If there's one thing Miles Fisher is undeniably great at, it's attracting attention. The 26 year-old actor rocketed to "viral sensation" status for his spot-on Tom Cruise impersonation in Superhero Movie. He's done it again, recently, though with slightly more artistic intent, self-releasing a music video starring former BlackBook intern Lydia Hearst, another spot-on impersonation (his take on Christian Bale's American Psycho performance), and his slightly unorthodox take on the Talking Heads' "This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)." The entire affair turned out quite well, and got some decent attention, piquing ours, too. We talked to Miles about his music, the unique nature of his fame, his Harvard lineage, Mark Zuckerberg, and of course, what it's like to work with Lydia Hearst in one of the more visceral ways possible.

Miles Fisher - This Must Be The Place (Cover) from Miles Fisher on Vimeo.

You’ve had a bit of a whirlwind bout of press. What was the week of the release like? What were you doing in New York? I was there taking a little bit of an escape from LA., as everything’s culminated to the release of this video, and I knew the initial buzz would be in New York. All the people involved are from the city, for one thing. We released the video last Tuesday just online, and then I flew in that evening. Since then, it’s been great, and a bunch of people have since taken interest. All we want to do is respond to them and get them more excited.

Did you have any idea that the video was going to generate the kind of interest that it did when you made it? Everybody I know knows the original, and everybody I know loves the Talking Heads. They're one of my favorite bands, and American Psycho is a personal favorite of mine, so: if we could pull off the original idea, which was to record a cover of the song and record a "cover" of the movie, and really have them parallel each other in specific moments where the lyrics match the visuals, there'd be potential to gain a bit of interest. We didn’t know that it would generate the kind of response it has, though. I mean: it’s only been up for a week and already we’ve gotten half a million views.

How'd the EP come about? I recorded it with a producer in Brooklyn named Sean Han who was under his production name, Blip Blip Bleep, who’s a tremendously talented guy. Music’s been a big part of my life since I was ten years-old and I’ve been out in LA for about two and a half years now. I moved out here initially to be in acting, and it’s going very, very well, but it’s not terribly self-enabled as a profession. It’s not like I go home at the end of a long day, go up to my room, and unwind by doing a couple of monologues.

It’s funny: you’re a RedCard, a Harvard grad, and you’re supposed to be you know working for the NSA or something. Not to pigeon-hole Harvard grads into Good Will Hunting cliche, but so many of them are in self-enabled professions, and you’re at the whim of an industry that’s pretty fickle. I definitely grew up in a very structured environment that was fairly meritocratic, where you get out of it what you put in. And then, you know, you get to L.A. and you’re like, “Alright,” [claps hands], “I’m ready. I’m ready to go, tell me what to do and I’ll work harder than anybody to get to that goal.” And it just doesn’t work that way.

But you've seem to manage to take hold of things. This was all you. You took advantage of the internet in creating a quick, fast buzz. I think I was the first year ever to get my college acceptance letter via email. A classmate of mine at Harvard, Mark Zuckerburg, invented Facebook, and we were—I was kind of one of the first original members ever of Facebook, back when it was an inhouse thing, you know?

Right, back when it was just a Harvard thing. Right. There were no photos, and it was TheFacebook.com, and really, just a means to flirt with the cute girl in your lecture. And of course, now it’s beyond "game-changer" and it’s a huge media platform on its own, not to mention part of its own genre of connectivity. But we—you know, if you subscribe at all to Gladwell’s Outliers, the Ten Thousand Hour Rule...

I'm familiar with it. You do something for 10,000 hours and your brain'll explode from it. [Ed. Or you become achieve mastery in it.] I don’t know where the speedometer is right now, but whoever clocks in 10,000 hours in kind of media 2.0...I mean, we were kind of fluent in that language as the vocabulary was still being developed, and that’s really exciting. A lot of this thing's reviews have been coming in from—for example, the site Break.com—it got over 200,000 views in the first 24 hours on Break.com and a lot of those were from people posting to their Facebook. I mean, that site's much more geared toward college and high school kids, but it's amazing how it spreads like wildfire. For example, I was in this film called Superhero Movie...

I was going to get to that. The Tom Cruise impersonation achieved for you a kind of "viral" fame. Your Patrick Bateman/Christian Bale impersonation was spot-on, too. Did the ability to channel that kind of thing factor into choosing American Psycho as the video you were going to cover? To this day people stop me on the street and say, “That Tom Cruise thing was amazing.."

More people saw the Tom Cruise clip than actually saw Superhero Movie. Oh, yeah. Dimension Films took down the official link and put the entire thing as a special feature in the DVD because it went *too* viral. It was (among other things) a realization that—okay, look, I feel like I’m a good actor, and I feel like I’m not limited to one thing. So the best way to get that Tom Cruise thing out of peoples' minds is to give them something else. I was kind of like, alright: if people think I’m One Note Johnny, impersonating Tom Cruise, I’m going to give it a different shot.

Well, your turn as Sleazy Coke Bro #2 on Gossip Girl was highly underrated. You’re very kind, thank you. I’ll be on Mad Men in a few weeks, which should be fun. The other thing is I knew I wanted to do it with people who I guess a way to put it that the original film kind of made fun of those people in real life—I mean the three other people are a real cross-section of New York.

You know Lydia Hearst interned for BlackBook for a day, right? Was it just for a day?

Yeah. She was a terrible intern, just miserable. How’d you get set up with her? And how was working with her? I may very well disappoint you because—and this is not just the fluff answer—she was incredible to work with. I’ve known Lydia for some time. We’ve known each other since high school. I didn’t get to see her much because she’s mostly in New York, but whenever she’s in town, we’ll always visit. She’s a personal friend, and it’s amazing actually how much she kind of looks like the actress from American Psycho.

Absolutely. Right, and the truth is some of her reaction shots are really, genuinely funny. Our director, a guy named Dave Green, who is just immensely—I mean I will stack all my chips behind him for future projects, he’s great. And by the way we’re all 26 year-old guys, me the producer and the director—but Dave Green pulled me aside twice during the shooting and said “This girl is really, really good.”

There's a nice comedic energy in the scene where you guys are having the threesome. The big decision that we had to make that Lydia was very cool with, as was Charlotte Kidd (who was the other girl) was that there are many ways we can screw up on this—people love this movie, and people really love this song, and so if we’re going to do this video, I think we really have to commit to it. The ménage a trios in the video is pretty racy—but you know, as an actor, and if we’re going to go all out, and we’ve reconstructed this whole set for heaven’s sake, let’s do this—and she was on board with that, which was cool. If you look up close, she’s wearing a tiny tiny little Speedo, but it’s still fairly intense. Lydia, though—by getting her on board—kind of legitimized the production of it, and allowed us to kind of get momentum with a few other elements. She flew in, she was in L.A. practically overnight, and we worked long, long hours, and she did it just in good faith of our friendship. I’m very grateful to her for having done so.

Who played Paul Allen? Paul Allen is a kid named Nick Hobbs who’s a Harvard graduate of ’01, he graduated UVA Business School, and he’s old school Manhattan.

Have you heard from (American Psycho director) Mary Harron or Bret Easton Ellis? Or David Byrne? I’ve heard from Christian Bale’s agent—who actually loves it—David Byrne’s a bit of a hero, but no, neither him or Ellis.

Are you gonna tour the EP at all? Not yet, and that’s definitely in the works. Right now it was really just me and this producer working together, but right now we kind of want to do—for lack of a better phrase—visual pop, where for each track we create an original video. The next one that we have coming up is the first song on the download—"Don’t Let Go"—and we got a cool music video that we’re now just finalizing. The music, and these videos, like I said, are enabling, and something I can kind of do on my own and stay busy kind of outside of auditioning and acting, but I want to do both. In a personal capacity, it’s music and it's videos, and in a professional capacity, it’s acting.

What do your Harvard brethren think of this? Again, not to stereotype RedCards, but you know, the cliche is that they go on to fairly lucrative careers. And you’re in an endeavor that’s... That’s not guaranteed. They’re really supportive. I'm still in good touch with my friends from Harvard and you know, look, a lot of them have kind of “crushed it,” and they’re making a lot of money and they’re doing well. I will say: being out here in L.A., I think by far I have more and more friends that wake up everyday, whether they’re making money or not, who're pretty passionate about what they’re doing. That’s exciting. I wouldn’t say that my friends from college are already burned out—they’re not—but I don’t know how genuinely psyched some are when they get out of bed in the morning to go to work.

And it sounds like you’re coming up with that enthusiasm fairly well. Yeah, so, let’s hope I’m not totally in denial [laughing].
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