Tyson Ritter on ‘Prisoner’s Daughter,’ Sharing Scenes with Brian Cox, and Touring with His Band All-American Rejects:

From director Catherine Hardwicke and screenwriter Mark Bacci, the family drama Prisoner’s Daughter finds Max (Brian Cox) needing to reunite with his estranged daughter Maxine (Kate Beckinsale), in order to reside with her and her son Ezra (Christopher Convery) on compassionate release after 12 years in prison. Diagnosed with terminal cancer has put a ticking clock on their time together, and while he may never fully redeem himself, Max just wants to connect with his grandson and protect his family in the only way that he knows how.

During this 1-on-1 interview with Collider, Tyson Ritter (who plays Tyler, Maxine’s abusive addict ex and Ezra’s father) talked about what made him want to explore this character, that addiction is Tyler’s villain, how he felt about the film’s ending, what it was like to work with Cox after being such a fan of Succession, and why he couldn’t get drawn into the laughs on set. He also talked about his journey from successful rock band frontman to an actor who respects the craft, what it was like to call his hero about a music collaboration, and headlining the Wet Hot All-American Summer tour with his band All-American Rejects.

Collider: You had previously worked with Catherine Hardwicke on Miss You Already. When she calls to offer something like this, are you immediately game and all in? Do you need some convincing? Do you want to read a script? What goes through your head when you get a call from somebody like that?

TYSON RITTER: She called me and was like, “Tyson, we can’t find this guy. I know that you just had a kid. I don’t know if you’d be in. I don’t know if this is something you’d want to take on because it’s a really dark character that has a lot of trouble. We can’t find him, and we’d love for you to come in and read for it.” I was two weeks into my wife having given birth to our son. I was free. I was wide open. There’s something that happens, when you have a child. It was my first. It was our first one that we brought into the world, and I was wide open and receptive to the script. I saw the character. I empathized with him. I saw that he wasn’t just a one-note bully. On the page, he had a lot of the same confrontations, over and over. He was this guy who was pissed off and wanted his son, but what wasn’t on the page was why he wanted his son. And after reading it, I was like, “He loves his son, and he loves her.” When I connected to that, I immediately was like, “Yeah, this is something that I’m into. I’ll come by.” So, I went and read for everybody. They were like, “What is your take?” And I was like, “This guy is the hero of the movie, at least to him.” He’s been abandoned, in my mind. When Kate [Beckinsale]’s character, Maxine, had their son, that was such a full time thing that he didn’t get to catch up with her because he was still struggling with addiction, so he wasn’t the best human. He was struggling, and doing so in real time while half-ass co-parenting. That was too much for Tyler, so he’s imploding in real time, in the film.

Aside from the fact that no one should ever resort to violence, it’s hard to be mad at someone struggling with addiction because they clearly need help. It’s interesting to watch a character like that, who’s supposed to be the villain, when he’s being ruled by his addiction.

RITTER: Addiction is the villain for Tyler. Even if Tyler might come across as the villain in the film, violence is the villain. I don’t wanna give away the ending, but there’s not necessarily a perfect ending in life. I don’t think that film was written to tell you that, as a cautionary tale. We all know that the American family, especially now, post-pandemic, struggles with addiction, struggles with a broken home, struggles with the lessons handed down from generation to generation. This movie isn’t seeking, I don’t think, to break that cycle. It’s seeking to penetrate you with the thought of turning inward. For me, I saw some of my family in this dynamic between Max and Maxine and Tyler and Ezra. That’s what I love about Prisoner’s Daughter. That’s what I loved about the script that Mark Bacci wrote.

The ending of the film is quite a series of events. It’s so interesting when you know, from the beginning, that Brian Cox’s character is terminal because know what his fate will be, but it definitely plays out different than what you expect. What did you think, when you initially read the script? What was your first reaction to that ending? What that always the ending? Did it evolve and change, at all?

RITTER: That was always the ending. When I read it, I was so wrapped up in this story that I didn’t see it coming. There was no telegraphing it for me, on the page, so I lost it. I was like, “What a beautiful thing for Max to do for his family.” It’s also the only thing Max knew to do. This is about the modern American West. I’m not sure if you’ve seen the Richard Avedon series, The American West, but it’s a series of stark black and white portraits of people in the American West in the seventies – the coal miners and the people that were working at diners and just the people that keep the lights on in America. I feel like Max is not the most educated man. Max is not from this aristocratic high society world. So, the only thing he can think to do to save his family is what he does, and what he does is so selfless that it almost makes up for his past behavior, in my mind. I think what Mark Bacci, the writer, was trying to say was, “Well, I can’t fix the past, but I can do this for you.” In terms of what he did for Maxine and Ezra, he did it to protect them in the only way he could. That’s a beautiful sentiment in the movie. When I read that, I was blubbering.

If you’re going to be an actor and do a movie, people will absolutely take you seriously when you’re sharing scenes with Brian Cox. What was it like to work with him? What do you learn from doing scenes with someone like that?

RITTER: It was so surreal. I got this part literally mid-pandemic, or post mid-pandemic, so I had been caged. I had been very removed from the real world and was watching Succession. And also with Agamemnon in Troy and even Super Troopers, this guy was somebody who I had grown up watching. So, at the point in which I got this part, he was literally my favorite actor because of Logan Roy, and to immediately stand in front of him, four weeks after I get the part, that was a master class. I got to watch his ease and the grace he has on set, dropping into a character that is very nuanced and very, very quiet and very subdued, compared to Logan Roy. The first time we were together, he did this beatnik poetry night at Christopher Convery’s house. They had a pool and were hosting, and we were doing freestyle beatnik poetry. He was there in a black turtleneck with a jazzy little hat on, being cool as a cucumber and just totally a different character, as well. It was fun to just watch his ease, as a performer, knowing that he comes from this wild school of the stage. And Kate invited me over to her house for a game night, before we got to Vegas to shoot. Jamie Foxx and all these crazy people were at her house, and this was right after I got the role, coming out of the pandemic, wearing a mask and making sure I’d been tested before I went to a fucking game night at her house. It was the most surreal entrance back into the outside world after the pandemic. I don’t think I’ll ever get over that experience.

I’m such a fan of Kate Beckinsale’s work. I think she’s such an underrated and underappreciated actress. My first exposure to her work was in Much Ado About Nothing, but for many people it was Underworld, which she’s great in, but it’s a very different type of performance.

RITTER: Especially if anybody’s seen The Last Days of Disco. That’s an insane film with her. The Underworld crowd thinks she’s a leading lady, in that regard, but she’s just a phenomenal actress.

When I spoke to Brian Cox about this film, he told me that it’s important to him to have laughs on set, especially with something as heavy as this is. On the days that you were doing the most intense moments, what was the vibe like? Did he draw you into that?

RITTER: I couldn’t help but notice it, but I did not want to lose my grip on this guy, on my character Tyler. Honestly, the moment I met Brian, I was so in my process, I was like, “I hate Brian Cox. I hate Max.” I had started painting, at that time, and I did this painting of Brian Cox, but it was just a purging. I looked at the piece, and it looked like fucking Hellraiser. I was concentrating all my hatred towards Max, because his character in the film comes back into my ex-wife’s life and is stealing my son. In Tyler’s mind, Max is taking his son away from him. And so, the whole time we were on set, Brian was cracking jokes and being super light, right before we would start rolling, and I would just turn away from it and be like, “Shut the fuck up.” The more I’ve gotten into acting and the more I’ve surrounded to the serious roles that I’ve taken on, the more I realize that it’s professional existing. You’re not telling lies, if you’re doing it right, so to deal with something as heavy as killing someone or having a gun pointed at someone’s head, that’s a traumatic experience that you have to shake off immediately. I understand that process.

When you started down this path, as a kid, of being an artist and a performer, what was the dream? Did you want to be a rock star? Did you want to be a movie star? Were you thinking, “Okay, I’ll try one first, and then I’ll try the other”? Once you started doing it, did the reality look anything like you thought the dream would be?

RITTER: When my band first grabbed a little success in the early 2000s, and then kept going, and I got to do things like being in The House Bunny, opposite Emma Stone, and then went on to do episodic television with Parenthood, and then going on to do a series like Preacher, it was just this gambit of roles. It’s just bizarre to have that, with a backdrop of being able to perform songs that people brought close to their hearts and made popular and made a success over the years. When I was a kid, I would always perform for my grandma and she would always say that I was made for the world. Especially now that she’s older and she’s in a nursing home and she struggles with dementia – and I’m not trying to bring you down – seeing her where she’s at now in life, every time I see her, she still echoes that sentiment. She always says how proud she is of me. She calls me Little Elvis. But I never thought it would be this great. I never thought I’d get to do it as long as I have. I never thought I’d get to stare down a cannon like Brian Cox. I absolutely never thought I’d not only get to do it once, but get to keep doing it. The musicians and artists that are in this for the craft and the lifetime of it, like Dwight Yoakam or Tom Waits, that’s the path I’m trying to carve for myself. With the film Prisoner’s Daughter under my belt, I feel taken aback with the fact that this is still happening.

Over the time that you’ve been in a band, you’ve been doing music, and you’ve been out on the road, what are the most important lessons that you’ve learned about yourself, who you are, and what it means to be an artist and performer, that enables you to keep doing it, to the point that you’re going to be touring with All-American Rejects this summer? How do you take those lessons and still keep it interesting and inspiring for you?

RITTER: I think the worst thing you can do to yourself, as an artist, is reduce yourself to something. I struggled with that a lot with my band because I was 17 when I was signed and I had my first hit when I was 17. My career has spanned 20 years now, but I would wanna reduce myself to being just this thing. I’d be like, “Oh, we were a band that had some pop rock hits in the early 2000s.” When I got this role (in Prisoner’s Daughter), I cold called my hero, who’s a guy that was in a really cool band and who’s played with Tom Waits and Ringo Starr, and his name is Mark Everett. He’s the lead singer and frontman of Eels. When I was a kid, I listened to “Novocaine for the Soul” on college radio, and Electro-Shock Blues. When I got signed to DreamWorks, he was on DreamWorks Records. This guy was always out of reach for me. I was in a pop rock band, and he is the coolest man in the world. So, I called him out of the blue. My reductive self thought, “I’m never gonna be able to do a song with a hero that is as unattainable to me as E,” but I called him. I told him that I wrote a song, right after I read the script, and I said, “Mr. E, I just feel something told me to reach out to you because you would be perfect for this song.” It’s this song called “Shotgun Clown,” that’s about Max, Brian Cox’s character, and it’s featured in the film’s end title. I’ve been a performer my whole life, but if you would have told me that I’d be able to work with someone who I think is that cool, when I regarded myself as a lame early 2000s pop rock/emo band, and that someone could see promise in me and validate me by wanting to do something like play with me, and it’s this guy, it’s little moments in life like that, that have kept me not only grounded, but believing that what I have done in life and what I do in life is valid and valuable and matters to someone, even if it doesn’t matter to me, every day. As artists, we struggle with self-doubt. It’s the community of artists that keep each other going, and that’s a beautiful thing.

Plus, when you have a title for a tour that’s as great as Wet Hot All-American Summer, you have to go on tour. That’s an insane title.

RITTER: Yeah, I came up with that. We love that film. I came up with that and was like, “Oh, this was meant to be. We’ve gotta do this every year.” It’s crazy, here I am, 20-some years after our first record, and this is the biggest tour we’ve ever headlined. It’s crazy, the way this shit cycles, and that people still wanna come out and see the rock show.

Prisoner’s Daughter is now playing in theaters.

View this article at Collider.