During a recent appearance on The Metallica Report, James Hetfield shared if he’s considering leaving Metallica for an acting career.
“I’m not into acting at all,” the frontman said. “I mean, I act enough on the stage, like projecting. For us on stage, projecting big, it’s almost more like Broadway. When you’re in a movie, you do just a little thing and that’s, ‘Whoa,’ that’s enough. I like big projecting.”
Hetfield continued, “So for me to be invited to be part of a film where I don’t have to go and audition or something, ’cause that doesn’t interest me, really. I’ve done that before, and it’s not my bag, really. But he invited me along. There was a couple of other things that I had done before. [Director] Joe Berlinger asked me to do something similar in the Ted Bundy doc that he put together.”
“It was, like, ‘I got this part. You’d be perfect for it. Come on, let’s do it.’ And that’s kind of similar to what, I guess, Peter Dinklage or the director had in mind. Like, ‘Hey, this is a part. You don’t have to do anything, you don’t have to train, you don’t have to do nothing. Just be you.’ It’s, like, ‘All right, I can do that.’”
The singer also added, “It’s certainly not a career choice for me. I love what I do and I wanna continue to do that till my last breath. But just something fun. I love that someone just asks you. They see you, they picture you in a part and then you go and you do it. I think that was very cool of Peter.”
Hetfield acts in the new dark western thriller ‘The Thicket.’ The movie, based on a novel by Joe R. Lansdale, will be in theaters on September 6. Peter Dinklage plays Shorty, a bounty hunter searching for a kidnapped woman in the movie. Set in the early 20th century, it follows Shorty and his team as they enter a dangerous place called the Big Thicket.
The film also stars Juliette Lewis, Esmé Creed-Miles, Levon Hawke, Leslie Grace, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Macon Blair, Ned Dennehy, Andrew Schulz, and Arliss Howard.