Your Heart’s Just Bleeding Everywhere: Clifton Collins, Jr. on Jockey | Interviews

I think a lot of that may be attributed, I’m kind of a whore for rehearsals, and all of the exploration. I don’t care if it’s in the budget or not, we do it in secret. I don’t care, I’ll pick you up, who cares, we do FaceTime. I’ll do it by myself. So, every day Molly and or Moises would be in my room at the end of shooting, or even before we shot, and we’d go over the next day’s scenes the night before. And a lot of times I’d ask to go over the future scenes. “Hey, let’s go over the scene because this will shoot on Thursday, and this one shoots next week on Wednesday unless that moves.” But let’s talk about that. Just make sure that we got the flow and things that we’re learning and stuff because Moises would go out and do stuff too. But with Molly and I, we’d sit down, we’d catch up on life and rehearse, and go through dialogue and just openly explore. And at that point, I already had so many through lines. To be able to throw the ball with Molly is just a gift. One longs to work with actresses like that. She’s magical. Literally, when they call action, you just look into her eyes, you’re just taken. She just has you.

I get a feeling for both of your characters that you are so good in one area of life and not so much in any other area of life. And so tell me a little bit about how you would describe your character.

He’s just doing what he does to get to where he can get to as best as he can in the state that he’s in. Not really paying attention to that state until he’s gotten a choice. 

But I think he loves it.

He does love it. But he’s also playing a hand that he knew he would get, he just wasn’t sure when he was going to get it. And then he gets it at the end. But there’s a great degree of pride in that this kid that I’ve mentored and inspired feels like a son. If I ever had a son, it would have been him. Like my spirit son, or my honorary son, or whatever you want to call it. It’s something to cheer and root for. So, I look forward to that. Who knows, maybe I’ll end up being some kind of horse trainer or an agent or something. I don’t really know. I think at this point he would take a couple days to just kind of lick his wounds. 

He clearly loves that environment. But he clearly loves crossing the finish line. And that’s a hard thing to give up.

But the fuse is lit to his ALS and stuff that’s kicking in. It’s not going to get better; it’s only going to get worse. 

And that’s such a powerful metaphor. For all of us, there’s always a fuse lit. And you always have to make the best of the time that you have. There’s a scene in the film, where you have a very difficult and disappointing conversation with your ex. I would love to hear a little bit about how the two of you prepared for that.

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