Aldis Hodge has played everything from MC Ren in Straight Outta Compton to Hawkman in Black Adam, but nothing quite prepared him for a line like: “Walk tall and clinch your butt cheeks.” Delivered straight-faced in Marmalade, it’s the kind of throwaway that sneaks up and floors you. Hodge admits it wasn’t even in the script. “It was not, sir,” he laughs. “I would just say a bunch of random things and judge by the crew. If they were laughing behind the camera, then I knew it worked.”
Improvised prison-yard wisdom aside, Marmalade is a twisty crime-romance about a small-time dreamer (Joe Keery) who meets Hodge’s Otis, a seasoned inmate with a suspiciously extensive history of prison breaks. Between plotting an escape and swapping tall tales, Keery flashes back to his Bonnie-and-Clyde-by-way-of-Hallmark romance with Camila Morrone. “I went into this blind, and I’m glad I did,” Hodge says. “There’s a sweetness and poetry to it I didn’t expect.”
For him, the real hook was the chance to flex a side he rarely gets to use: comedy. “As an actor I want to be challenged, put outside my comfort zone,” he says. “I love comedy but haven’t had a lot of comedic opportunities. I did about eight years of stand-up, so the foundation’s there. Comedy is all tone and timing. This film gave me the chance to work that muscle.”
Much of that comedy happens locked in a cell across from Keery, who’s miles away from his Stranger Things smirk. “He was going somewhere I’d never seen him go before, which was great,” Hodge says. “He’s taking crazy risks, so am I, and we had to balance that out. The magic moments you see are what you get, but there was a lot of magic in between.”
The risk-taking extended to director Keir O’Donnell, pulling double duty as first-time writer/director. Hodge, who also produces films with his brother, knows the gamble. “Everything is a risk,” he shrugs. “You can work with somebody who’s made ten Oscar-winning films and still land on the bad one. It comes down to heart’s intention. Do you love the script? For me, I loved it. That’s enough to start the journey.”
And as much as Otis is a guy who “misses a few beats,” Hodge relished playing the cracks in the armor. “Everybody’s deceiving everybody,” he says. “That’s where the opportunity is: how much does he believe himself? There’s a fallible nature to somebody so serious and really trying, but who still misses a few. That’s what I loved about him.”
He’s also loving the other side of the camera. Parallel, a project from Hodge Brothers Productions, is already on deck. “My brother and I have been in this business 34, 35 years,” he says. “It was always aiming toward making our own films. Making a movie is impossible—if you can actually finish one, you’ve done the impossible.” He grins at the memory of grinding one project out on a shoestring, then jumping straight to Marmalade: “Man, people don’t realize. But if you can pull it off, you’ve got something.”
Pull it off he did. Between The Meters, Toots & the Maytals, The Cardigans blasting on the soundtrack, and a con man’s smirk stretched across his face, Hodge found his sweet spot. Which, apparently, is somewhere between prison breaks, pratfalls, and a line about butt cheeks.
Watch the interview above and then check out the trailer below.
