Welcome to the fictional Northwest Washington University, bitch! Benjamin McKenzie, best known for playing Ryan Atwood on The O.C., occasionally pops up as a smarmy forensics student in 88 Minutes, the Seattle-set Al Pacino thriller in theaters this Friday. We caught up with Ben to see if he’d be more generous with his spoken words than Ryan. And he was!

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You filmed 88 Minutes back in 2005, right?
BEN MCKENZIE: Yeah, we filmed it a little while ago. We were shooting The O.C. in L.A., and they were shooting the movie up in Vancouver, but they were on a Wednesday-to-Sunday schedule. So I was able to basically go up on weekends. It was two months of seven-day work weeks. Never worked that hard.

Was it strange going back and forth?
It was very weird. It felt half the time like I was daydreaming, like I wasn’t really working with Al Pacino and it was all in my imagination.

When you found out you were working with him, were you terrified?
Absolutely petrified. I had some time to rehearse with him a little bit before we started shooting, when I first got up there. I was just doing a wardrobe fitting and at the last minute, the director [Jon Avnet] calls me up and says Al wants to rehearse. So it ended up being just me, Al, the director, and the photographer in this huge lecture hall. I was fumbling all my lines, but he was so gracious and nonchalant about it.
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