“It’s a breath of fresh air,” says Lionel Boyce from a green room in Midtown Manhattan a few days ahead of the release of his new blockbuster movie. The actor has been in the spotlight for years thanks to his Emmy-nominated turn as Marcus in “The Bear,” but he’s now on the promotion trail for one of the year’s most anticipated movies, “Project Hail Mary,” and it’s giving him a moment to reflect on his path so far.
“I’ve had such an interesting career to me, where it started off in a place where I was making things that five people were watching, so you don’t really talk about it,” Boyce says. “And then this show happens, ‘The Bear,’ and then you’re talking about that, and it’s been a few years. So it’s cool to talk about something else that you love, that’s completely different from the other two things.”
In “Project Hail Mary,” Boyce stars alongside Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller and Ken Leung as security guard Officer Carl. Initially the role was quite small, but when Boyce learned from his team who was involved in the movie he was immediately interested, no matter the scale of the role.
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“I was like, ‘I’m a huge fan of everyone. I’m down.’ To me, it’s worth spending…I think originally the role was like for a day or so, so it [would be] cool spending 12 to 14 hours with these people,” he says. “Worst-case scenario, I get to learn, see what a big movie’s like and get the coolest general meeting of all time.”
The opportunity blossomed as directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller kept expanding Carl’s place in the film, to the point where Boyce ended up being on set for nearly a month.
“When they found out I was on board, they were like, ‘OK, we’re going to write a few more scenes,’” he says. “And it was cool because his character did not necessarily exist in the book, so it was free rein of getting to develop it with Phil and Chris and just be like, ‘OK, so this guy Carl, who is he? What does he do? Where does he fit exactly into this world?’”
It also opened the door to some improvisation with Gosling, which ended up making it into the movie.
“Ryan, I feel like his brain’s just constantly going at all times,” Boyce says. “I had all these people around to support me, and it just took on a life of its own. [Carl] was this person where I feel that in the end, they found was a necessary ingredient in this soup that they were making.”
The 34-year-old grew up in Inglewood, Calif., and first became known publicly as a member of the music collective Odd Future with Tyler, the Creator, whom he met senior year of high school in drama class. Growing up, Boyce had been focused on sports, but when he and the rest of Odd Future began making the sketch comedy series “Loiter Squad,” which ran from 2012 to 2014, he suddenly saw the magic of being part of something on screen.
“It’s not that I didn’t want to do it, it just never crossed my mind to do it. It was nowhere in my vicinity,” Boyce says. “And we started making the show and I remember feeling like, ‘Wow, this is cool.’”
The fifth season of “The Bear” will presumably return this summer, but any specifics are being kept from Boyce and the rest of the cast.
“At some point, I think they stopped telling us information. They literally were like, ‘You know what? You guys don’t know how to stop talking,’” he jokes.
He has wrapped his work on the fifth season, and continues to love growing the character of Marcus over the years.
“I always credit Chris [Storer], Joanna [Calo] and all the writers where they’re writing these characters and they’re itching to evolve these people. You’re like not getting someone who’s afraid to push a character in a different direction than they’ve gone in the previous seasons, despite how people feel about the safety of like, ‘Oh, we love this character,’” Boyce says. “It’s a journey of the evolution of a person. And it just keeps adding different dimensions. They find different ways to reveal these characters every year.”
