You can’t make a teen comedy without teens and comedians—luckily, Orange County has both areas covered, boasting a stellar cast filled with comedic legends and bright up-and-comers. And lucky for you, the Crimson got a chance to talk with a few of these stars during a roundtable interview.

Colin Hanks

Q: Were you nervous at all, this being your first lead role?

A: Yeah, there was a little bit of pressure, because if no one feels any sympathy for Shaun [the main character], there’s really not a movie. There’s always pressure whenever you’re doing anything, because you want it to be good, and you want to do the best job you can. And there was a little pressure because I’m in almost every scene of the movie, so that’s a lot of work.

Q: You come from a pretty functional family. How did you manage to create such a dysfunctional family dynamic?

A: You know, I didn’t really have to create it. That came from Jack [Black], Catherine [O’Hara] and John [Lithgow] and all of them, that was their job. My job was coping with it. My whole purpose was to work with what they gave me, with how they interpreted what Mike [White] had written and committed it to flesh and bone, and my job was just to work with that. All I had to do was react to them. So it was actually very simple, and very fun, because each character was so different. It was fun to be able to play with those different kinds of relationships. That’s one of the things that I really liked about the script—all the characters were different, and Shaun had a different way of approaching each one.

Q: How similar was your actual childhood to what you described in the movie?

A: Well, here’s the big difference. I was born in Northern California, which is really almost like a completely different state, in my opinion—completely different weather and all that stuff. But I don’t know if there were a lot of similarities between me and Shaun. Shaun did really good in school—I didn’t do very well in school at all. I was a pretty bad student. And when I went to college, I had no idea what college I wanted to go to, or what I wanted to study. I was just sort of like, “Well, I gotta go somewhere.”

Q: What was it like working with Jack Black?

A: I’m spoiled now. It was so much fun. I’m one of Jack’s biggest fans. I’ve been a huge fan of the [Tenacious] D for years, and God bless him, because I would sing him the D songs back to him, and somehow he didn’t get pissed. [laughter] I think he actually kind of liked it.

Q: How does working with a younger director affect the way things go on set?

A: It was great, because Jake [Kasdan] knows what the kids like. And plus, I had much more in common with him. I’ve known Jake for a while, so it was nice to have a friend back there. There was trust right away, there wasn’t a getting to know you period, and we were just like, “Let’s just do the best job that we can.”

Q: There’s a heavy influence on writing and storytelling in the film. Do you have any plans to get into the writing side of the business?

A: I keep a journal, but I’m really bad at writing. That’s probably not even proper English, so there’s a good example. I look back at some of the entries, and they’re really boring, filled with stuff like, “It was cool!” or “I had a good time!” So I’ll leave that to other people.

Jack Black