What comes to mind when you think about electronic dance music (EDM)? Is it Kyle MacLachlan? Probably not, but it turns out Maclachlan knows his way around the genre pretty well thanks to his role as Horan in the movie Confess, Fletch.
The film, which stars Jon Hamm as the titular character, features MacLachlan as the movie’s villain. One of MacLachlan’s characteristics is his specific taste in EDM music and a penchant for dancing. In an interview with Screenrant, he revealed that he absolutely had no idea about the genre.
“Well, it was interesting, because it initially said, ‘EDM,’ and I didn’t know what that meant when I first started out, so I was like, ‘Okay.’ And then they said, ‘It’s electronic dance music,’ and I said, ‘Oh, okay, great. I do love some of that. I like electronica a little bit.’ So then [Director Greg Mottola] said, ‘Well, why don’t you bring me some suggestions of music that you like.'”
That’s when the floodgates opened and MacLachlan had this epiphany about his character and the way he listens to music.
“So I started listening to EDM and I don’t even remember the name of the bands, but I was all over the place. I wanted something that was kind of, I guess the rationale for it was here’s a guy who’s very, very caught up in his head and plotting and planning, and the EDM is an opportunity for him to sort of forget about all that. It’s basically just like playing a video game, it’s his equivalent to a video game, so you just go mindless for a while and just do this crazy thing.”
The actor went on to explain his approach to the character’s love of the music was two-pronged, because it’s “it’s practical in his mind,” and “it’s very good exercise.” Also, it adds a European flair to the character, he said, “like he spends time somewhere in some small German community dancing around with other strange people all wearing various types of clothing.”
For MacLachlan, researching a character and finding out what works in the context of the role is all in a day’s work.
“… [The] research part of it was fun, and it was really more about finding where that quirk, that addition to the character, making it part of the character, not just something that you laid on, like, ‘Oh, here’s three weird things that this guy is going to do.’ They all had to make sense within the character, so we found a rationale for it.”
You can watch Confess, Fletch in certain cities and on streaming services.
