The last time we spoke to you about Jimmy was to tell you that James Stewart‘s daughter gave her blessing to KJ Apa‘s performance after watching him on set, adding that she could not imagine a better choice. That means the actor did a superb job in the film directed by Aaron Burns, and so it feels odd to learn that Archie Andrews from Riverdale initially felt scared and not up to the part. In a long interview with Variety, the actor explained that the first thing he did was rewatch It’s a Wonderful Life, the perhaps most famous film from the star of The Rear Window. The viewing, however, made him waver:
Watching the film, I thought: how am I going to pull this off? I don’t resemble him at all, my voice is different from his and I’m not as tall as him, but by the end of the film I told myself: “I have to do it.”
Jimmy sheds light on the professional ascent of James Stewart and his participation in World War II. After winning the Oscar for Best Actor for The Philadelphia Story in 1941, he decided to enlist. Being quite famous, he could have found a way to avoid combat, but he chose to fulfill his duty as an American citizen and took part in around twenty missions in Europe, attaining the rank of Colonel. When he returned to Hollywood, it seemed the world had forgotten him. At that point the actor considered going back to Indiana, Pennsylvania, to work in his father’s shop, but Frank Capra persuaded him to play John Bailey in the holiday classic of 1946:
Frank Capra handed him the script. Jimmy was going through something very similar to what John Bailey experiences in the film, and I believe It’s a Wonderful Life was a kind of psychoanalytic therapy that allowed him not to end his career. His daughter Kelly told me that, when he returned from the war, he didn’t know whether to call himself a retired pilot or a retired actor. He didn’t know what to do; he felt lost.
Born and raised in Australia, KG Apa did not have a long familiarity with James Stewart or with Hollywood’s Golden Age, and the biggest challenge was to imitate the actor’s voice. Helped by dialect coach Eliza Simpson, APA carried out a meticulous job:
I watched all of his films, listening to him and listening again. When you reach that point, you simply dedicate a lot of time to listening and then repeating, listening and repeating, listening and repeating (…) I remained in a kind of limbo throughout the entire preparation. I didn’t speak to anyone. I was terrified and I only confronted Eliza.
KJ Apa finally explained what he hopes the audience will take away about James Stewart by watching Jimmy:
I would like people to feel the same emotions I felt when I read the screenplay, namely that it seems impossible to believe that such an important actor served for more than twenty years as a bomber pilot and then came back to appear in more than 50 films. I hope the audience understands that what James Stewart did, he did for his country.
Jimmy will arrive in U.S. theaters on November 6, and the cast also includes Neal McDonough, Christopher McDonald, Rob Riggle, Jason Alexander, Max Casella, Sarah Drew, Jen Lilley and Jemma Donovan, the latter in the role of Ginger Rogers.
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