PERSONALITY PEEKS:
SETH D'ANTUONO, Actor, "Dan in Real Life"
by FRANK O'DONNELL
October 11, 2007
Seth D’Antuono needs to thank his grandpa.
If it weren’t for him, the 13-year-old North Providence actor might have missed his chance to be in a major movie.
“My grandfather saw the ad in the paper for the auditions,” said D’Antuono recently. A movie company was holding open auditions in Middletown. “I didn’t know what it was,” he says, but his grandfather drove him down anyway.
The movie was “Dan in Real Life,” starring Steve Carell, to be shot entirely in Rhode Island.
The first audition was simple. “I waited three hours. Then they asked me what I was doing this summer, and took my picture.”
That was it.
But the casting people kept calling him back. “On the second audition, I had to sing. I had nothing. So I sang a song from ‘High School Musical.’”
Next, they emailed him part of the script. “That was the first real audition,” he says, reading with the casting director playing the other part, behind a small movie camera.
Through the whole process, D’Antuono never expected he would be cast. “I felt good about the auditions, but I didn’t think I’d get the part.”
After all, there were hundreds of other kids auditioning, and lots of them had more experience than he did.
Until then, most of his experience had been working with the Wanskuck Players in a series of plays including “Alice in Wonderland” and “Seussical: The Musical.”
On his last audition, “they kept calling kids in, then sending them home. We were left with eight or nine kids. Then it came down to six of us.”
The next morning, the phone rang at home. “They asked if they could speak to my mom, and they asked her if I would like to be a part of the cast.”
D’Antuono remembers getting “hysterical. I was in shock, I never thought that I could get this.”
This all happened a year ago, from August thru September, 2006. In mid-October, D’Antuono started the commute to Middletown. “We spent the first two weeks in a school house in Newport, getting our schooling hours in.”
When he finally to on set, they ran through two rehearsals before filming a football scene. “I met Dane. Steve wasn’t there that day,” D’Antuono recalls.
Dane Cook, that is. “I thought it was definitely cool working with Dane,” he says. “I was nervous about meeting him. I guess I was star struck. He was really nice to me.”
I wonder if they became buddies. “I don’t know if I’d call it that,” he says. “Somewhat. I talked with him more than others in the cast. I was comfortable with him.”
He enjoyed Carell’s company as well. And his mom, Linda, says he really loved working with Peter Hedges, the director.
When we talked, he hadn’t seen the movie yet, but this week, he’s attending the premiere in New York. Next week, he flies to Los Angeles for the premiere there.
“I saw little bits of it when I had to go to New York to do some sound dubbing.”
All things considered, this is a pretty big deal for a young actor in the 7th grade.
The trailer for “Dan in Real Life” is playing in local theaters now, and people who know him report seeing him in them. One friend of his told me it was “weird” seeing him up there on the screen, so big.
D’Antuono has seen some of the trailers on YouTube. “You have to stop (the video). You can’t really see me unless you do that.”
I did that. He’s right. I could only find him in one YouTube video, and only by stopping it frequently. It’s a scene where he’s sitting on a couch in the living room, surrounded by his movie family, while Dane Cook and Norbert Leo Butz make up a song mocking a girl from Steve Carell’s past.
“My sister goes on YouTube and picks me out on the computer screen.”
What do his friends think about his becoming a movie actor? “They think it’s cool. I’m going to go see it with them on October 26, when it opens around here.”
Reprinted with permission from The Valley Breeze
