Pop-Culturalist.com

Graham Skipper can do it all. He’s an actor, writer, and director, and he’s best known for projects like Almost Human, Beyond the Gates, The Mind’s Eye, Bliss, and Re-Animator: The Musical. Currently, he can be seen starring in the horror-comedy Dementia Part II. Pop Culturalist was lucky enough to chat with Graham about the role!

PC: Tell us about Dementia Part II and your character in the film.
Graham: Dementia Part II originated as a dare that took place at the Cinepocalypse Film Festival with filmmakers Matt Mercer and Mike Testin. They were dared to make a movie from script to screen in thirty days. If you’re not familiar with the filmmaking process, that’s insanely fast. It’s stupidly fast.

I got a call one day from my buddy Matt (Mike is also a friend). He said, “Hey, Mike and I are making this movie. We’ve got to shoot it in four days. Do you want to be a character in it and be a real sweaty sleazeball?” I said, “Sounds great.” I showed up and they gave me like thirteen or sixteen pages of script. I said, “Oh, so what are we starting with? What are we doing tomorrow?” He said, “No, no, this is all for the first half of today.” [laughs] We dove right into it and it was great. It was total guerrilla filmmaking. It was amazing.

My character, Reggie, as I previously stated, is a real sweaty sleazeball. My inspiration was the greasiest, worst version of Dennis Franz you can imagine. We were really having fun and enjoying our time. Fortunately, it all worked out.

PC: Like you were saying, you didn’t have a lot of time to shoot. What challenges/freedoms does that provide you as an actor?
Graham: Challenges/freedoms is a great way to put it. We didn’t have a lot of time to play around because you have one or two takes of everything. You don’t have much time to shoot anything. It’s really about making the biggest, boldest choices possible and living with it. That’s it. You’ve just got to make that choice. There’s something really freeing about that, to the point where you’re not overthinking anything. You know that everybody’s on the same page as you tonally in terms of making the biggest choice and rock ‘n’ rolling. Here we go. We’ll get what we get. Matt and Mike are such good directors and editors. We all knew that we were in very safe and capable hands. It ended up turning out gravy.

PC: You’re no stranger to horror-comedy. What is it about these genres that excite you?
Graham: Horror and comedy are very similar. A scare is the same as a joke. It’s about building up tension and then there’s a release with the punchline or the scare. They’re intrinsically linked. For me, horror is a comfort blanket. It always has been. I also greatly appreciate comedy. The beginning of my career was all comedy in New York. I see the craft in both of them and the artistry in both of them. When you’re combining them and doing it well, it’s a sublime feeling of honoring both of these techniques in a way that creates something wholly new and interesting. That’s exciting to me.

PC: PC: What’s that collaboration like working with Matt and Mike? How beneficial was it having that prior relationship when you’re working on a project that has a tight deadline?
Graham: Super beneficial. Anytime you’re working with people that either you’ve worked with before or that you’re already friends with, you have a shorthand. That was crucial in creating this movie. If you were bringing in somebody random that you’d never met before, it wouldn’t work. Matt and Mike have these relationships with people and that really allowed everyone to have a sense of ease regarding working with them. The two of them worked great together. Mike can make anything look beautiful. I’m evidence of that. [laughs] Matt is really, really good at communicating with actors. The two of them combined—it’s totally easy. You find your team and your crew. All the great directors have done the same thing. They find the right team that they like to work with over and over and over again. The proof is in the pudding.

PC: What do you hope audiences take away after they see it?
Graham: I hope audiences are reminded of an appreciation for silly midnight movies. I remember when I was a kid, I would scour the video store aisles for whatever the most ridiculous-looking horror movie I could find was. My buddies and I would all watch it in my dad’s basement at night and have a great time. We’re living in a time where people are putting a lot of stock into elevated horror stuff things with bigger budgets or things that have more societal stuff to talk about—but I miss the gory, silly midnight stuff that you watch with a bunch of beers with your friends. That’s what Dementia Part II is. That’s part of the reason why I love it so much. It reminds me a lot of early Peter Jackson and I hope that people walk away from it with a drive to explore sillier, darker, and grosser corners of the horror genre. That’s certainly what got me hooked.

To keep up with Graham, follow him on Twitter and Instagram. Dark Star Pictures and Bloody Disgusting will release the midnight horror film Dementia Part II in theaters on May 21, 2021, and on VOD, Digital HD and DVD on June 1, 2021.

Photo Credit: Dark Star Pictures & Bloody Disgusting