TELLER: Sutter is the feel-good party guy. Whenever he’s around, everybody’s having a good time. He’ll be the guy to get everybody to jump into the pool, and he’s the life of the party. He always has a drink in his hand, and a smile on his face.

BROWN: I think it took me a good half an hour to realize that he was always drinking.LARSON: I think that’s awesome.TELLER: It’s very subtle.LARSON: In the script, you know it. It’s very black and white. But seeing it for the first time, I was so impressed and so excited about it, because that’s the way it is in real life. You’re not going to be sitting there going, “Hey everybody, I’ve got this Big Gulp of alcohol!” [laughs]TELLER: [earnestly] “There’s whiskey in there!”LARSON: I loved it. There are also scenes that Shai is drunk in, but you don’t really allude to it. But you can just tell slightly. She’s a little bit more relaxed.TELLER: In the playground. “You didn’t mean what you said about the prom” or “you know.” [drags out words] We’re not trying to fix it.LARSON: I think it’s great. She’s unbiased.BROWN: Do you find it hard to get out of character when you audition the day after another movie? Were you still in Footloose mode, Miles?TELLER: Yeah, because that was a three-month thing. I was playing a redneck, but with a studio system, so a little bigger. I didn’t have the time to prepare for it, so it was not the best time. But a lot of times in this business, I’ve gotten a call and they’ll say, “Here’s the pages, can you be there in three hours.” And you just say, “Whatever, screw it,” and you do it, and you feel better that you at least tried. I would feel bad if I let my own fear of failure get in the way of putting something out there. You’ve got to throw something out there. Maybe at least it’ll get you a callback, and you take more time with the callback, and by the time of the director’s session, you feel like you’re in a pretty good place.LARSON: It’s like a muscle, too.TELLER: And I have big muscles. The biggest muscles.LARSON: You do. There was a movie I did right afterwards where I was playing a really dark character, and I thought that the whole time I was doing a really good job of keeping myself separate, but you can’t help but take on—my character has this thing where she scratches her thumb all the time, and I still do it. If you’re in somebody’s head for 12 hours a day for four weeks, it’s like your brain actually wires itself to start thinking that way. It makes it so much easier as you’re playing this character more and being on set more, and it becomes fun because it’s less about getting in this mindset and just existing within it. You have to go on a trip or make sure your family is close by. Take something like that, a smelling salt sort of thing, to get you back.TELLER: I want go to Ibiza.LARSON: That sounds good. Let’s go to Germany.TELLER: Let’s go wherever. I went to China.LARSON: Oh, I know you went to China. [laughs]BROWN: Do people ever try to make you super uncomfortable at auditions, to see how you react?LARSON: Yeah, there’s one person. I’m not gonna say who it is.TELLER: Scare tactics, or something?LARSON: Yeah. There’s one person who thinks it’s fun to mess with actors.TELLER: I haven’t been manipulated all that much.BROWN: Apart from during photo shoots?TELLER: Oh yeah, photo shoots are so weird. I hate them.BROWN: Parts of the movie were very painful, because they remind you of your first boyfriend, girlfriend, etc., and how vulnerable you can be the first time you really like someone, before you realize it’s such a bad idea.LARSON: The hardest part [about] playing someone who is four years younger than myself, I have all this knowledge now. But at that period of time I was probably thinking in a very similar way. The hardest thing as the kind of puppet master of this character, is not influencing what you want this character to do, but doing what they would do, which is sometimes painful as the vessel. Like the scene in the attic, ended up getting way darker and way more upsetting than I had ever anticipated.TELLER: For me, I still have feelings for all of my ex-girlfriends. In different parts of my life, I would miss that person. There’s something that drew me to that person, and I shared something with them. It was tough knowing that this character was falling in love with me, and knowing that I was going to let her down. I’ve had certain moments in my life where I’ve felt really, really bad about shit I’ve done to an ex-girlfriend. I’ve written long letters, and you almost want them to say it’s okay, and sometimes they don’t say it. Sometimes they say, “I never want to talk you again.” That’s tough to deal with.BROWN: What would you do if you were Aimee?TELLER: Eat bugs.LARSON: [laughs] I don’t know. One of the first meetings after I was cast, I sat down with James, and we discussed the parts of the script that interested us and the themes we liked. One of the questions we always kept going back to is: Can people change? When is that moment for them? I think that everybody goes out on a limb at some point in this film hoping. [to Teller] You hope that your father can change. I hope that you can change.TELLER: [laughs] But they just don’t.LARSON: At the end of the film, whether or not you guys end up together, you do become more of a man. Maybe you’re not perfect, but you’re willing to actually look at yourself and take some kind of accountability. That’s a change. It might not mean that you can turn everything around, but I think there’s something incredibly hopeful about that.TELLER: If I was Aimee, I don’t know. All Sutter needs is a crack, and he can charm his way in there.