'The Glee Project' Interview: Charlie About Aylin And The Judges

07/13/2012

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For the past few weeks on The Glee Project, Charlie couldn’t catch a break. No matter how he acted during the music video, he ended up in the bottom three. Even with the stress of the competition, he still managed to get very close to Aylin. I spoke with Charlie about the status of their relationship, and he also gave me a very vivid description of what’s it’s like to get slushied.

Ology: Hi Charlie! This week was your fourth time in the bottom three. Did you find it frustrating to keep being in the bottom? Were you confused about what the judges wanted from you?

Charlie: No, not at all. I don’t think I was confused; if anything I think I was overcompensating. If you look at the show in a linear perspective in terms of what they asked me to do, I think I tried to put all my effort into doing that thing the following week and as a result I think I overcorrected in a few of the cases.

Were there a couple weeks where I questioned what I was doing there? Yeah, you bet. But overall, I don’t belittle the experience. I thought it was an amazing opportunity to perform for Ryan Murphy and the creators and co-producers of Glee, you know, what do I have to complain about?

During your last chance performances, you tended to change the melody around. Has that always been a part of your musical style?

Surprisingly, no. But Ryan said to me during week 3 that he was tired of Glee being characterized as a karaoke show and I wanted to pay as much of an homage to that each week. I thought that after I did that, it got a lot of really positive response while we were filming, so for better or worse, it became my stamp.

And if there’s anything that I really like about my style and my time on the show, it’s that nobody really agreed. That’s a good thing. You know, being universally loved is nice, nobody wants to be universally hated either, but I think the fact that the fans have been so open to discussion about me, it’s really what I find to be the most intriguing. No one seems to have a set opinion on me and that means that they’re talking and they’re forming their own opinions, and I like that our fan base has been so positive and so open to change and to new ideas over the course of the show.

Why did you decide to change the words to “It’s Not Unusual” and sing it directly to Ryan?

Here’s the thing. The only other contender in the history of the show who had been in the bottom three for four weeks in a row was Alex [from season 1]. I have a feeling that, really, the truth of the matter is the mentors didn’t really know what to do with me. And there were many times where I felt that I didn’t kn what to do with me but I knew that, fourth time in a row, I really had to aim for the fences. If I was going to go out, there was no way I wasn’t going to go out fighting. So I just tried to make a bold choice. I tried to make a choice that was the embodiment of the week’s theme, which was fearlessness, and I think I succeeded. Whether or not I got called back, I think I succeeded that night.

The judges seemed to be concerned with your acting choices, such as creating your own character. How did you approach the music video shoots?

In week 4, sexuality week, the criticism was that I was taking on roles that weren’t mine to play including director, choreographer, producer, whatever. So after that I thought, okay, I’ve clearly missed some cues here that people have been sending me. Which is characteristic of the autism spectrum disorder that I’ve been struggled with for most of my life. And I thought, time to reevaluate, this week I’m going to throw everything I have into staying in character the entire shoot, only asking questions that are relevant, and so I did. I stayed in character and I focused on my acting and as a result I was put in the bottom three again and was told that I stood out too much.

And I took that to heart in week 5 and said okay, great, that didn’t work, but you know, NASA didn’t put a guy on the moon in a week. You have to figure out the mathematics of getting it right because sometimes getting it right can be an exact science. And I think I’ve always been more the type of guy to throw science at the wall and see what sticks. So week 6, I tried to approach it from a natural perspective, and what they said was that I was coming in a bit underneath. What I had interpreted that as is, you know, I’m just trying to react how I would actually react if someone were about to throw a slushie into my face, which is to say it hurt, a lot.

But they were right though. I think they were ultimately right in the end. The mentors are professional and they’ve been in the business for many, many more years than I have. I didn’t always get the result that they were asking for but every time they gave me feedback, I sat there and I took it. I said thank you for your honest critiques, I’ll try my best to integrate it into my practice the next week.

I take ownership entirely for the faults that I had on the show. They were mine and I feel like they were only human, but in the end I think I was not entirely what Glee needed at the moment and I’m okay with that. I left the show on such a positive note, my fans have been wonderful in terms of their feedback and saying that they think I have a career ahead of me, and I can only hope that they’re correct.

Obviously you and Aylin were very close during the show, did you ever find that relationship distracting from the competition?

I think they may have played that aspect of it up a little bit. But no, I never found it distracting, as a matter of fact I found it grounding. I thought that having something real amidst so much of the, for lack of a better word, much of the bullshit that goes on in a reality competition series, I found it to be very grounding and very helpful for both of us. I think the fact that they spun it as a distraction for me, in terms of my progress on the show, it was unbecoming of what our relationship actually was. But that’s just my opinion on the matter.

Are you still in a relationship with her now?

Well, suffice to say, we have about as much of a definition to what we are as we did on the show, which is to say we don’t really have an idea. But I think that one way or another she’s going to be in my life for a long time, whether it is in a relationship or friendship capacity. I think she’s an awesome girl and I like having her around and I think she likes having me around too.

What are your plans for the future?

My plans for the future are to do what I’ve been doing. Before I booked the show, I was just a struggling actor in New York and now I plan to be a struggling actor again until something else comes along. It’s a very cyclical and a very cynical industry and if I find any measure of success in it, I’ll consider myself a lucky guy.

Final question: how was it getting slushied?

Getting slushied is excruciating. I mean, the single slushie, one slushie per take, I can handle, that’s fine. It’s like being face to face with a musket from the Revolutionary War, you fire and then you’ve got about a minute where you have to reload and pack the powder and you have some time to collect yourself. I could do a single slushie take all day, everyday, I could do that for an hour and I’d be fine, but it was the vignette of slushies that really took its toll. You saw with Ali getting slushied over and over again, that happened with all of us.

At first it hits you like a shock and then about 20 seconds in, it feels like… basically imagine being covered in water and only in a bathing suit and it’s the middle of winter and there’s a pickup truck that’s got its tires going and it’s shooting sleet into your face, and that’s basically what it feels like. It’s not at all pleasant, it’s not at all fun, and by the time 30 seconds goes by, I couldn’t have even told you my own name. It was a blanket of cold and sadness and pain and I’m pretty sure everybody felt the same way about it. But it was a rite of passage and I’m glad I was on the show long enough to get there.

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