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'Be willing to look stupid,' Anthony Mackie, who plays Lincoln's best friend in the film, warns.
By Kevin P. Sullivan
Benjamin Walker in "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter"
Photo:
Working with a director like Timur Bekmambetov guarantees a few things. You'll probably take part in some insane action sequences. And there will definitely be slow-motion. When MTV News sat down with Benjamin Walker and Anthony Mackie, from Bekmambetov's latest film, "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter," they shared some helpful hints about how to properly act in super-slo-mo. "Don't think about it," Walker said right off the bat. He probably had the most to do at the slow speed as our 16th president and first commander in vampire slaying, Abraham Lincoln. But it's never that simple, as Mackie was able to attest. "Be willing to look stupid," he warned. The final sequence of the film finds Abe and his best friend, Will Johnson (Mackie), atop a locomotive, riding along a burning bridge. It required a lot of slow-motion running and jumping. Mackie couldn't help but exaggerate his movement as he leapt from car to car. "There's that whole sequence where we're jumping from one car to the other when the bridge is burning up, and I literally couldn't stop doing the 'swim' move when I was jumping. So Timur was like, 'Don't do the swim move,' and I was like, 'Sh--,' " he said. "So we're on the train, and he's like, 'Don't think about it,' and I'm like, 'All right, all right, all right.' Action, jump, swim. In order not to do the swim move, I do a shot-put move. Needless to say, I'm glad it looked all right in the movie, because I thought I was going to look like an idiot." Similarly, during something as simple as a ballroom-dancing scene, Walker couldn't help act out the slo-mo. "When we were shooting the ballroom scene, it was in slow motion," he said. "I knew it in my mind, so I start kind of slowing down. He goes, 'No, stop. We'll slow it down later.' " But if it came down to it, Mackie had one big piece of advice. "It's all about your face," he said. "They always say, 'Be careful about your face.' " Check out everything we've got on "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter." For breaking news, celebrity columns, humor and more — updated around the clock — visit MTVMoviesBlog.com.
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