Alan Tudyk’s Touch of “Evil”

"Firefly" star Alan Tudyk on the pain of comedy, especially in a horror film like "Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil."

There’s this old line that jazz is knowing where to put the silences between the notes. Is the same thing true for comedy, like knowing where to put the pause, have a blank look or just stare?

I think yes. You don’t feel it as you’re doing it, you don’t [think] “I’m gonna stare… Yeah, this is a good place for silence.” That’s more in the editing room, but it is true because even from the first edit where it’s still very rough around the edges, Tyler and I both had suggestions like, “You can’t get out of that scene before this is said.” There’s a part towards the end where I’m saying, “Dale, you have to go on without me… Go on without me, I’ll be fine.” And we shake hands, but I’m injured — I’m down a couple fingers.

His math skills are impaired now.

Exactly. [laughs] And my subtraction skills have actually improved. … And we shake, and it’s a very serious, sort of heartfelt scene leading up to this, and [Craig] was cutting before [that] — it really needed to hurt. He wasn’t allowing to hurt. It has to hurt me very badly, because you can’t have too much seriousness going on and on. It just doesn’t feel right. We’ve got to be stupid. The only way we can earn that seriousness is… we have to be as dumb as we can. We had that talk right in the beginning, ’cause this [scene] is really heavy, but it can only work in my opinion if it ends with a really silly dumb joke. And let everybody off the hook that, okay, we’re still in the same movie.

A little agony to make it lighter?

Yeah, so we can laugh at the pain that [Tucker] is in.

It’s also a very movie movie. There are tributes to a bunch of “cabin in the woods” films. There are tributes to “Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” When Tyler’s gearing up, there’s a little “Evil Dead” riff in there. Did you watch any films to get in the right frame of mind? Did you go back to classics of the crazed backwoods killer subgenre?

I knew all the classics. I didn’t go back on those. But I went to look at some new ones. “Wrong Turn” is definitely what [“Tucker & Dale vs. Evil”] is sort of — a reverse of “Wrong Turn.” So I watched “Wrong Turn,” “Wrong Turn 2,” and all of these movies — and I got through about four of them and then I couldn’t do it anymore. I realized “I’m watching the wrong movies. I’m not supposed to be watching these. These are for the college kids to watch. [Tucker is] a good ol’ boy who doesn’t have a view of hillbillies in that way.”

You should be researching by watching a movie about happy, overall-clad people who love PBR and fishing.

Yeah, just watch the Fishing Channel. Shop for some new lures, just crack a beer and kick back. Watch a game on TV. And I was amazed at how many of these movies deal with [how] college kids go someplace where hillbillies will kill them, eat them, rape them. I’m sure there’s got to be some [reason], if you’re a psychologist. There’s a reason behind the popularity of this because it’s somehow our nature of being wild and crazy with no rules versus rules, but it blew me away how many there were.

So you imagine some German academic going, “The fear of the urban civilized human against the rural outsider.”

Exactly. [comedic German accent:] “Ze raw animal …”

Earlier, I overheard you mentioning that you were wearing your Sundance look, which was a hat and sunglasses inside. It’s an easy cliché to mock, but at this point, has Sundance become a thing unto itself where you know what to do when you come here?

I guess so. I’ve never been. It’s my first time. And I’m not wrong about what my idea of the cliché is, but, yeah, it is what it is. Unfortunately, I think one of the great things about Sundance is all the movies you can get to see, but we don’t get to see any of them, so I just get to do the stereotypical “Walk around in my L.A. wear, and go to gifting suites and get a bunch of things.”

It’s like being told you’re being invited to an amazing buffet but then being told, ‘Well, you’re one of the dishes.”

[Laughs] Yes. I guess so.

In a creepy…

In a creepy way. I was thinking of the buffet of gifts, so if the buffet is the food of the films, then definitely we’re a meal.

“Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil” does not yet have U.S. distribution.

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