Cleveland – This early afternoon is different for actor-musician Eugene Hutz, co-star of the film “Everything Is Illuminated.” Normally he begins his day with a few shots of Jagermeister. Today he meets a writer in Cleveland holding a shot glass filled with vodka that he sips on occasionally throughout the interview.
“Like I said, I’m trying something new,” Hutz said with a laugh. “I’m not afraid to try something new.”
Indeed, and it’s that quality that led him to his first significant role in a feature-length movie. He walked into the offices for “Everything Is Illuminated” looking only to get his band’s music on the soundtrack.
Instead Hutz walked away with the part of Alex, a Ukrainian 20-something who, along with his crusty, grumpy grandfather, helps Jonathan (Elijah Wood), an American Jew who returns to his grandfather’s homeland, to thank the woman responsible for saving his life. Its based on the novel of the same name by Jonathan Safan Foer.
Hutz heard that director Liev Schreiber was looking for Eastern European-tinged music for the movie’s soundtrack, but Schreiber realized after talking to Hutz that he’d found his Alex. For a novice actor, it proved an eerie coincidence.
“I don’t want to sound too mystical,” he said in his thick Russian accent, “but within that whole week that all of these events came together, my friend gave me a book and said, ‘You have to check this book out, ‘Everything Is Illuminated.’ It’s written very much like you write your lyrics.”
After listening to Schreiber describe the character, Hutz said: “I am that guy. If you let me do it, consider it to be done. That is the least I can do.”
But looking at Hutz the actor and Alex the character, there’s little to make you believe they are one and the same. With a full shock of hair, a bushy handlebar mustache, a golden loop dangling from his left ear and an impish grin, it’s difficult to believe he is the clean-shaven, almost bald, Alex.
He found much in common with his on-screen alter-ego.
“In the literal sense, no-how. However, I suppose there are archetypal Eastern European traits we share which you kind of have to have to pull that off,” he said as he enjoyed his Absolut, “the main one being creatively abusive toward language. That’s what people do in the Ukraine and Eastern Europe. It’s a very well-known strategy for getting through the day. It’s using language as sort of an entertainment/survival technique.”
If there’s anything Hutz should know about, it’s survival, given his story, which he calls a “pretty long story of incongruity featuring evacuation, clinical depression and immigration.”
At the age of 13, he and his family found themselves evacuated from their native Kiev because of its proximity to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. That was followed by stints in refugee camps in Poland, Hungary, Austria and Italy. Finally, he and some members of his family were relocated to the United States, where he eventually helped found the punk band Gogol Bordello.
Despite the upheaval, he’s philosophical about his experiences.
“As they say: What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and what makes you stronger makes you a killer,” he said.
