Prepare For The Unexpected

“You come in prepared and with a point of view, but mostly with an openness to play with your partners.”

Max Casella, who plays A&R guy Julie Silver on HBO’s Vinyl, explains his process of getting into a character.

“You don’t come in with a preconceived set plan. The worst thing that you can do is to have a plan and try to stick to it, cause other people will come and all of a sudden — they’ve messed up your plan. When you’re home alone and you’re preparing for the scene, you have to be completely open to the unknown of what your friends are going to be doing when you get there, and that’s what’s fun.”

Casella is currently a regular in Vinyl, executive produced by Martin Scorsese, Mick Jagger and Terence Winter.

Set in 1970s New York, the show explores the sex, drugs and shady side of the music business at the dawn of punk, disco, and hip-hop, as seen through the eyes of a record label president, Richie Finestra, played by Bobby Cannavale.

As Julie Silver, the actor says he primarily tapped into his own personal “idiosyncrasies” and read a lot books “filled with colorful characters” that he borrowed from to help shape the character.

“I just created my own backstory based on stories that I read about different people who were in the music business, and how they came to be in A&R. Maybe I fall in love with a particular person I read about, and I would borrow from their story and make it my story,” said Casella about the initial crafting of his character.

However, getting into Julie’s headspace during filming is a process that comes “quite naturally” to the actor, and one that is “always evolving and never ends,” he said.

“I have a sense of who he is from the scene that I’m preparing. What’s going on in the scene and how is Julie going to approach that,” Casella explained.

“I feel like every character that I play is a version of myself. I put the clothes on, the shirt and the bellbottoms and the big belt, and I have my hair all out and the beard — and I just become. I start playing make believe, and it’s something that I’ve done since I was a little boy. It comes quite naturally.”

Only a few days after its premiere back in February, and despite lackluster ratings for the first episode, HBO renewed Vinyl for a second season. The show boasts wild characters inspired by real-life music players, some of which helped Casella with “the problem of figuring out who Julie Silver is, and creating a history of Julie,” he said, noting the importance of crafting “a musical orientation of Julie based on my own personal tastes in music, and my own various idiosyncrasies.”

Born in the US capital, Casella revealed that how he approaches each scene on Vinyl “really all comes down to, what’s Bobby going to do?”

Casella and Cannavale previously collaborated on Boardwalk Empire and Blue Jasmine. Additional series regulars include Olivia Wilde, Ray Romano, and James Jagger. When it comes to what makes for an enriching collaboration on Vinyl, Casella lives by an “expect the unexpected” attitude.

Casella first became widely known to audiences with his portrayal of Vinnie Delpino on the hit series Doogie Howser, M.D, and since then, his “natural” knack for acting has seen his career span two decades, including prominent stage work and small screen credits such as The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire, and dynamic big screen performances in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, the Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis, Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly, and Spike Lee’s Oldboy.

When asked to reflect on his impressive body or work, Casella said he’s “proud of different things for different reasons,” but he can’t put one specific project above another. Although, he is quite honored by the opportunity to have worked with the Coen Brothers and Woody Allen.

“Some things I’m more proud of than others, but thankfully, I have a lot more good things than bad things on my resume. I’m very proud of Inside Llewyn Davis and Blue Jasmine because I love those two filmmakers, and I loved working with them.”

So what common qualities in cinema today does a veteran like Casella dislike and try to rebel against in his work?

“I definitely get annoyed when I go to the movies and watch television, and I see that there is so much cynical business motivating the artist choices. I don’t like going to the movies and it’s the same movie dressed up as a different movie, telling me how I have see this new movie.

"I think there’s way too many superheroes movies. I don’t like to be watching a show, say about hospitals, and people who do open heart surgery look like fashion models. I don’t like that kind of artifice. Which is there not by accident. It’s there because people must like looking at pretty people and not thinking about anything. When I go to the emergency room, nobody looks like that. Nobody talks that way. That stuff really bugs me.

"When a show really gets it right, that’s special.”

Vinyl airs Sundays at 9pm on HBO.