I Am The Walrus

Kevin Smith’s Tusk has a premise that is already infamous: Justin Long is taken hostage by creepy Michael Parks, who lovingly yearns to turn him – via some Human Centipede-esque home-butchery – into a monster part-man, part-sea creature. Yet, when Smith approached the comic actor about being involved with his 11th film, he only gave him a “very general” sense of the film. “He never mentioned anything about a walrus,” laughs Long. “He said it’s a dramatic two-hander between these two men, alone in a house together. So that’s how I approached it, all too seriously.”

Long soon found that being a walrus was the defining part to his role. “If it had been any other animal, maybe it wouldn’t have quite so piqued my curiosity; would’ve been just more scary, or horrifying. There’s something about a walrus: they’re absurd, accessibly, weird, scary, friendly. They seem both adorable and terrifying.”

Admitting that the prospect of playing in the film’s more gruesome horror stretches “scared [him] a little bit”, Long threw himself into researching walruses, and trying to mimic their wide vocal range. All that went out the window once he was inside the actual walrus suit. “The whole process took four hours, from putting the make-up on to getting into the suit. I could sit still in there for three or four hours, only because I was losing so many fluids, because I was sweating my ass off in there. But any discomfort, I felt like could only help take me to that dark place. I know it sounds weird to say, playing a walrus, but it took so much out of me physically and emotionally. You know how Will Ferrell has that line in Anchorman: ‘I’m in a glass case of emotion!’? I felt like I was inside a walrus suit of emotion.”

Long’s talking on the phone, on a long-distance car ride from New York to Boston, with the admonishments of his girlfriend, Amanda Seyfried (“You’re talking too loud!”) in the background. Talk turns to the moustache Long sports in the movie, a furry lip-caterpillar that serves as walrus-foreshadowing. The facial hair, Long says, “really could’ve cost me my relationship, because my girlfriend didn’t want to kiss me whilst it was there between us.”

Tusk has just opened in the US, where its box office performance was well below Smith’s expectations. “It was disappointing that more people didn’t see it, but I think of this film as a real, true cult movie,” Long says. “And those movies, when they first come out, they almost never do well. It’s such an odd mix of things that it’s not the easiest sell: you can’t even just call it a horror movie about a madman who turns a guy into a walrus, because it turns into a real comedy. I like the weird turns that it takes, that it doesn’t play by conventional rules of tone. Kevin was stoned out of his mind when he conceived of it, was plenty stoned when he wrote it, and was pretty stoned for the majority of making it. I think, if you understand it through those parameters, then you’ll know how to approach watching this movie.”