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ABC/Paula LoboModern-day musical film La La Land, which stars John Legend, has been nominated for a leading six 2017 Golden Globe Awards, including for Best Original Score and Best Musical or Comedy Motion Picture.
Legend, who portrays a jazz musician named Keith in the movie, says that he was humbled to be a part of the cast.
“I just felt happy to be there because I’m not an experienced actor. I’d done some acting in high school,” he says.
“But Damien Chazelle, who wrote and directed the film, he wanted someone that brought some authenticity to the idea of being the kind of musician that the character I played was,” adds John.
The ten-time Grammy award-winner says that his character in La La Land was “an interesting character to be” in “a really cool movie to be a part of.”
“He finds success but also kind of finds it in a way that borrows a little bit from the old school, but is trying to do something new and he’s trying to tell Ryan Gosling‘s character, ‘You need to do something like that. You need to push music forward and not just stick to the old stuff,'” he explains.
And if you’re one of those people who longs for a time when a many Hollywood movies featured song-and-dance numbers throughout, La La Land is sure to satisfy.
“It’s set in the present too, but it has all this nostalgia to it and it throws back to all those great musicals that Hollywood used to do and really hasn’t done in such a long time, at least not original musicals, in a long time. For Damien, as a young director, to take this project on was pretty incredible,” John says.
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