While you may know the talented actor Jeremy Ray Taylor from It, for his latest role he’s branched out into the world of action comedy with London Calling. Starring opposite Josh Duhamel, the actor plays Julian, the LARPing son of a crime-boss who has to learn how to become a man in a hitman-in-training ride-along. The film is a throwback to the old-school 80s and 90s buddy cop movies, with a ton of cool stunts and surprisingly strong heart.
Over Zoom, Taylor and I about training for the role, career advice he got from Duhamel, restoring a car, filming in South Africa, and more. Read on for the full chat.
The Interview with Jeremy Ray Taylor of London Calling
[Editor’s Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.]
Ayla Ruby: So you’ve done a bunch of really interesting stuff, but this film is quite different. Can you talk a little bit about your path to this role, how you came on board, and what drew you to Julian?
Jeremy Ray Taylor: Yeah, absolutely. Me and Josh both actually had some pretty amazing conversations about what we wanted for the futures of our career. And I think both of us wanted to be taken a little bit more seriously on the action side of things. And I’m trying to kind of grow out of being a child actor, and kind of transition that to being taken a little bit more seriously. Allan [Ungar] reached out to me directly, and as soon as I opened it up, it was absolutely a dream role of mine, this is kind of what I’ve always wanted to do. And it gave me the perfect opportunity to start as a Ben character, and then kind of turn into what I want to turn into. So hopefully it’s a good movie that represents my career. We’ll see.
Ayla Ruby: I kind of love that because a big part of the movie is mentorship, right, in a way. and that you guys had that conversation is fantastic.
Jeremy Ray Taylor: Yeah, absolutely.
Ayla Ruby: Was there any advice that you got as you kind of went into this project as far as steering things along those lines?
Jeremy Ray Taylor: Yeah. I think it’s just create what you wish existed, is kind of our whole thing, it’s like do what you want to do and put it in front of the people and they’ll love it. And I think that, that’s kind of what we did here is break the mold. I mean, Alan took a chance on me, and he didn’t really know that I could do the action thing. And for some reason saw something in me, and took the chance and it worked. So we’re all just kind of creating what we want, dress for the job that you want, if you will.
Ayla Ruby: Perfect. So kind of switching a little bit. There’s this really interesting car in the film, I think it was called a 69 Pontiac Grand Prix, in burnt orange. And I read you’re a car guy.
Jeremy Ray Taylor: Yes. So we are actually taking a 1969 Pontiac Grand Prix and we are completely restoring one. So we took one that had rust holes in it and problems and broken motor and tons of awful things, and we are basically completely restoring it from the ground up and it’s going to be unveiled at the movie premiere in L.A.
Ayla Ruby: Oh, that’s fantastic. I’ll have to look out for that.
Jeremy Ray Taylor: Yeah, absolutely. Please do.
Ayla Ruby: Okay. Besides that, was there anything that was kind of your favorite thing, or something that was really challenging, or interesting to kind of pull off with this movie that challenged you as an actor that was just really fun?
Jeremy Ray Taylor: Yeah, absolutely. I think that the most fun parts for me in general is anything action-oriented. So flipping over the car hood was obviously fun, and shooting the blanks and all that kind of stuff was all super great and the sword fight at the end is awesome. And so anything action-oriented was definitely my favorite. As far as challenges go, I think I have a lot of extensive firearm training in real life, and so Alan had to keep coming back in and telling me not to hold my gun so properly because supposed to not know anything, right? And so I kind of had to untrain myself a little bit and go back from basics, which is very hard with guns because it’s very important that the basics because that’s very safety concern.
And so that was kind of the hardest part. We were in South Africa away from our families, it was during Christmas, so that was obviously tough. But luckily Cape Town is freaking awesome, so that wasn’t a problem at all. So yeah, as far as difficulty goes, this film was easy. I mean, Josh is incredible and our chemistry is real, and there was nothing artificial about that, so it was awesome.
Ayla Ruby: I love that. So you talked about untraining yourself with the guns because there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on in this film. Was there any other kind of training, or stuff that you had to undergo or that you prepared for going into Julian?
Jeremy Ray Taylor: I think that we had to do a lot of training on the sword part of it, because sword fighting in real life too is very different than sword fighting on camera. So we had to learn how to play to the camera and stuff like that. I didn’t know a ton about LARPing before, I think it might be something that I would be interested in real life at some point anyway. So I kind of had to learn more about that realm, and there are a couple callbacks in the film, so old LARPing videos that went viral and stuff like that. So I think it was more just research on exactly what Julian’s hobbies are. But LARPing was really the only one that I didn’t know. So yeah, I mean me and Julian have a lot of parallels, so.
Ayla Ruby: I think the LARPing thing is just a viewer was really cool because it’s like that arc, right? For Julian, he’s being bullied and then he kind of stands up to the bully at the end, which I love because I love story.
Jeremy Ray Taylor: Absolutely. It was a great climax for sure.
Ayla Ruby: So is there anything else we haven’t talked about that you want people to know about this film or anything you’re working on next?
Jeremy Ray Taylor: No, I think I just want people to understand that this is, even though it’s an action comedy, it’s got a lot more than that, and it’s got some real heart. And there is a beautiful underlying story about finding out what being a man really means. And it’s definitely not what Julian’s dad thinks that it means. And I think that Julian and Tommy both kind of figure out what that means, and it’s a beautiful buddy cop, if you will, but it also has a beautiful father-son relationship story as well.
Ayla Ruby: That was fantastic. Thank you so much for chatting. I enjoyed it a ton.
Jeremy Ray Taylor: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.
London Calling is now in theaters.
Learn more about the film at the official website for the title.
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