Thomas Lennon’s insane experience working with Terrence Malick

Larry King: You said recently that working on Terrance Malik’s “Knight of Cups” was the single most fun day you’ve ever had. Why?

Tom Lennon: It was completely insane. So I went in the morning of filming that movie, I’d been cast, I did not know why. And the answer was – I found out later it was to play Christian Bale’s friend who’s like a terrible screenwriter and Hollywood type. And then I understood immediately, I was like ‘oh I’m that. I get that. That makes sense.’ But we came in in the morning to shoot that film and I didn’t know who Terrance Malik was, he could have been the gardener, he had a strange hat and kind of dirty, khaki pants on. And he started handing out pieces of paper, he said ‘here’s one for you.’ And I looked at the piece of paper and it said, ‘there’s no such thing as a fireproof wall.’ And I said, ‘is this my line? Do I say this? Or is this my subtext?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know, it’s just something to think about.’ And then we improvised as if we were at a party, walking around in the Hollywood Hills for about 11 hours. We’d never stop. In the final film I say a sentence and a half.

Larry King: Really?

Tom Lennon: I say something along the lines of ‘oh I never go to the Westside. The Pacific Ocean’s freezing and it’s full of sharks,’ or something is what I said. But we filmed for a long, long time and at one point my wife was at home trying to figure out how to adjust the television to record the Olympics or something, and we got into a little bit of a fight the way you sometimes do. You know how these things happen. And Terrance Malik took a camera himself, and he put it on his shoulder, and he filmed a real fight between me and my wife from about this far away. And at first I was sort of offended, I was like ‘this is not appropriate.’ Then I was like welp, it’s the realest thing that happened all day.

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