- The black-and-white movie Divinity features Stephen Dorff.
- Divinity only slows down physical ageing, not the mind.
- Stephen discloses that the writer-director created a character just for Dorff.
Eddie Alcazar, the writer-director of this year’s sci-fi thriller Divinity, returned to the Sundance Film Festival using the hybrid live-action and stop-motion technique he refers to as “meta-scope.” The Stephen Dorff-starring black-and-white movie takes place in an unsettling world where people are addicted to a substance called Divinity. This substance was developed by the ambitious scientist Sterling Pierce (Scott Bakula), who dedicated his life to discovering the mysteries of immortality. Since the middle of the 1980s, Dorff, who portrays Sterling’s son Jaxxon, has established a career in Hollywood, appearing in a variety of genres, from pre-MCU blockbusters like 1998’s Blade to lesser-known classics like Entropy.
Although Divinity only slows down physical ageing, not the mind’s, the serum, now controlled and produced by Sterling’s son Jaxxon Pierce, is in high demand in this barren world. There are those who, by whatever means necessary, would like to see the amazing elixir eliminated because of its side effects. The cast of Divinity also features Bella Thorne, Moises Arias, Karrueche Tran, and Jason Genao in addition to Dorff and Bakula.
Dorff visited the Collider Studio in Park City before Divinity’s Sundance premiere, where he spoke with Collider’s Steve Weintraub. In the conversation, Dorff discusses how he first met Eddie Alcazar and discloses that the writer-director created a character just for Dorff that he later used as the basis for Divinity. He talks about the peculiar project, comparing it to Citizen Kane and A Clockwork Orange, and describes it as “sci-fi meets noir, meets a mental breakdown through an IV.” He also explains some of the difficulties the part brought him. In addition, Dorff discusses a couple of his earlier performances, including those from Roseanne and Diff’rent Strokes, and he talks about working again with John Goodman on The Righteous Gemstones.
Interviewee asks: I have a ton of questions for you, we’re gonna talk about Divinity in a second, but you have been one of the few that has been working for a long time as an actor, but when I was looking at the always-accurate IMDB, I noticed that when you were a kid, you did an episode of Diff’rent Strokes and I have to know, do you even remember being on that?
Stephen Dorff: Yeah, it was weird, when I was a kid and I was in school, this agent– you know, I started doing commercials, auditioning, and then I started getting auditions for all these TV shows that I grew up watching, you know, like Diff’rent Strokes, Gary Coleman, I was like, “What?” So I auditioned for it, got it, and then I’m on the set, but he’s not in it because Gary Coleman was sick at that time dealing with something. So the red-headed kid was the star kid, and so I was a Cub Scout in that.
I love that. I like that I got to work with Michael J. Fox, do an episode of Family Ties when I was young, Married with Children, Roseanne. And I just finished working with [John] Goodman on [The Righteous Gemstones] with Danny McBride, and we’ve been working on that new season, and [to] Goodman, I said, “Do you remember I was Becky’s boyfriend and you sat me down on the couch and told me what time to bring her home?” And he’s like, “I remember, Stephen,” and we talked about it, and then we watched the scene. It was on YouTube and John made me watch it, it was so funny.
Yeah, I liked doing all those early things because, you know, I was an LA kid, I grew up in the valley. It was a very surreal upbringing because I ended up on the sets of all these fake families that I grew up watching when I’d be sick from school or my favourite TV shows. I never got on the Love Boat though. That was one I would have loved to have been on.
Dorff was asked: So you’re in today at Sundance because you have a film in Sundance called Divinity?
Dorff: Yes.
No one will have seen the film yet who’s watching this, so how have you been describing the film? Because I’ve seen the trailer. I haven’t seen the film yet and the trailer looks really cool and different, and not what people are expecting.
Dorff: Yeah, I mean, jeez, it’s a very strange situation. I’ve made some interesting films before in unorthodox ways and different, off-the-beaten-path. But Eddie was a director that I met through a friend of mine named Danny. He sent me a short, I watched it. It was then in Canne, it was called The Vandal. It was kind of, I thought mind-blowing for a 10-minute short, or however long it was. I was like, “Who is this guy?”
He was further questioned: You’ve done so much work over the years. If someone has never seen anything you’ve done before, what is the first thing, or the second thing, you’d like them watching, and why?
Dorff: I don’t know, maybe start at the beginning. I love The Power of One, my first big entry into film. Obviously, I did The Gate before, so people like [Quentin] Tarantino and all those guys, and Eddie even, and Mike Marino, the best makeup man, and all my friends that are, you know, horror buffs will say, “The Gate was your first movie!” And I’ll be like, “I know, but I was 16– I was 17.” The Power of One was really my first movie, in my mind, as knowing what I was doing as an actor, travelling, getting out of LA, and not being a chubby little kid screaming, which is easy to do, was always easy for me to do.
So for me, I guess start at the beginning and then maybe, I don’t know, go from The Power of One and then watch Somewhere, and then go watch True Detective, and then go watch, I don’t know, check out Blade, if you haven’t seen it. Or go see I Shot Andy Warhol or Entropy, and find the movies that nobody knows.
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