Actor and musician Charles Esten (“Nashville”) chatted about starring in the Angel Studios series “Homestead,” where he plays Cain Ross.
The synopsis is: Picking up where the “Homestead” movie ends, the series drops you into the aftermath of a nuclear detonation off the coast of Los Angeles—a moment that sends a once-comfortable nation into chaos.
“Homestead” follows the survivors both inside and outside the compound as they collide with each other and the violent world closing in. Are they an ark or a fortress? Is it kill-or-be-killed, or is God working in ways they can’t yet see?
‘Homestead’
On being a part of “Homestead,” he stated, “It has been fantastic. This came out of the clear blue for me. I just got this call and I got this script.”
“The first thing I read was the entrance from this helicopter. I said, ‘This seems like a lot of fun.’ Once I got there, every moment from the very beginning, I remember going to wardrobe fitting and they’re giving me these boots, and they’re giving me these jeans and this leather jacket,” he elaborated.
“Now, they’re giving me this cowboy hat,” he said. “Now, they’re fixing this revolver on my hip. It felt like it’s a kid’s dream to get to play this role, but it’s an adult actor’s dream to get to play it as well in terms of all of the topics that we confront and the general fighting to be the person that you should be under some very extreme circumstances.”
Playing Cain in ‘Homestead’
On playing his character Cain in “Homestead,” Esten said, “Cain is an incredible character with all of these dramatic scenes and moments.”
“It’s funny because Ward Cameron in ‘Outer Banks’ seems fairly irredeemable, but he had a through line that he really loved his children and his wife, and he was mostly doing this for them, and he had a whole lot of moments of him having a hard time. It was war on him,” Esten said.
“That’s not Cain right now,” Esten admitted. “There’s something a little broken in Cain, and he was the brother of this wonderful guy, Ian, and he was the black sheep, which is where he got the nickname Cain.”
“I think so often when we’re labeled some way we tend to embrace it and go, ‘okay, I’m Cain,’ all right, watch me be Cain,” he noted.
“Now, he’s in a situation where Jenna is depending on him and his homestead. His brother is gone, and he really wants to step up and try to be more than Cain and try to be closer to his brother,” he elaborated.
“Whether he’s able to do that is a great question, and a really interesting thing to play,” Esten added.
Lessons learned from the screenplay
On the lessons learned from the screenplay, Esten reflected, “I think this character is probably less me, way less me than Deacon was.”
“Deacon had a whole lot of me in trying to fight your demons, listen to your better angels, and Ward maybe on the page was not me at all, but I put a whole lot of me into it in terms of the care I had for my family and my kids, and that was what made sense to me is I would defend my daughter to the limit,” he elaborated.
“With Cain, I’m having to let go of some of the softer parts of myself and the more thoughtful parts and the harder edges, and so I’m looking to find the authentic place of it,” he said.
“I don’t want to create the part that’s not me like that,” he noted. “I have that in me, so it’s just trying to access that and perhaps I’ll find out more. In some ways, it’s trying to keep him separate from me.”
Working with Rudy Pankow in ‘Outer Banks’
When asked what it was like to work with Rudy Pankow in “Outer Banks,” Esten said, “Rudy is fantastic! I remembered the first day I met him at the table read. We’re all sitting around a massive conference table in the middle of a warehouse where the production offices were and everybody’s reading.”
“I thought that all the young actors had known each other for a long time, but they had just met two or three days before. I was impressed with the chemistry that they had,” he said.
“That chemistry came from the fact that they were all whip smart, they’re all super creative, they all felt super comfortable instantly,” he noted.
The Paramount in Huntington on Long Island
Esten recalled performing a solo show at The Paramount in Huntington on Long Island.
“I really enjoyed playing The Paramount in Huntington,” he exclaimed. “They were very kind; they gave me a Paramount brick for my performance there. I have it downstairs in my window.”
“I miss the Paramount. That’s a fantastic venue, and it was so much fun to play there,” he said.
Stage of his life
On the title of the current chapter of his life, Esten revealed, “The Adventures Continue.”
Superpower of choice
His superpower of choice would be “mindfulness.” “I want to be able to live in the moment as thoroughly and as fully as I can,” he noted.
Message for his fans
For his fans, he expressed, “Well, I just want to say thank you for continually letting these characters into your heart and your homes.”
“For anybody that comes to ‘Homestead’ because of me, because they’ve watched me play other characters or they’ve watched me in ‘Whose Line is it Anyway,’ I do not take that for granted. That’s unbelievable,” he elaborated.
“I’m very grateful to the fans,” he concluded.
To learn more about Charles Esten, follow him on Instagram.
