Letting Them Talk with Will Harris - Ep. 11 - Thomas Jane (The Punisher / Hung / Arrested Development)

This time I'm letting Thomas Jane talk.

The last time I talked to Mr. Jane was in 2011, when I interviewed him for the AV Club’s Random Roles feature, and I won’t lie to you, I was downright giddy when I got word that I’d secured him for an episode of this podcast.

Thomas Jane has been acting in front of the camera since he was 15, and the story about how he got that gig is one that we talk about during the course of our conversation. A lot of people know him as The Punisher, others know him from the HBO series Hung, still more of you may have been traumatized by watching him in Frank Darabont’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Mist. I know I sure was!

The film that brought him onto the podcast today is Frontier Crucible, a western based on the 1961 novel Desert Stake-Out by Harry Whittington. I was able to check the film out in advance of talking to Mr. Jane, and he delivers a tremendous performance, as does the rest of the cast, frankly. If you’re a fan of westerns, I highly recommend it.

Over the course of our interview, we touched on a number of projects from Thomas’s back catalog, from Arrested Development to The Expanse and much more, including what he learned from working with Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman on the same film. I’m not going to say that we tackled everything that I wanted to tackle, nor did we get to many of the things that you probably wanted me to ask him about, but it was a conversation that kept me guessing throughout, and it led me to jump around to match the topics that were coming up, from film and TV to music and comics. I even got a chance to ask him about the best show he ever saw at the 9:30 Club, which… I mean, who else is going to ask him that?

Anyway, I’ll just say this: if we didn’t end up talking about something you were hoping we’d talk about, don’t worry, because he’s already said that he’s up for doing a sequel in the future. Whatever it was, we’ll get to it then.

And with that, it’s time to let Thomas Jane talk.