A Long way from Mac ads
Most of them walk up and say something like, "Hey, Mac Guy. I bought a Mac because of you."
Once in a while, someone's curious: "Sooooo, Mac Guy, do you actually own a Mac?"
The ones who think they're funny go with, "Hey, man, look out, I'm a PC." Always a hoot.
It breeds strange moments, this whole human-embodiment-of-a-machine shtick. Probably none more so than when Justin Long is shopping or eating a hot dog and suddenly a stranger launches into a tale that begins: "I'm having a funny thing happen on my screensaver . . ."
"It always takes me a couple seconds to adjust to the fact that I'm in the Mac commercials, and they really, genuinely think that I am also like an expert," says the actor. Long, 29, says he can download music from the Internet; that's as advanced as it gets.
If he's looking for a chance to lose the techie-dork rep, "Live Free or Die Hard" is not that chance. He plays the smart-mouthed hacker sidekick to Bruce Willis's weathered Luddite, and together they battle a band of cyber terrorists to save the girl, the country, etc.
It's Long's first crack at the "action hero for a major motion picture" category. That the role will strengthen his typing for a specific kind of character is a risk he's willing to take.
"I have two different thoughts on that," he starts. "Just realistically, it's so rare to work in this business -- we're all carnies, we go where the tents are -- that if that's where they are, that's what people want and see me as, I'd happily do it. And be thrilled to work as long as I could.
"But on the other hand, I've done a few movies, smaller movies where I get to play characters and less-recognizable type parts and guys who are very dissimilar to myself, so I've gotten kind of an appetite now to kind of do more versatile roles. That's one of the goals of 'Die Hard.' I pray to God it does something for my career ."
You get the sense, talking to Long, that there's never enough time for him to say everything he wants to say. He launches into story after story after story. About the eel livers he tried during the Asia leg of the press tour. The iPhone Steve Jobs wants to give him but he's scared to use. The godfather who made him want to be a priest when he was a kid. The girls he discovered who made him think celibacy might not be a fit.
Long got into acting after football didn't work out in high school (he was 4-foot-9, 85 pounds when he entered ninth grade in Fairfield, Conn.). He migrated to the drama scene , because his older brother was there and, more important, so were lots of cute, "cool, actress-y type girls."
"It was like a social, and I didn't have a lot else going for me. I wasn't cool or rich or big or play sports," Long recalls. "Then as I was going to college, I did so many plays I just fell in love with it. "
He dropped out of college, moved to New York, got a job delivering pizzas, and started showing up for every audition he could find. It turned out Long's brand of adolescent-Woody Allen awkwardness was in greater demand than expected. First with 1999's "Galaxy Quest," then as Warren P. Cheswick on the TV drama "Ed, " then as a sweatband-wearing weakling in "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story" (2004).
And now as an asthma tic hacker drawn reluctantly into the heroism business . When the bad guys shut down telecom networks and power grids, it's his job to undo their evil coding, while Willis distracts them by launching cars into helicopters and dropping dudes into turbine engines.
"And the funny thing is, Bruce knows far more about computers than I do ," Long says. "I'm really, really bad with gadgets and any kind of computer thing."
