In the classy Georgetown Ritz-Carlton, 31-year-old comedian Marlon Wayans looks relaxed in worn jeans, a wool sweatshirt and a beanie, while most of the others surrounding him rush around in tight and serious suits. Considering his role in the high-profile film "The Ladykillers," a remake of a classic film, in which he appears alongside the legendary Tom Hanks and under the direction of the infamous Coen Brothers, surely Wayans might be worried that he was out of his league.
To go from doing the "Scary Movie" films with his brothers to acting in an intelligently dark comedic caper directed by the Coens could be quite a stretch for some actors - perhaps for the Baldwin brothers, but not Marlon Wayans.
"It was good to depart from 'The Wayans Brothers' and go on a journey with the Coen brothers," Wayans said. "Both funny, it's the same language, but it's a different kind of funny. So it was great working with them."
Wayans admits there were vast differences between working with his brothers on their parody films and working on "The Ladykillers."
"I noticed one really big difference - they're white," Wayans joked, adding that comedy is a universal language.
"There are different joke equations," Wayans explained. "There are different kinds of comedies. ['The Ladykillers'] is a comedy of errors. [The Coen brothers'] comedy is through different eyes. You kind of understand each other."
Back in high school he and his brothers were the bullies, whereas the Coens were the nerds of their school, according to Wayans.
"[My brothers and I] never punched anyone, but we talked a lot of trash and we made fun of people," Wayans said. "[The Coen brothers] were the guys that got picked on and said [in a nasal voice] 'Oh, tomorrow I am going to come back and have some really funny jokes for you.' They learned to be funny that way, so there's really no difference between the two. I think we are cuter though."
In "The Ladykillers," Wayans plays Gawain McSam, a maladjusted wannabe "gangsta" who is the in-man for the casino heist around which the plot revolves. To get into character, Wayans made some unusual assumptions about Gawain.
"He has a little dick," Wayans explained. "If you look in my wallet I had a magnum condom that you could see, but tucked away behind there is a regular-size Trojan, and that's the one [Gawain] would really use. But being that he don't get none, because he doesn't know how to talk to women, he has both of those condoms just sitting there. That's because he has little-dick-man syndrome mentality. He's very arrogant in his ignorance."
Working alongside Hanks is intimidating enough, but working with Hanks while he is playing a criminal mastermind with an unusual Southern accent and a far-flung vocabulary could be strange as well. For Wayans it was no big deal.
"He did sound a little bit like the Kentucky Fried Chicken man," Wayans said of Hanks' role as Professor Goldthwait Higginson Dorr. "It was actually great to watch him work and keep that consistency. The man was doing Shakespeare in a way. All his character was based on subtext, cause you needed a thesaurus or dictionary nearby to understand what the hell he said. I went through two years of college and did damn good on my SATs and half the words he said were not on that test! But like Shakespeare, it was all about subtext, and you could understand what he was saying, even though you didn't know what he was saying."
Wayans attended college in D.C. for a year at Howard University, and, although he didn't finish due to his acting career, he advocated the importance of doing well in school.
"I wish that when I was in school that I was [consistently] great," Wayans said. "When I wanted to apply myself, I got the greatness out of me. I learned in this industry you got to be great all the time. There is no excuse. You guys in school, be hard on yourself. There is no excuse for a B. Do your homework. Homework is important."
What he does study now is film.
"You have to know movies inside-out and front to back," Wayans said. "All the characters and how they break down. It's just a whole process and it's a lot of work, a lot of time, a lot of energy"
