You’ve seen plenty of movies about gambling.
But “Mississippi Grind,” opening Friday, is a truly fantastic one, featuring incredible performances by Ryan Reynolds and Ben Mendelsohn as gamblers who team up and drive to a high-stakes game in New Orleans. I talked to some of the stars, as well as the filmmakers, on the red carpet before the film’s Sundance premiere in January.
The worst poker tell from Ryan Reynolds/Ben Mendelsohn:
BM: That’s sort of like [grimaces].
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RR: Or when you’re looking at your cards and you’re like, “[F***!]” That’s a tell.
Reynolds during the post-movie Q&A:
I always think chemistry is sort like a double rainbow, just something that kinda happens. You can’t really make it happen. Except with chemistry you’re usually a little less stoned.
I’ve been on sets where you don’t have that, and it’s [bleepin’] bad. But thankfully we had it from the second we met.
Analeigh Tipton, who plays a prostitute in the film, on lucky charms:
“I used to believe in lucky charms more until I kept forgetting them at home and realized that it was terrible to put luck into any object. I was a figure skater; I had skate guards, and so I would have lucky guards. It was really ridiculous.”
Writers/directors Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden (“Half Nelson”):
Looking at a theme in some of your films, what do you like about someone being taken under someone’s wing, who’s passing on their knowledge?
AB: It’s an interesting way to put it. I think that we think about it as friendship. And in some ways both of our characters are taking each other under their wings. I don’t know what draws us to stories about friendship so much, but it seems like for us particularly with this movie watching two strangers develop a bond and develop a friendship amidst the tensions of the highs and the lows of gambling was really interesting to us.
Who’s the more intense poker player between the two of you–who’s deadlier at the table?
RF: I think it started with Anna, and the more we did it, it was me. Anna has no poker face. Look at this.
AB: No poker face.
What does that look like?
AB: [Laughs]
RF: That’s it:“Oh my God, look at this hand!”
So you passed it to him then, the poker fixation?
AB: He just needed to figure out numbers, additions.
RF: Math, basic math. I was learning math on this movie as well.
Is that why “Half Nelson” felt like an important project to go back to school?
RF: Yeah. And an excuse to smoke crack.
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Co-star Robin Weigert, who you may know from “Chicago Fire” and “Chicago P.D.”:
Do you believe in lucky charms?
“No, but I do believe a little bit in mental telepathy. I think when you’re at a card table you sometimes are blessed with the ability to actually mind-read. You have to really be riding a great wave. But I sometimes feel like it’s not just playing the cards, it’s not just playing the odds and it’s not just reading tells. You actually feel the cards the other person’s holding.”
Do you have to be born with that or can you learn how?
“I play enough cards to know that it’s happened to me a time or two. I’m not saying it has happened every time. There was a time when I was playing with my brother and family; of course I know those guys really well, but I had them put their cards down at the end of the hand and I named everybody’s hand. I said you’ve got queen-ace off-suit, and so on. I went on; we were playing no-limit hold ‘em. It doesn’t always work like that, but you can sometimes absolutely feel what people are carrying. So there’s something magical about it, and I think that’s part of what keeps people coming back for more. There’s this X factor, and poker pros will tell you this too where something’s going on that nobody at the table understands but that person or that person or that person has just got it.”
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