Statham and Ramirez in Crank
Efran Ramirez on Crank
“I will tell you, whether it’s action, comedy, drama, it’s all character,” said Ramirez. “I don’t smoke but my character smokes. And I told the director, ‘You know what guys? I’ve got to be smoking Marlboro Reds.’ And the first day, you’re doing take after take, I had to smoke about eight, nine cigarettes. One time they called action and I was like, ‘Hold on guys, wait.’ I threw up all my chicken tacos. The director’s like, ‘Welcome to Crank.’ It was so intense because there’s so much that’s going on. It’s like a culmination of I would say Pulp Fiction meets Mad Max, especially with the rhythm, the style and the way the director is directing it.”
Kaylo couldn’t be further away from Napoleon Dynamite’s Pedro Sanchez, and it wasn’t even the role Ramirez originally read for. “When I went into the office to meet up with them, they didn’t have sides for Kaylo. They had sides for another character named Orlando who’s African-American, the leader of a motorcycle gang. So I go in and I’ve got like 10 pages. I’m like, ‘All right, guys. I’m African American, the leader of a motorcycle gang, sure, I’ll do it.’ And they look at me like ‘Okay, let’s read it, sure.’ So after we did the entire scene, they’re going, ‘You know what? You might be right for this other character.’ Sure, what is it? ‘He’s a transvestite.’ Sure, why not? Bring it on. They go, ‘Do you need time?’ I go, ‘No guys, right now, just tell me exactly the circumstances what’s going on, what the character’s about.’ So they quickly explain it to me and I said, ‘All right, fine, great.’ We end up doing the scene and everybody was quiet. When you have those quiet moments, you go, ‘Okay, I either was great or they think I’m completely weird.’ I’m like, ‘All right, thank you very much, guys, good night.’ So about two weeks later, they end up calling my agent, my manager and the whole team. They say, ‘Well, we want to offer him the role of Kaylo’ and I thought ‘All right, cool, let me get the script.’ But the things that happen with my character throughout the entire script, I went, ‘Oh my God.’ And just the script itself and how riveting it is, full of adrenaline, my gosh. I’m excited for it to come out in theaters so people can be holding onto their seats.”
To come up with the character, Ramirez tapped various resources. “I would actually go to a bunch of gay clubs in Los Angeles, one of them called The Abby. And I was looking for the character and could not find them. And I work as a DJ all around the world, celebrity DJs. And I actually got offered to work as a DJ at a strip club in Detroit. So I’m like, ‘Sure, I’ll take it’ and when I was DJing, there was a girl named Danielle. I don't think that’s her real name, but she was so erotic, so elegant and so beautiful. And I said, ‘Well, let me emulate her.’ I sat, had coffee with her, we talked. I didn’t give her bills. And she was telling me that no one knows that she’s actually a stripper. So she has a totally different day life as opposed to her night life. And that’s exactly like Kaylo. In Kaylo’s life, he has two different lives. During the day, no one knows, especially because he lives in the hood, no one knows he likes to dress up as a transvestite with all the women galore and everything. So at night, he likes to go to clubs and he has his happy friends. But the thing about it is we all know that when someone lives two different lives, they tend to bleed into each other. And that’s what happened in the film with Crank, where Chev Chelios begins to question the fact of how he dresses and his nails and just the way he looks and his manner of behavior. I think that’s where the comedy lies because sometimes in action films, everything’s about just the action, the whole drama. That’s fine but as we all know, in drama there’s always comedy and in comedy there’s always drama. As an actor and as an artist, you need to find that and I think that’s important to be told.”
Crank is out in theatres now.
For movie posters, trailer, synopsis and more movie info, go to the Crank
Movie Page.
Stay tuned for updates.
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