Watch this exclusive Mr. Media interview with Michael Pare by clicking on the video player above!
Mr. Media is recorded live before a studio audience full of missing movie rock stars still living on the dark side… in the NEW new media capital of the world… St. Petersburg, Florida!
“Take your glasses off.”
That’s the moment when a cowboy played by Michael Pare, a previously loving, respectful father and rancher in the Old West, signals that the previously restrained film, Traded, is about to get physical.
He becomes a “crazy sumbitch” on his way to discovering that his 17-year-old daughter Lily has been taken against her will into an underground sex ring.
MICHAEL PARE podcast excerpt: “The director of ‘Eddie and the Cruisers’ auditioned me and asked if I could sing. I said, ‘Sure! I sing like Sinatra. And I play guitar like Jimi Hendrix. Anything you want, I can do it.'”
In Traded, a smartly directed indie film that’s part High Noon and part “Deadwood” and which focuses on sex trafficking in Kansas, Pare dominates every scene he’s in – although Kris Kristofferson is pretty compelling himself as a philosophical bartender that Pare encounters in Wichita on the hunt for his kidnapped teen daughter.
“I’m presently searching for my daughters,” he tells a man. “I believe she’s been imprisoned in town as a whore.”
And now you know the plot of the movie, which co-stars Trace Adkins and Tom Sizemore.
MICHAEL PARE podcast excerpt: “Trace Adkins has such tremendous presence and he’s very professional. He’s not one of these guys who doesn’t know his dialogue on the set. And he’s a big sonuvagun — 6’6″, 240 pounds. He’s a big effin’ guy! I would love to do another movie and spend more time with him in the story”
Pare, an actor who made a huge splash on the silver screen in the mid-1980s as the star of Eddie and the Cruisers and Streets of Fire, has been busy ever since.
For me, talking to Pare is the completion of a full circle cruise.
In 1983, after Eddie and the Cruisers caused a sensation in theaters, I spent a full day chauffeuring the singing voice of Eddie Wilson around to Tampa Bay area radio stations in exchange for an extended interview.
(Trivia: Michael Pare and Mr. Media share the same birthday: October 9.)
Key interview moments:
• 4:05 Michael Pare rode horses in movies before, but for the Western ‘Traded,’ he had special training and a truly great time;
• 13:36 Pare calls country singer and ‘Traded’ co-star Trace Adkins “a tremendous presence” on screen — “a big effing guy I would love to do another movie with”;
• 21:36 Pare takes us behind the scenes of ‘Eddie and the Cruisers,’ a movie for which he clearly still has great fondness.
Michael Pare Website • Facebook • Twitter • Wikipedia • IMDB
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