By: Izumi Hasegawa February 10, 2014
Small-town English actor Dominic Sherwood is now portraying the popular character Christian Ozera in Vampire Academy. How has he handled the fame? What does he like about Christian? How did he handle fire? He also revealed his side of the story about his kissing scene with Lucy Fry who plays Lissa Dragomir. Yes, he answered some of your questions too!! Don’t miss finding out the story behind his tattoo as well!!
Q: Are you ready to be famous?
I’m a little boy from Kent is who I’ve been so I really never anticipated myself having people asking me for my photo or asking for my autograph. That’s never something that I’ve really seen myself do, I guess. And it’s something that I had not really gotten my head around until we literally went on the press tour and I started meeting these people. It was never something that I’d been like, “Oh yeah, this is probably going to happen.” I never thought of it that way. And then when I actually started to meet them, it was like, “Oh wow, these people really care about who I am. And they care about the movie and they’re so excited for it.”
Q: What did you like about your character?
I really like everything about my character. What’s interesting about Christian is his back-story dates back to when he was very, very young, when his parents turned Strigoi and then attacked him. So I got to develop my character from a four-year-old — so what turned him into this sarcastic, lonely kid who used humor as a defense mechanism but also very loyal, very proud, and very brave. What turned him into this person? And I got to start when he was four. So I had 14 years of back-story and to really develop the character with Dan and Mark’s help.
Q: The kissing scene with Lucy Fry, we heard it was filmed on the second day you guys met. Is that true?
It literally was. It was day two. And I was cast so late in the process too, I hadn’t had a chance to meet everyone. So I literally, the first day I had properly spoken to Lucy was day one. And day two, Mark just said, “Cool. We’re going to do some kissing.” And we both just went, “Ahh. Oh my God!” But it was really fine. It wasn’t a problem at all. The first kiss was a bit all over the place… actually, that’s not true. The first one was a bit of a disaster but it was really fortuitous to kind of get it out of the way very early because then we didn’t have any pressure. It wasn’t built up. It was like, “OK, cool. We have to do a kiss again.” It was not an issue because the first one was done. So it was actually really good. It worked out really well.
Q: You got to play a vampire, what other supernatural character would you like to play?
I’m very into Greek mythology and always have been. So anything having to do with the gods or the demigods or like Hercules or Perseus, all of that sort of stuff, Achilles. I’ve always been really, really interested in that sort of stuff. If I could do anything it would be something based in that.
Q: Which god would you like to play?
Ares maybe, the god of war. I think he’d be one of the most interesting. Or even Hades. I think Hades would be quite interesting because there’s so much about that story because Hades and Zeus and Poseidon are all brothers and he was banished down. There’s so much about that story that a lot of people don’t realize — that it was Zeus that was the bad one and tormented his bother Hades and turned Hades into who he was. I have a Hermes tattoo. [Shows it on his left ankle]
Q: What’s the best thing about playing a vampire?
I think for us is the powers — the elemental powers of Moroi. And I’m fire. I did pretty well in this one. Yeah, I’m pretty good. And that was kind of the pinnacle was the powers and stuff. We had days where I thought the stunt guys were going to actually set me on fire. And they were kind of talking to me about it — not in a crazy way. There’s this special gel that you can use that they put all over your hands and your arms and they can digitally set fire to it with a trigger that they’ve got behind camera. And I guess they just spent too much time with me and went, “You’re too clumsy for this. You’ll be on fire and you’ll like run your hand through your hair and ruin the rest of the movie.” So the only time we had fire was for the last scene with the dogs. And they drew it across my body, which was amazing — on the back of a kind of golf buggy on these big long tubes — and then they shot out these kind of flame throwers. And then they came across my body and kind of scattered off like the dogs were. They were like, “We know what you’re like, Dom. Just don’t put your hands in the fire!” And I was like, “Thanks, guys. I’ll try not to put my hands in the fire.” That was my favorite thing.
Q: How was wearing fangs?
I learned how to talk with your fangs. They are really sharp — like really, really sharp — and they are like two individual things that attach to your incisors and then go all the way back like across the back of your teeth. But it’s really thin and you can’t feel it on the back of your teeth. But if you shut your mouth too quickly, you’re going to bite yourself. They are supposed to sit in a certain place but as you’re talking, obviously your jaw is moving. I bit my tongue a couple of times and they are sharp enough to draw blood. That’s a fact. You can take that from me. They are sharp enough to draw blood.
Q: The fire and fangs, what else was a first that you did in this film?
Contact lenses. The colored contact lenses for the first time for that scene in the middle. They are really uncomfortable — really uncomfortable. And obviously the bits that are colored, you can’t see through so the hole is smaller than your pupil and you can’t see through it. So you end up with this opaque red tint around everything you see. Your peripheral vision comes to about here [moves hands right in front of face]. This was personal to me because it doesn’t happen to everyone but I couldn’t focus my eyes because they were stopping my pupils from contracting and dilating properly. So everything was just like a colorful blur to me.
Q: Did you run into some walls?
But I would do that without contact lenses. That’s the embarrassing thing. I am that clumsy. But I was walking into stuff and I missed a couple of steps.
