Greg Sestero takes us deeper inside The Room

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      Fans of The Room can get a double dose of their favourite poison when actor Greg Sestero (“Oh hai, Mark!”) comes to the Rio Theatre on Friday (November 29). Sestero is not only promoting his book, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside the Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made—he’s also bringing a behind-the-scenes documentary with him.

      The film includes actor-writer-director-enigma Tommy Wiseau’s first ever screen appearance in a TV commercial, in which he descends a spiral staircase in a tacky garment warehouse reciting from Hamlet. It sounds like the Holy Grail of Tommyana.

      “Mmm… it’s pretty great,” says Sestero, calling the Straight from LA and struggling to conceal his mirth. The actor is in a strange position. Obviously a man with a slightly perverse side, Sestero was initially so intrigued by Wiseau’s unfathomably weird energy and uniquely incompetent approach to his craft that he elected to become his scene partner when they first met at acting school. But he also loves the guy.

      The Disaster Artist details their relationship, and it is, predictably, every bit as preposterous as the mess we see on screen. But in spite of the wealth of information he provides about his friend, some of it disturbing, a lot of it just sad—it even includes what amounts to Sestero’s best interpretation of the man’s probable origins in the Eastern Bloc—Wiseau still remains oddly unknowable. Sestero fleshes him out, but the mystery of Tommy Wiseau only seems to deepen as you pile through the book’s 268 pages.

      “I feel the same way,” he says. “Every answer sorta turns over another question.” One thing we do know is that Wiseau has taken to his infamy with gusto. “He’s a showman,” offers Sestero. “He’s very adaptable in an odd way, and I feel like he loves crowds. He loves people. He’ll be there if they’re there, and he’ll let them do what they wanna do. But he still feels his movie is the greatest movie ever… They can say it’s the worst movie ever but he’ll show up and still be proud of it. It’s a weird mix of confidence and naivety, I guess you could say.”

      It’s perhaps worth noting that amidst Sestero’s painfully hilarious tales of Wiseau’s misadventures on set—after three-and-a-half hours and some 30 takes, here's the best Tommy could do with this particular scene—there’s one moment in The Room that he says captures the real guy. Namely, when Tommy ad-libbed the much loved line, “Hi, doggie,” during the flower shop sequence. 

      “Those are the moments that I feel like Tommy shines,” Sestero says. “That’s when you see, like, the berserker charisma that he has. I think that’s what people really respond to; that kind of child-like enthusiasm. He’s definitely strange and different, but at the end of the day, there’s something human and sort of refreshing about his sincerity.”

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