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FHS graduate Edwards featured in Duvall, Spacek film
Alan Sloan - Thu, Sep, 24, 2009
Linds Edwards, inspired to become an actor after seeing a Brad Pitt movie, produced quite an audition tape that eventually landed him a big-time movie role.
Just ask legends Robert Duvall and Sissy Spacek.
Landing the role of a rural radio announcer in the movie “Get Low,” shot in Crawfordville, Ga., near Atlanta in February, this 2003 Farragut High School graduate first met the Academy Award winning Spacek near his movie trailer.
“There’s this silver Buick that pulls up, and they stop right in front of my trailer while I’m sitting on the steps, and the window goes down,” Edwards said. “... So I stood up and I walk to the window” and Spacek said, “‘I know who you are, I watched your [audition] tape. ... That was incredible. That tape was so good.’”
Not long after the Spacek encounter, “I see Robert Duvall walk right past my trailer,” Edwards said. “I walked to his trailer door and knocked on it.”
Explain-ing who he was to the Academy Award-winner, Edwards said Duvall replied, “‘Oh, yeah, you’re the one with the tape that was so good.’ And we just sat there and talked for about 30 minutes, just as people.”
Edwards also met celebrated actor/comedian Bill Murray. “I look to my left and there comes Murray walking down,” he said. “He points out my shoes, I had skateboarding shoes on, and said, ‘his shoes look comfortable, I want his shoes.’
“They all made me feel welcome.”
Near the end of the day, Edwards said he reflected, “I have just had the coolest day of my life.”
Beginning to shoot his scenes around 10:30 p.m., Edwards said despite having his lines “nailed” he was “still freaking out [thinking], ‘I’m about to do a big A-list movie’ I’m sweating, just trying to keep my hair together for the whole thing.”
While shooting his scenes, Edwards said he “blended right in with all of them, like I knew what I was doing. ... I’m learning.”
In the end, “I didn’t miss a single line,” Edwards said. “Duvall actually ran over a couple of my lines, but what do you say to a legend that’s running over your lines?
“And he looks at me and he’s like, ‘Linds, I’m really sorry buddy,’” Edwards added. “I made a joke, ‘just don’t let it happen again.’ .... he kinda laughed.”
Edwards, 24, said his total scene time is about “five-and-a-half minutes” in a movie about a Kingston man gaining national attention because he wanted to attend his own funeral — alive.
To top it all off, Edwards recalled Murray saying: “‘You’re good kid, you can stick around.’
“This was one of the coolest things in my life,” Edwards added, also saying he has that quote inscribed on his bedroom wall “so that I know every day that Bill Murray said I could stay.”
“Bill Murray made fun of me for having a regular job at Home Depot. I said, ‘it pays the bills. I don’t get to make movies like you guys do every day, but I’m getting there.’”
Before “Get Low,” Edwards said making smaller independent films was a matter of “‘if I could just get this role maybe I could pay off these bills.’ Now it’s, I want do films that affect people in such ways that they’re thanking me for helping express something they’ve seen or felt before.”
With Edwards part of the movie’s premier in Toronto, Canada, recently, “Get Low” is set to be released later this fall.
Most recently in the movie “Bailey,” about a blues player who finds “spiritual redemption through music” and filmed in Nashville, Edwards plays Jimbo, a music shop employee.
Auditioning for “The Story of Bonnie and Clyde” as a “guy who helps Clyde escape out of jail,” Edwards also has auditioned for a Robert Redford movie, “The Conspirator,” as Lewis Payne, “one of the conspirators they say helped John Wilkes Booth assassinate Abraham Lincoln,” he said.
Juanell Walker, co-owner of Talent Trek agency in Knoxville where Edwards is a client, said, “No matter what role you give Linds, instead of trying to be that character, he makes the character him. ... it’s very natural.”
His long-term future? “I want to direct,” Edwards said. “I understand people really well, and I just love storytelling. ... to mold a story is so exciting.”
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