Kevin Sorbo Dishes The Dirt

With Herculean candor, the 48-year-old star of a pair of upcoming
Walking Tall video sequels comes clean on life in the Hollywood hunk
lane.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007 at 3:35 PM
By Daniel Robert Epstein

Kevin Sorbo is not one to hold a grudge. Still, he admits he's a
little bitter about the fact that he has received not one single work
call from executive producer Sam Raimi since the end of their very
successful TV series collaboration Hercules. Especially since right
around the end of Xena: Princess Warrior, the companion series also
produced by Raimi, star Lucy Lawless was given a small part in
Spider-Man.

"I think Lucy got a small part in it because she's married to Sam
Raimi's partner, Rob Tapert," Sorbo tells FilmStew. "She started
having an affair with him down in New Zealand. She left her husband
and he left his wife of 15 years. So that's how that whole thing got
together."

"I busted my ass on Hercules and during Season Five, I almost died
doing it," he continues. "I had an aneurism that exploded in my body
that almost killed me. I think I'm a good enough actor that he can put
me in a secondary part in one of his feature films. It would be nice
if he did that."

"I think he's holding a grudge over me. He wanted me to do a movie
back in '96 when I decided to do Kull the Conqueror. He wanted me to
do his movie and quite frankly, the movie was horrible. If the movie
was so great, let me ask you this, how come he never made it with
somebody else?"

The last time Sorbo actually saw Raimi was on the set of the 1999
drama For the Love of the Game, because Sorbo is friends with that
film's star, Kevin Costner. But even then, things were not quite
right.

"I was having lunch in Kevin's camper," Sorbo recalls. "Sam showed up
and of course acted all nice and sweet to me. I think he held
something back on me and it's just weird. It is very infantile from a
guy who's as powerful as he is and as wealthy as he is to. Throw me a
bone. Why not let me do something? I'd love to play a bad man in one
of the Spider-Man things."

"I think I'd be great at it, but what are you going to do?" he
ponders. "It is what it is and it's unfortunate, but people harbor a
lot of resentment and whatever in this business. Jealousy and envy and
everything else."

The aforementioned Tapert offered Sorbo a part in the first of Raimi's
Grudge remakes, but that too moved quickly from a matter of schedule
arranging to what Sorbo sees as another slap in the face.

"I said, 'Let's work out a schedule and see if I can come over and do
it,'" Sorbo remembers. "Then I find out that they want me to come in
and audition for it. It wasn't that big a part, so I thought, 'I'm not
interested.'

"

"Again, I shed blood, sweat, and tears for Hercules," says Sorbo. "I
gave him a successful spin-off in Xena and Young Hercules, and he
says, 'You've got to come in and read for a part that's really like
the seventh lead.' I decided that's just basically saying F-you."

"I think he was mad because I didn't do three more years of Hercules.
I was completely burnt out. They got seven years out of me, so let me
move on to something else. Still to this day I'm grateful for the
series. I have friends that I've held over from that show forever and
I have nothing but great memories of working in New Zealand."

On the day of his interview with FilmStew, Sorbo was also heading off
to a pair of readings for NBC TV pilots. The actor has been offered a
series on the CW, but because it shoots in yet another distant corner
of the Southern Hemisphere (South Africa), he's for the moment hedging
his bets.

"I loved New Zealand, but I'm married now," he explains. "I've got
three small kids and to go all the way to South Africa to shoot a
series is like, 'Ugh!' We'll see. I'm not opposed to television. I
wanted to do more theatrical movies and see what that world brings me
right now. I love to the work, so I'm never going to say no to
anything that looks good to me."

Part of the reason Walking Tall 2: The Payback and Walking Tall 3
looked good to Sorbo is because they offered him the opportunity to
star in something contemporary. But there was also a light bulb that
went off in the businessman part of Sorbo's brain.

"The other part was to develop a relationship with Sony as well,"
Sorbo reveals. "I looked at it as a positive thing in terms of the
business of Hollywood. I'm also a fan of the original movie with Joe
Don Baker, so I got to reprise that role and obviously contemporize it
with a different name since I really don't look like a Buford."

"We had a screening at Sony for the sequel and we had a great
response," he adds. "I was pleasantly surprised. I didn't know what to
expect considering the budget they gave us and the time element that
they restrained us with. I thought it turned out pretty good."

Sorbo's sequel does indeed hew closer to the original Joe Don Baker
installment rather than the more recent remake starring Dwayne "The
Rock" Johnson. And that, confirms Sorbo, was the intention.

"I had talked to Sony before they got The Rock to possibly do that
feature film," he recalls. "The script that I read was closer to this
one than [what] The Rock did. Once The Rock signed on, I'm sure they
just went into a higher action one for the sake of action."

"There was a rumor that Walking Tall 2 was going to get released
theatrically," Sorbo continues. "We knew that probably wouldn't happen
with the low budget they put on it, but that doesn't necessarily mean
they wouldn't have. I always knew it was going to be a straight to DVD
release, but I just thought going back more to the original roots and
with a little more character development, a little more heart and soul
to it, would make it a lot more interesting to do. I carry a stick and
a couple times I got to carry a sawed off shotgun as well."

Sony shot Walking Tall 3 at the same time as 2, and Sorbo says he has
heard rumors that they might want to turn the franchise into a TV
series. As it stands, Walking Tall 2 is the first time the Mound,
Minnesota native has been part of an R-rated flick.

"Kull the Conqueror was supposed to be a really dark X-rated film
almost with the violence and sex," Sorbo interjects. "But they rewrote
the film so drastically, to my disappointment, and made it a PG
because they didn't want to alienate the Hercules audience at the
time. But I was like, 'Who cares? They'll come.'"

With Sony leading a charge on straight-to-DVD name brand films, Sorbo
is all for the revitalization of this age-old trend. Even though, in
the case of the Walking Tall movies, it meant budgets of $2 million
and miniscule, 17-day shoots.

"I thought they should have had four to five million and a month, but
we didn't come close to that," Sorbo bemoans. "My hat is off our
director, Tripp Reed, who just busted his butt. We joined him on some
of our days off just to shoot some second unit things. For what they
gave us, I think he did an amazing job."

"They didn't pay me anything, trust me," he continues. "I made more
money on one episode of Hercules than I made on both of these movies
back to back. For me it was really something contemporary and fun to
do. Considering everything that's going on in the world right now, I
think all of us wish we could just walk down the streets of Baghdad
and make every bad guy in the world out there just disappear. That's
what this guy does."

Sorbo says he is open to the idea of a Walking Tall 4, as long as
there is a decent script and director Reed is brought back to guide
it. In other words, he's looking for a slightly higher level of
commitment on what he saw on one of his most recent TV gigs.

"I went in to do two episodes of The O.C. and I ended up doing seven,"
Sorbo says. "The first day I was there, Peter Gallagher said to me,
'By the way, we're going to get cancelled. We're done.' But Peter
said, 'Just don't say anything.'"

"But you could tell they were done from the lack of care on the set by
everybody," he adds. "It just seemed like everyone was going through
the motions. But I still had a good time."

And for all those would-be action stars out there, what advice does
Sorbo have for them about Hollywood?

"I tell them to run for the hills," he insists. "I tell them don't
get involved in this business. It's insane. Once Hercules hit the
airwaves, I had everything from a seventh cousin to people who just
knew someone in my family asking for advice on being an actor."

"I'm like, 'Geez, nobody really showed me the ropes,'" Sorbo
continues. "I just went out there and got myself beat up and you learn
that way. I think you've got to really want it and stick with it,
because chances are you're not going to make it."