How do you top this? What do you do next?
I’m actually headed on a plane to Vancouver today. Can’t tell you much more than that unfortunately at the moment, but there’s always something coming up around the corner.
It must be exciting, man.
It’s a lot of fun. It’s a lot of fun. I’m having a blast.
Top Photo: Getty Images / FilmMagic
William Bibbiani (everyone calls him ‘Bibbs’) is Crave’s film content editor and critic. You can hear him every week on The B-Movies Podcast and watch him on the weekly YouTube series Most Craved and What the Flick. Follow his rantings on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
