By Chrisdfw (Chrisdfw) (209.246.135.69 - 209.246.135.69) on Saturday, October 13, 2001 - 01:53 pm:

Michael Cudlitz (Randleman) hangs out behind a dike.





Michael Cudlitz (Randleman) on the run.

By Chrisdfw (Chrisdfw) (209.246.135.69 - 209.246.135.69) on Saturday, October 13, 2001 - 02:19 pm:

Photo Credit: David James

By Chrisdfw (Chrisdfw) (209.246.135.69 - 209.246.135.69) on Saturday, October 13, 2001 - 02:21 pm:

Photo Credit: Keith Hamshere

By Chrisdfw (Chrisdfw) (209.245.229.153 - 209.245.229.153) on Saturday, October 13, 2001 - 08:17 pm:

Welcome to our special Band of Brothers issue where we talk with four of the stars of the Tom Hanks/Steven Spielberg mini-series. For the record, we should never forget those that fought and fell for our country during times of war and we hope that by watching Band of Brothers you too will be moved on some level by what went on. The stories, the men, the cause.

No Bull for Bull: Michael Cudlitz

By: Jason M Burns
The Green Room

Michael Cudlitz plays Denver "Bull" Randleman and like many of the other actors, Michael found himself face to face with the man he was set to play. This again made the project much more emotional than your average production was worth.

Michael has had a successful acting career while still squeaking under the radar of the general viewing audience. He's the, "Hey I know that guy" guy. He has made numerous television appearances on the most popular of shows and has starred in films like Gross Pointe Blank and American Virgin.

He's a family man but a big kid at heart and that is apparent in the humor he displays with me…a regular stranger.

JB: Is Michael available?
MC: You're speaking at him.
JB: How's it going. It's Jay Burns from the Green Room Magazine.
MC: Jay Burns! I'm looking at my watch thinking, "Wow I just walked in the door and I'm glad I made it in time." I keep trying to schedule these for noon and I got the call that this was for 11:30, which was fine…it's just I didn't even remember to be home.
JB: Do you need a couple of minutes?
MC: Not at all. I'm going to take you and we're going to go upstairs.
JB: Sounds good.
MC: On our first date too.

Just for the record I don't usually just jump into the bedroom with the first actor I interview. We're not that kind of magazine. Sure we're the kind of magazine your mother loves to hate, but we only take it so far.
JB: So how are things?
MC: Excellent. How are you?
JB: Good. I actually just got off the phone with James. He told me you guys had the big guy/small guy thing going on throughout the whole project.
MC: Yes actually. We have some pretty cool moments involving that. I kind of take him out of there on my back.
JB: This project just seems bigger than life and it seems that it is one of those things that has more of an emotional attachment than a regular acting job would. Does that sound familiar to you?
MC: It was an adventure. It was like doing a short tour in the army or all of those things that you can associate with it. A first year in college, any involvement you've ever had with a sports team that was intense, it was way more than a job.
JB: As far as performing a real life story?
MC: As far as every aspect of it goes. I think when we agreed to do this there was an initial feeling of, "Oh great, this is going to be a great project!" They basically sent the forward of the book and the introduction of the book with the breakdown. Early on you got a real sense that this was going to be a huge project and a cool project. You know…it involved Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks and this is the first time they've paired together for this type of format. Tom had just done Earth to the Moon. It had all of these things around it where you were just like, "AWWWWW!" "If you get it this it's going to be fantastic and it's going to change your career." That's where your focus was initially. "It's a great project and it's going to do great things for me." Extremely superficial! But, it's the same way when you meet someone you want to get into a relationship with. It's usually on those superficial things and then it turns into something else and this was the same exact thing. Little did we know it was going to take on a complete life of its own and change us as people in the way we view the world and for me in the way I view my children and my life…my place in society. It was just a job when I started out. It's like, "What did you do to me man?" (Laughter) "Get out of my head."
JB: Sounds like a big commitment?
MC: Yeah. The individual commitment by everybody in the production…and I mean right down the line. I don't mean every actor, which that in itself was a whole incredible experience that is still going on. But everybody in the production, straight down the line, to the extras that were maybe working one day on the project. I mean, just a phenomenal level of commitment.
It's weird because sometimes I hear myself saying these things and you're just like, "Oh dude, come on it's just a friggin' movie." But, when you see it you'll see and you'll know we're not full of shit.
JB: Absolutely. I'm the type of guy that is obsessed with the Discovery Channel and the History Channel and you can see that this is one of those things that will interest more than just somebody looking for some entertainment.
MC: Well then you're gonna dig it. My wife is in love with it and she's about as much of a chick as you can get as far as gratuitous violence and that kind of stuff. But, it's not any of that. It's relationships. It's following these guys as a group the same way you would follow a sports team through a year. There are different players that rise up through the season and contribute to the team but you're following the team as a whole. It's just a phenomenal, phenomenal feeling to be a part of it. As an actor you just sit there and watch trailers and go, "Fuck man, I want to be in that." And then you're like, "Oh, I am." (Laughter)

I totally hear what you're saying Michael. I said the same thing about Corky Romano when I first saw the trailer!

JB: James talked very personal about how the ceremony with the veterans on the beach of Normandy touched him. Did it work the same way for you?
MC: Oh, completely. The entire focus of the entire time of the Normandy screening and the regional screenings has been the vets…as it should be. We'll get our recognition later on down the road by people who can make those decisions but as far as the viewing audience is concerned…this is for these guys. The whole experience has been extremely emotional. Just getting close with these guys. Jimmy's guy is still alive. My guy is still alive. That in itself…those ongoing relationships, are what have been the most rewarding experiences of the whole thing. Getting closer and closer personally with Mr. Randleman and his wife over the past six or seven months has been incredible.
JB: You're playing a character that has obviously lived these experiences. Was it a nervous feeling for you having to live up to the image of man that had gone through this and is in fact still living today?
MC: Oh yeah! I keep referring to it as the ultimate gift and the ultimate curse because if you fuck it up he's gonna see it. It's not something like, "Well he's dead and I can take this liberty." Not to say that was the thought but when you can't find the answer as an actor, you sort of think "Alright, he doesn't recall this incident specifically but we know he was there." What would he have done?
Well, that becomes a pretty heavy weight to carry around when your guy is still alive because he could turn around when you're done and go, "What the hell is that…I wouldn't have done that." As opposed to saying, "I've done all of the research and heard from all of the other guys and I think this is what he would have done."
JB: Have you heard from Mr. Randleman as far as seeing the project and his views on the end result.
MC: Yes. His quote was, "I think it's the best war picture ever made and I don't think they will ever make anything better." (Laughter) Now I don't know if I agree with that. When you really get down to it this project is representative of …it really does honor all of the men. You've got a group of guys who have stayed together so obviously Stephen Ambrose was able to write the book because so many of these accounts and these specific incidents about these specific men stayed together. They had an association that they formed. It was a situation where you had all of these stories about all of these men in one place and it was actually fairly easy to chronicle what they went through. I actually had a point there and lost myself. (Laughter) I had no idea what I was talking about before that.
JB: I asked what the comments of Mr. Randleman were after seeing the project.
MC: Yes that's right. Thank you. (Laughter) But, I think as the technology evolves we're able to represent on film better, in a more realistic format.
JB: But like you said earlier, this series is more about the relationships.
MC: It really is. We always hear about history and this is sort of stealing Steve Ambrose's words, but we do always hear about history through the leaders. What the leaders went through is always extremely well documented because they do reports every day. The military documentation of a leader or an officer is a daily or weekly report…basically a diary. And through that you hear about all of the extra efforts but you don't usually hear about the average effort or the everyday effort of what the soldier goes through. "Patton's army came down." You don't hear that Joe, Frank, Tommy, Bob and Phil in Patton's army came down. These guys went down through a tunnel and did all of this stuff. You just hear, "Patton's army came down beat the shit out of everybody and moved on." It's all these sort of broad strokes…these sort of sweeping descriptions of war.
And what Stephen Ambrose has done in his book was personalize it and it's through the eyes of the guys. You really do get a sense that you know these men as the series progresses.
JB: And these guys went into this having no idea what to expect either and this series allows us to meet each of them individually.
MC: And that is what the show really focuses on. How these men, or boys at the time, joined something that they were just excited to join because, "we're going to get an extra $50 bucks, we're gonna jump out of planes and we're gonna get lots of chicks because the paratroopers are bad ass." And then the reality of the war hits them and it's horrifying and they realize that the only thing that they have is each other and if they don't hang on to that they have absolutely nothing to fight for.
JB: It definitely seems like something that will stick with you through the rest of your career.
MC: The project itself will come and go but what the project has done to each of us will stay forever. I read something yesterday where Tom Hanks had said to Frank John Hughes, "This is going to change your life." That sums it up. It really does. And there is so much of it that is really beyond description that for us is still so emotionally raw and we're just sort of sorting out like, "What the fuck did they do to us." It was a whole deprogramming thing that we went through…that we chose to go through. It's a very different situation when you know truthfully that at any point you can pull yourself out of it. I have a successful career, I have two children, I have a wife, a house, things are going good for me. I don't need somebody jumping in front of me yelling, "OK you deutsche bag, you piece of shit, jump in that fuckin'" well, you know. You choose to do that and to sort of make that mental leap and commit to that. It took its toll. But the benefits that we got out of it in terms of being able to portray these men are things that made it easier to do. You learn things about yourself through that process for what I would imagine is forever.

I had someone yell these same things at me a few years ago. The sad part was, it was my mother.
JB: You're obviously talking about the boot camp phase of your commitment. They made it the real deal I assume?
MC: It's real! Nobody is going to die but on the other side of it, nobody is getting kicked out. If these paratroopers couldn't cut it, they were fuckin' kicked out. You might be a great actor and you might be in the worst physical shape possible but you're not getting kicked out buddy. (Laughter) You're running the five damn miles everyday, you're doing the push ups and you're going to shut up and pay attention. And you're just thinking, "Man, I would be so kicked out if this was 1942." (Laughter) So in certain ways for some of the guys, I think it was harder. The real guys were all athletes and farmers and they were frickin' 19 or 20 years old. Some of us have a good…more years on them. (Laughter) Let's put it that way. But, you get people that are like; "I'm an actor." Well good but today you're a frickin' paratrooper and you're going to run. It's an interesting process and I highly recommend it for anyone. (Laughter)
JB: Coming off this and going into another project…do they seem like cake work?
MC: Oh cake! There are very few projects, no matter how intense the character is, that you will go through this kind of research. And what I mean by this kind is this sort of labor intensive in the sense that it has stretched over a whole year. And getting the information is so hard when dealing with the men. You need to establish a level of trust. It's stuff they haven't talked about with anyone. Not their families, not their wives and a lot of them haven't even talked about it with each other. And over this time I think we the performers have gotten more out of them than they ever wanted out of them.
JB: One of the staples to all war films and real life soldiers is that they all have nicknames…the middle blank. What would Michael ____ Cudlitz be?
MC: It would be close to what he was. He was called the Bull and that has kind of stuck with me. That would be close because my nickname in college was Sarge and that is because I am a pretty physically large person and I used to sport the flat top. It was pretty severe.

By Chris Langlois (Chrisdfw) (12.239.86.117) on Monday, June 17, 2002 - 11:58 am:

Michael Cudlitz and Tracy Gordon Goff (daughter of Walter Gordon}


Courtesy of Tracy

By Chris Langlois (Chrisdfw) (12.239.81.247) on Tuesday, November 12, 2002 - 07:54 pm:

By Melissa Clay (Melissa2800) (66.166.47.71) on Tuesday, March 25, 2003 - 12:15 pm:

Hello!!! I am the moderator of Michael's yahoo group, I just wanted to invite anyone who is interested in discussing Michael's career past or present to stop by & join.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/michaelcudlitzfans/
I hope to see you there!
Missy

By Chrisdfw (Chrisdfw) (209.159.98.1) on Wednesday, July 18, 2007 - 07:33 am:

Cudlitz on tv's 'Standoff'

By Chrisdfw (Chrisdfw) (70.244.167.189) on Saturday, July 21, 2007 - 01:29 pm:

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