‘It’s terrible’: Why Giovanni Ribisi won’t watch any of his movies

Exclusive: Avatar star actor Giovanni Ribisi returns to screens in high-stakes thriller American Hostage – but don’t expect him to watch the series.

“Oh god. No, it’s terrible,” the Emmy-nominee, 51, admitted to nine.com.au; a surprise admission that had nothing to do with the series itself, but the thought of watching himself on screen.

“It’s like when you get really drunk at a wedding, and you decided to dance and then you watched the tape the next day and you’re like... oh no.”

Not even his role in Avatar, one of the highest-grossing movies of all time, raking in a worldwide box office total of $2.923 billion, could convince Ribisi to tune in.

“Don’t get me wrong, it feels really selfish because there’s so many people involved in making a movie,” he explained. “It’s such hard work any time a movie or TV show gets made, it’s an unadulterated miracle.”

“That’s not the intention. It’s just, I can have a really bad week...” the star trailed off as he started laughing.

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“I go, well, it’s done and there’s nothing else I can do about it. I’d rather have it be a fond memory, an experience.”

Ribisi had quite the experience filming American Hostage alongside Emmy-winner Jon Hamm.

The series, out now on Stan, is based on the famous 1970s true story of beloved radio reporter Fred Heckman (Hamm).

A reporter, who is thrust into a life-or-death crisis when hostage-taker Tony Kiritsis (Ribsi) demands to be interviewed live on his program.

“It was definitely challenging,” confessed Ribisi.

“Adam Arkin, who was the directing showrunner had this great idea that we wanted to shoot the telephone calls live.”

Those harrowing phone calls captured the heart-racing tension between the two characters, where at any moment, Kiritsis could pull the shotgun trigger on his victim’s head – if his demands weren’t meant.

“We had two cameras on my set, two cameras on the radio station set. We were only divided by a hallway,” he revealed.

“We had a closed-circuit phone, and we were just performing in one or two takes, that was it. It was like doing theatre, you just had to go with it even if you f--ked up, it was real in that way.”

Just as real, was the emotional toll it could take to play an “extreme” role, like that of Kiritsis.

“In my 20s it just wasn’t fun,” he said of deeply intense characters. “It can be such a painful experience, especially when you’re doing somebody who’s troubled.

“I think that when you can embrace all of that, that’s where you find the most richest material or performance. This is the stuff I love, I embrace that now.”

Of course, filming with Hamm was “incredible”.

“Jon is everything you want in an actor, a leading man, in a producer. It just doesn’t get any better,” he beamed.

“There was a moment where I got to sneak over to his set and I remember seeing him. I was like, oh this just perfect. He’s just that guy.”

Stream Season 1 of American Hostage now on Stan.

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