A TOP GUN GOES ON THE ROAD TO EVERYWHERE
- Joe Mealey and Michael Paradies Shoob
- Feb 12
- 7 min read
Updated: Feb 17
Whip Hubley discusses his long career from roles in TOP GUN, SPECIES and TALES OF THE CITY to bringing his character from DRIVEN back to life thirty years later in ROAD TO EVERYWHERE.
When did you first realize you wanted to be an actor? Were there people who inspired you in the beginning?
My older sister Season was going out with an actor named John Bennett Perry, Matthew Perry's dad. John was kind of my idol at that age and he was around when my dad died. He was a Broadway actor and singer and an inspiration to me. I remember him coming to see a production of The Hobbit and just feeling so proud of what I was doing. That was my first experience of that kind of joy, performing on the stage.
Your sister Season Hubley had started her career...
My sister Season went out and did it. It wasn't like there were actors in my family. I wasn't brought up to think of acting as a possible career by any means, but when she went out and did it, then it became something viable… I had a buddy who was stage managing at a theater Off Broadway. He called me up one morning after I had gotten through with my bartending shift, told me they needed to fill this role at the Theater for the New City. I went down, auditioned and got the role. That was the beginning of it for me. And then I just started doing it.
What have been some of the highlights of your long career? What are some of the films you’re most proud of?
I came out to LA to do a play called “HEAT”, and it turned out to be a really great showcase for me because it was a real physical character. He was kind of a tough guy, drank a lot, there were physical scenes on stage, a brooding character. A lot of agents came to see the play, and I got signed out of it. They started submitting me for these movies and the first one I did was ST. ELMO’S FIRE. And, obviously, the TOP GUN movie was a big deal. Those auditions went on for months. You keep putting it on a back burner and then you forget about it completely. Then you get called in again. Finally the last auditions were for (director) Tony Scott and (producers) Simpson and Bruckheimer. It was really a fun period, going down to Miramar Naval Air Base and getting to do all of that fun stuff with the machinery. The training was intense. We flew and actually shot in the F-14. It’s a world that I am not otherwise interested in, to tell you the truth. I ended up basically doing an advertisement for the Navy. That was not something that I was setting out to do at all, but that's just the nature of it. Getting cast in that film opened doors and I landed the lead in RUSSKIES playing a Russian sailor. The director and I made a strong connection and he championed me through the audition process, all my self-doubt about the dialect, etc. The producers set me up with a dialect coach who I spent weeks with. They sent me to Russia for ten days. I found the school in Odessa that my character, Mischa would have gone to. The smell of the hallways, that's what I was looking for. I felt Russian by the time we started shooting in Key West. Then there were surprises that came up. EVERYBODY’'S BABY”was the true story about baby Jessica getting stuck in the well down in Midland, Texas. I played the guy who saved her, Robert O’Donnell. That was emotionally just a really connected movie for me. SPECIES and EXECUTIVE DECISION were a lot of fun. Working with Kurt Russell and John Leguizamo. That was a big splashy Joel Silver Warner Brothers kind of thing. Believe it or not, you just never know where they're going to come from.
I guess you could say that about the first movie we did together.
Yes, I got called in for this movie called DRIVEN, which was directed by a guy named Michael Shoob. And written by him and it was based on his experience as a cab driver in LA. It was a really good ensemble movie about cab drivers, just the lifestyle and the things they come up against and their relationships to one another. And, you know, I kind of always felt when I was playing the role of Jason Schuyler that I was playing the writer's point of view a little bit…
That’s probably true.
The other characters had their things that they were going after. I was more of an observer and I was watching them. You never knew quite what this guy was about or what his aspirations in life would be. It’s one of those movies… It was fiercely independent. DRIVEN was kind of like an actor's movie, you know? And everybody I knew had gone up for these parts. And that process went on for quite a while too. It was just one of those things where I felt connected with the guys in the room.
Ten years ago, you and your family decided to leave Los Angeles.
My wife and I moved from California in 2015 to Portland, Maine. And at that point I thought this is gonna be that new chapter that everybody talks about. You're getting older. The kids had all grown up. We didn't even quite know where we were going to settle, but I certainly didn't think that I was going to get involved in any kind of local theater or anything like that. But then once I got here, because of the TOP GUN connection, people ended up finding out about me and somebody sent me a play, and I ended up doing it. And then one thing caught on after another. Now I've done 8 plays and a bunch of local movies, which has been really interesting.
That’s when we called you about ROAD TO EVERYWHERE.
You texted the day after Christmas: I had hardly seen you in the last 30 years since we did the original DRIVEN. I thought “Whoa, what's this all about?” So, I called and you told me about this possibility of revisiting Schuyler 30 years later. And you asked “Should I send you a script?” And I said “I don’t need to see a script. I trust you.” I was in because that's an exciting thing that just doesn't happen. It was so totally out of the blue that I would get the opportunity to take a look at a guy that came out of me 30 years ago. In this case, the script and character of Schuyler all came from the work we'd done 30 years ago. Fascinating to me. What an opportunity to take a look at where my life has gone, the tools that I've learned to use over the years.
I remember on DRIVEN you put together a big book of ideas about the character. This time you didn't have nearly as much time to prepare. Talk about the difference in the preparation for both films and what it was like to do our film 30 years later.
Well, I understood that ROAD had been developed for nearly a year for one of the other actors from DRIVEN who couldn’t do the movie at the last minute. So without much time, we had to figure out what would have happened with Schuyler and what's he doing now. And then once we got into that, it was a matter of putting heads together with the writer. Also, it turned out I had a previous commitment: We were going to see my son Ben who was going to be on stage doing THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION in China. So you and I got together to rehearse on Zoom every morning while I was in China. We worked to develop the 30-year storyline for Jason Schuyler where we find him back driving a cab after his businesses have been devastated by the 2008 crash. We developed a really compelling story for my character.
What did you respond to in the story of ROAD TO EVERYWHERE?
It's a story about a relationship between two men each going through their respective struggles and sharing their hopes. At the end of the movie, it's not neatly wrapped up. There are a lot of question marks. There’s an open-ended quality to the movie, a characteristic of the original movie too. You don’t write neatly tied up packages and that appeals to me because it's a more accurate depiction of life. And there’s a certain peace that comes out of the journey I’ve had with Jake on the road. What a joy to explore that journey with Robert Mirabal and you throughout the production of this film. You had asked originally what it was like to come back to the material after so many years. Well, there was a big, huge break in there. I would say that a lot of it was family stuff. Personal stuff. Self-doubt. I was trying to reinvent myself. I went into the finance business for five years and that was kind of like an experiment with myself to see if I could create a new character in a way. Ultimately, it was a discovery process that led me back to where I am now in realizing what's important for me. And what is important in acting, as it turns out, are those flashes of connection and it does seem like sometimes if I try to articulate it, it’s hard… but it’s a connection… I guess you could say... to myself, the character, the material. Glimpses of truth.
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