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SHON GREENBLATT "Oscar Delancey"
TEEN BEAT: Tell us about your character in Newsies.
SHON GREENBLATT: The character I play in Newsies
is a true character. His name is Oscar Delancey. (The
younger of the two Delancey brothers.) The Delancey
Streets in
TEEN BEAT: Was he an easy character to play?
SHON: I've never played a bad guy, so it's cool. It's hard to
play a period bad guy because you can't rely on any one thing. There was a lot
of research into this character. We were trained in martial arts and wrestling
and there was a dialect coach on the set.
TEEN BEAT: Was it hard to stay in that "New Yawk" tongue?
SHON: No. We were around each other and pretty much talking like
our characters all the time.
TEEN BEAT: Was there anyone who mastered this
"dialect?"
SHON: If we couldn't find the dialect coach, then we'd talk to
Max Casella. Max has such a great
TEEN BEAT: Were there any outstanding things you remember from
filming?
SHON: Yeah. When we burst into the theater
where Ann-Margret is performing to get all the kids.
The cop my character's with falls into the orchestra pit and it's a funny,
slapstick thing because I'm trying to push him out of there and he weight two
tons and he's crushing me. I just started ad-libbing. I had to get it approved
by the dialect coach because there are certain words they didn't use back then.
TEEN BEAT: Were they open to your input as far as lines go?
SHON: Yes. Actually, I said the ad-lib and the script supervisor
wrote down what I said, and together we picked what we'd keep. Then, all the
other takes were done with that.
TEEN BEAT: We understand that kenny Ortega, the director of Newsies,
was really great.
SHON: Kenny Ortega is the greatest. He's an actor's director. He
really believed in us. He's a good guy.
TEEN BEAT: Was Newsies a tough film to
make?
SHON: Newsies was . . . there is no
walk in the forest when it comes to making a film.