Benjamin-McKenzie.org is an unofficial, non-profit fansite. The administrators of this website do not know Mr. McKenzie personally and do not have any official affiliation with him or his representatives in any way. All copyright is to the respective owners. No infringement ever intended. Please read our disclaimer and FAQ for further information. Thank you.
Batman: Year One (2011)
Ben as Bruce Wayne/Batman Info |
Photos |
Official Site |
IMDbScooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated (2010)
Ben as Odnarb Info |
Photos |
Official Site |
IMDbThe Glass Menagerie (2010)
Ben as Jim O’Connor Info |
Photos |
Official Site |
Facebook |
Twitter |
YouTubeSouthland (2009-2010)
Ben as Ben Sherman Info |
Photos |
Official SiteSin Bin (2010)
Ben as Michael Info |
Photos |
Official Site |
Blog |
Twitter |
Flickr |
YouTube |
IMDbThe Eight Percent (2009)
Ben as John Keller Info |
Photos |
FacebookJohnny Got His Gun (2008)
Ben as Joe Bonham Info |
Photos |
Official Site |
MySpace Facebook
The next animated feature from DC Entertainment and Warner Premiere will be the adaption of the acclaimed Batman story from Frank Miller, with Bryan Cranston, Ben McKenzie, Eliza Dushku and Katee Sackhoff lending their voices to the main characters.
Batman: Year One — otherwise known simply as Year One — is a 1987 comic book story arc written by Frank Miller and illustrated by David Mazzucchelli. The story finds a young Bruce Wayne who has spent his adolescence and early adulthood traveling the world so he could hone his body and mind into the perfect fighting and investigative machine. But now as he returns to Gotham City, he must find a way to focus his passion and bring justice to his city.
Retracing Batman’s first attempts to fight injustice as a costumed vigilante, we watch as he chooses a guise of a giant bat, creates an early bond with a young Lieutenant James Gordon, inadvertently plays a role in the birth of Catwoman, and helps to bring down a corrupt political system that infests Gotham.
Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston will voice Jim Gordon, while Ben McKenzie is Bruce Wayne/Batman. Dollhouse’s Eliza Dushku will play Catwoman, and fan-favorite actress Katie Sackhoff will voice Detective Sarah Essen, a love interest to Gordon. Alex Rocco has also been announced to be playing crime lord Carmine Falcone.
Bruce Timm previously confirmed that a Catwoman short would be attached to the feature. Batman: Year One is directed by Lauren Montgomery and Sam Liu and scribed by Tab Murphy. The animated film will be rated PG-13 and is due out in this fall but will make it’s world premiere at the San Diego Comic-Con in July.
Bryan Cranston, Ben McKenzie, Eliza Dushku and Katee Sackhoff have been tapped to star as the voices in Batman: Year One, the adaptation of the Frank Miller comic book classic from Warner Premiere, DC Entertainment and Warner Bros. Animation.
Lauren Montgomery and Sam Liu are directing the movie, the 12th entry in the successful series of DC universe animated originals. Tab Murphy wrote the script.
The feature adapts the landmark four-issue story written by Miller and drawn by David Mazzucchelli that first appeared in 1987 on the heels of Miller’s seminal work, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. Those tomes, along with The Watchmen, helped elevate the comics medium, changing the public’s perception of the art form and influencing Hollywood writers and artists to this day.
Actor Ben McKenzie, best known for his TV roles in “The OC” and more recently “Southland” is co-starring in the LA stage production of the Tennessee Williams’ classic “The Glass Menagerie.” Ben stops by “Good Day LA” to talk about the production.
Director Gordon Edelstein’s controversial interpretation of Tennessee Williams’ classic first play, now its West Coast premiere, brilliantly tempers the play’s wistful sentimentality.
Keira Keeley is luminous as Tom’s self-defeating sister Laura, a physical and emotional cripple, lost in her fanciful world of glass figurines. Keeley and a terrific Ben McKenzie, as the cocky yet compassionate gentleman caller Jim O’Connor, create magic in the lengthy candlelit Act 2 scene, which shows us Laura’s finest moment of resiliency prior to a crushing letdown.
As with all fine revivals, helmer Gordon Edelstein’s concept for his splendid, unmissable “The Glass Menagerie” at the Taper doesn’t blast the delicate play off its hinges, but instead brings out all manner of hitherto-unseen insights, stage business and laughs.
gentleman caller Jim isn’t the usual tall smoothie but shorter, pugnacious Ben McKenzie (“Southland”), a dead ringer for Williams’ expressed “type” (including soulmate Frank Merlo) who thereby casts a seductive spell on both Wingfield children.
Bottom Line: A stunning and original take on an American classic.
The Gentleman Caller scene in Act 2 is almost unbearably poignant. Ben McKenzie walks a fine line between genuine sympathy — even affection — for Laura and his brash desire to sell himself to whomever he’s talking to and perhaps improve them in the bargain. After he impulsively kisses Laura, it’s a nice touch to watch him become the shy one as she momentarily feels desired and takes in the experience.
“The Glass Menagerie,” which opened Sunday at the Mark Taper Forum in a production directed by Gordon Edelstein, shouldn’t be missed by any devoted admirers of Williams’ writing. It captures better than any play I know the claustrophobic reality of family life, with its jostling interests, imposing expectations, burdensome concern and overwhelming love.
DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES – As a young writer at MGM in the 1940s, it was Tennessee Williams’ job to knock out scripts he referred to as “celluloid brassieres” for stars like Hollywood’s favorite sweater-girl, Lana Turner, but his heart wasn’t in it. His attention was focused on a much more personal project — an autobiographically inspired script, The Gentleman Caller, based on a short story he’d written years earlier called “Portrait of a Girl in Glass.”
As fate would have it, not only did the studio reject the script, they fired its author for neglecting his primary duty. Dejected, Williams made his way to New Orleans where he sequestered himself in a shabby hotel room and set about transforming The Gentleman Caller into The Glass Menagerie — the play that would launch his career. Since its premiere the day after Christmas in 1944 in Chicago, The Glass Menagerie has established itself as one of America’s most beloved and enduring dramas.
The challenge facing any new production of a classic, however, is to find some intriguing inroad that has not been previously explored. So, when director Gordon Edelstein chose The Glass Menagerie for the 2009 season at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, his goal was to take Williams’ work and infuse it with the distinctly autobiographical quality that went into its creation.
The result was a highly praised rendition that was subsequently presented on Broadway at the Roundabout Theatre and that debuted Sept. 12 at the Mark Taper Forum (it runs through Oct. 17). The show stars three members of the original cast: Judith Ivey as the aging Southern belle, Amanda Wingfield; Patch Darragh as her frustrated son, Tom; and Keira Keeley as her daughter Laura, the painfully shy “Girl in Glass.” The newcomer is Ben McKenzie, best known for his television appearances on “The O.C” and “Southland.” McKenzie plays the crucial role of Jim O’Connor, also identified as “The Gentleman Caller.”
Darragh notes that Edelstein’s approach weaves in some elements that might surprise anyone who has seen The Glass Menagerie in the past 66 years,
“Gordon’s approach to the play opens up the door to embrace the fact that Williams is really writing about himself and his family,” says Darragh (pronounced Dara). “It also brings the character of Williams as a young writer into the play, and that adds a whole new dynamic.”
Toil Over a Typewriter
To establish the interplay between theatrical fiction and literary history, Edelstein sets the opening scene in that bare-bones New Orleans hotel room, where the author (be it Tom or Tennessee Williams) is toiling over a typewriter in an attempt to remember and unravel the sadly tinged events of his past. As the drama unfolds, past and present, the soft glow of memory and the stinging pain of personal suffering cross-fade into one another.
The autobiographical inroad also allows Edelstein to inject an element that is rarely, if ever, explored in productions of The Glass Menagerie — the notion that Tom/Williams is homosexual. It’s a challenging duality and subtext that Darragh says he is still trying to reconcile, and he spent the six months between the Connecticut debut and the Broadway run digging into the playwright’s life.
“I looked at all the interviews,” the 33-year-old Darragh says. “I read all the books. I went to St. Louis [where Williams lived as a young boy and the play is set] and I went to New Orleans. I saw how everything in the play was a reflection of his own life.”
Ironically, Darragh concedes, all that research ended up creating an unintended problem.
“In the New York production I think I got a bit bogged down in trying to encapsulate the entire life of Tennessee Williams into my performance. What I realized is that the play is really a coming-of-age drama for Tom. That’s what I’m trying to focus on in this production.”
The Newcomer
In the gritty TV cop drama “Southland,” Ben McKenzie plays rookie patrolman Ben Sherman. He’s also the new kid on the block in The Glass Menagerie.
Sitting down between rehearsals on a recent weekday, McKenzie admits that taking on the part of The Gentleman Caller required a steep learning curve.
“It’s been a very compressed two-week rehearsal schedule,” says McKenzie, who will celebrate his 32nd birthday on opening night. “But everyone has been great and made me feel welcome.
“The thing that’s scary is that I haven’t been on stage in front of a live audience since 2002,” he adds, a hint of panic creeping into his voice. “I always intended to do more live theater than I have up to this point.”
By far the majority of McKenzie’s acting career has been devoted to television. In 2005 he won the Teen Choice Award for “Breakout Star” for his role as another new kid in town, Ryan Atwood on “The O.C.” Then came his recurring role on “Southland.”
McKenzie sees his role as The Gentleman Caller as fairly straightforward — at least compared to Tom. His character is a man who never lived up to his own expectations.
“He was the king in high school, but things haven’t turned out the way he thought they would,” he says. “He’s hit a rough patch and is working in a shoe factory, which is where he meets Tom. His newfound religion is the self-improvement teaching of Dale Carnegie. But deep down he’s filled with doubts. That’s why he keeps repeating these [self-help] aphorisms over and over.”
When asked how the introduction of Tom’s homosexuality affects his character, McKenzie describes it as a double-edged sword.
“There’s enough going on that the audience is going to be able to see it,” he says. “But you have to remember the play is set in 1938 and Jim is totally oblivious to it. All he sees is a poetic young guy with lots of potential who just isn’t focused. He thinks Tom is a dreamer. The one person he really wants to help is Laura. She’s his willing captive audience. But when he kisses her, he knows it’s a mistake and he wishes he could take it back.”
For McKenzie, who was born in Austin, Texas, and attended the University of Virginia, appearing on the Taper stage has special significance. When he was 12 (or 13, he’s not quite sure) he remembers being in the audience for Center Theatre Group’s presentation of his uncle Richard Schenkkan’s epic drama The Kentucky Cycle.”
“I stayed awake through the entire six hours!” he says proudly. “I thought it was amazing. This is going to be amazing too.”
The Glass Menagerie runs through Oct. 17 at the Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., (213) 628-2772 or centertheatregroup.com.
Batman: Year One (2011)
Southland (2009-2010)
Sin Bin (2010)
The Eight Percent (2009)
Johnny Got His Gun (2008)
