MONDAY, APRIL 26, 2010
Kellan Lutz Bares His Uhh, Soul, In Interview Magazine
Team Emmett peeps, this is all for you!
Kellan Lutz recently sat down with Interview Magazine, talking about everything from his early years on a dairy farm, to his dogs, to his modeling and acting career.
An excerpt:
MARK JACOBS: Hi, Kellan? Where are you right now?
KELLAN LUTZ: I am in my backyard in L.A. hanging out with my two dogs.
JACOBS: Who are your dogs?
LUTZ: Kola is a shepherd-husky mix I adopted from the Compton animal shelter. Kevin is the newest, most adorable member of our family. He’s a Chihuahua. I found him on the street when I came back from one of my trips.
JACOBS: You spent time on a dairy farm in Iowa while you were growing up?
LUTZ: Iowa is where the big farm was, where my grandparents lived. After my parents divorced, we would visit them. My mom would send me out to the pigpen, where we had these huge, huge pigs. I would stand there for six hours holding a hose, watering pigs. They’d dive in the mud and shake it off, and I’d go home covered in it. I loved the whole thing of getting wet and dirty and then getting in a warm bath.
JACOBS: You also have experience spraying crops and building silos. Are you aware of how this story reads in New York and L.A.? Anything involving uncontrived hard labor is irresistible to the style industry.
LUTZ: I’d rather do manual labor than sit behind a desk. And as my grandparents got older, I’d fly out there and help out around the farm. We’d tear barns down; we’d build barns. I’d rather be outside rolling hay or driving the tractors.
JACOBS: Then how did you choose Hollywood?
LUTZ: I have a lot of older brothers who messed up in different ways in my mother’s eyes. So I learned from all of their mistakes. I can’t go into detail, but while I was growing up, I always tried to make it a goal to relieve some of the stress my mother went through. I applied myself to school very diligently. I wanted to go out of state so I wouldn’t have to depend on my mother. And L.A., where my father lived, seemed to call to me.
JACOBS: Why acting?
LUTZ: In L.A., I was meeting people who were all actors. My mind started to open up to what acting was. I didn’t realize that Brad Pitt was a real person. I didn’t think he was a robot or a machine, but I thought you were just born into acting—that it’s a family tree, kind of like NASCAR. No one can just say, “Hey, I’m going to be a
NASCAR driver.” They need to have some way in. Once I was in L.A., I realized anyone could do this. Why not give it a shot? I started going to a ton of acting classes, and I found I had a real passion for it, probably the biggest passion I’ve ever had in my whole life. So I decided to put school aside, put all my scholarships aside, put everything that I worked hard on for my mother and myself aside, and pursue this roller-coaster ride.
JACOBS: How old were you when you got the -Abercrombie & Fitch cover?
LUTZ: Eighteen. I was actually working in L.A. at an Abercrombie to make friends. I had no friends.