Darryl Stephens and Jensen Atwood bring back the Arc

AE: Fair enough. A few years ago after Noah’s Arc ended its second season, it wasn’t picked up after being very successful and gaining a huge following for Logo, and that led to a lot of speculation as to the reasons behind its cancellation. Do either of you have any insight into that?

Photo credit: Jesse Grant/WireImage

JA: I was shocked when we were canceled. I’ve heard a lot of speculation as far as why people think it was canceled. I also think that there is somebody out there that knows what the real answer is – the person who makes those decisions. I would like to have someone sit down whoever that person is and genuinely ask them the reasoning behind it. It just makes no sense not only to me, but to a lot of our fans as well.

AE: Do you have any thoughts on this, Darryl?
DS: Yeah. We were given a lot of information, information that was useful in trying to comfort us when we found out that we weren’t going into production on a third season, but nothing that made me understand why one of the network’s biggest shows wasn’t coming back to television. I think that the movie was a great way to end the show and it‘s a nice final chapter, but I don‘t really get why the show didn‘t come back.

I will say that I understand that Logo has a lot of people that they‘re trying to appeal to within the LGBTQ community. A show like Noah’s Arc is not the cheapest show to produce. Looking at a show like Shirts & Skins, it’s much more cost-effective for them to do a show like that as opposed to this big narrative with wardrobe budgets and sets and shooting in Vancouver. If they feel like they’re going to make more money on a show that doesn’t cost as much, that’s what the network is going to do.

Photo credit: John M. Heller/Getty Images for Logo Features

AE: Well, now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about the movie. What were your initial reactions were to the idea of the series continuing on as a film?
DS: Apprehension, honestly. I thought “Oh, really, we’re not doing a third season? Now it’s going to be a movie? Really? Really?” [Laughs] But I do have to say that Logo has been very enthusiastic from the beginning about producing the film and getting it into theaters. We worked really hard to get the film done, and here it is.

AE: How do you feel going into the release of the movie, which is in just a few days now?
JA: I guess I’ll echo what Darryl was saying as well. Once they did cancel Noah’s Arc it was such a shock. For them to say that now we’re going into production on a movie, it was like, huh? Ok, well, let’s go do the movie! I didn’t know I was going to be a part of it until two months before the production date, so I was really feeling disbelief, and now we have a date and a limited release, and people are actually going to see it in the theater.

AE: From what I hear advance sales are really good, so that’s something to be excited about. Since the film takes place two years after the Noah’s Arc finale, how did your approach to the characters’ change or evolve?
DS: I was a little worried that I wasn’t even going to be able to play Noah. I was thinking…there’s softness and smallness to Noah that I had personally let go of in my own life. I mean, I got fat, I got bigger. By the time we shot the second season, I had gotten enough advance notice that this was going to happen, and I worked really hard to lose weight. I felt like Noah was someone who is very fashion-forward, and smaller than I am.

JA: Darryl had to stop lifting weights to slim down.

DS: Yeah, and when we shot the movie, I had a month. I mean, it kept getting pushed back and pushed back, and I wasn’t as skinny as Noah. I wasn’t rail-thin, my hair wasn’t as long. But once I met up with all the actors again, I got more comfortable. We all met up at LAX on the way to Canada to shoot, and even though it had been a while since we had seen each other, all the chemistry that we had before just clicked right back into place.

I think that what I was working with personally was that Noah had taken these two years to kind of grow up. Since the accident and the cheating in the bathroom and all the drama that happened at the end of Season 2, Noah has stepped up and decided to be a more proactive and self-realized man. I don’t think he’s counting so much on the advice of his friends or the ideas of other people to form his own choices. I think what you see in this film is that he knows what he wants. Before, there was a little whining and he was always trying to gauge what other people wanted, but now, it’s like: “Bam! This is how I feel.”