Rod Lurie directs the controversial remake of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, which finds a young couple (James Marsden and Kate Bosworth) moving to a quaint southern town. Soon, though, their perfect getaway turns into a living hell when dark secrets and lethal passions spiral out of control. Trapped by a pack of depraved locals led by a ruthless predator (Alexander Skarsgård), they face a night of agonizing suffering and endless bloodshed. Their only hope for survival is to become more savage than their merciless tortures.

Straw Dogs makes its awaited debut on Blu-ray and DVD today, Tuesday, December 20th. To celebrate this release, we caught up with star James Marsden to go in-depth into the making of this modern day classic thriller.

Here is our conversation.

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James Marsden may be one of the dreamiest men on the planet, but he never gets the girl. “27 Dresses” aside, he’s almost always the nice guy in films who can’t catch a break when it comes to love. Need examples? Just watch “The Notebook,” “Enchanted” or “Superman Returns.”

But maybe now Marsden’s finally getting lucky — he’s guest starring alongside Tina Fey on “30 Rock” when it makes its mid-season return. However, the actor was terribly tight-lipped about his stint on the NBC comedy when asked at the Savannah Film Festival last week.

“I can’t tell you anything. I am doing a six-episode stint on the show, kind of like what Matt Damon did last year,” Marsden told The Huffington Post.

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James Marsden moved to Los Angeles when he was 19 to pursue a career in acting. He’s currently 38.

“So I just realized that I’ve been doing this for half of my life, exactly,” Marsden told me during a casual one-on-one Friday evening.

Those years spent honing his craft explain why organizers at the Savannah Film Festival chose Marsden as the recipient of this year’s Spotlight Award, which was handed to him on stage at Trustees Theater prior to the Director’s Choice screening. A montage of clips highlighting Marsden’s work emphasized his range: Stoic superhero in the “X-Men” trilogy; Easter Bunny guardian in “Hop;” exuberant dance-show host in “Hairspray,” and; henpecked husband pushed to the brink in “Straw Dogs.”

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ConnectSavannah.com has posted a new interview from Jimmy, thanks to b for the tip!

Is there a plus or a minus side to being closely identified with the X–Men franchise? A typecast point where you’d say “I don’t want to be the guy who’s in all the X–Men movies”?

James Marsden: I would never say I don’t want to be the guy from the X–Men movies, because my longevity, and the opportunities I’ve gotten in this business, are largely due to being cast in those movies. It was something that certainly put me on the map. As well as being financially lucrative, they also were really well–made movies and were reviewed really well.

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Source: MovieWeb.com

ComingSoon.net talked to James Marsden about playing David Sumner in Rod Lurie’s Straw Dogs, opening in theaters on Friday, September 16. You can watch the interview using the player below!

In the thriller, David and Amy Sumner (Marsden and Kate Bosworth), a Hollywood screenwriter and his actress wife, return to her small hometown in the deep South to prepare the family home for sale after her father’s death. Once there, tensions build in their marriage and old conflicts re-emerge with the locals, including Amy’s ex-boyfriend Charlie (Alexander Skarsgård), leading to a violent confrontation.

Source: ComingSoon.net

Source: MyFoxLA.com

James Marsden is having one of the most unusual years for a leading man in some time. We asked the star of this Fall’s Straw Dogs remake about making the transition from acting opposite a CGI rabbit to a gang of bloodthirsty rednecks

Here’s a hypothesis: No leading man in the long history of cinema has ever starred in two more outrageously opposite movies in a single year than James Marsden. First movie of 2011: Hop, a zany Easter flick for kids in which he stars alongside a tiny CGI bunny. The second: Straw Dogs, a remake of Sam Peckinpah’s ultraviolent home-invasion rape-and-kill-fest, in which Marsden burns off James Woods’s face with a pot of scalding hot water. “I made Straw Dogs first,” he says, “and now I think you know why I did Hop. I needed to do some goofy pratfalls and talk to a rabbit for a few months.”

In the 1971 Straw Dogs, Dustin Hoffman played David, a nebbishy mathematician who goes Seal Team Six on a pack of local lowlifes after they rape his wife. Marsden’s rakishly handsome David? A “Hollywood screenwriter.” This isn’t the only break with the original, and Marsden, 37, is already bracing for the critique that sanding away Peckinpah’s more provocative sexual politics leaves nothing more than an exploitative southern-gothic bloodbath.

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James Marsden had a pretty good weekend. HOP, the new family film, opened last Friday and came in number one at the box office. Besides starring in films like Hairspray and Enchanted, Marsden is busy raising his ten-year-old boy and five-year-old daughter making doing a family film like this a pretty sweet treat. He recently sat down with a group of mommy bloggers to discuss Hop, Easter and of course the Easter Bunny.

What were some of your favorite Easter traditions growing up or with your family now? What are you going to do?

James Marsden: We did the normal traditions. We did Easter Eve, we never called it that, but the night before, we would die eggs and paint them. We didn’t do anything outlandish or too different than most. We would wake up and the baskets and the candy would be there and we would have a hunt in the backyard, which always ended up in a fight, by the way.

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James Marsden’s new comedy, “Hop,” is a blend of state-of-the-art animation with live action. The actor, who continues to carve out a distinctive place in Hollywood with both comedic and dramatic roles, plays a 30-something out-of-work slacker named Fred who is trying to pull his life together. After he accidentally runs over E.B. (Russell Brand), the Easter Bunny’s son, while driving in Hollywood, the two develop an unusual friendship that leads Fred to discover his real purpose in life.

James sat down with us recently at a press conference in Los Angeles to talk about his new movie. He told us how he prepared for the role, what it was like working with improvisational comedian Russell Brand, and why it was challenging to shoot a film with a rabbit as his co-star. He also described how he celebrates the Easter holiday tradition with his children and why he made this film for them.

Q: You got to spend some time watching Russell do his recording sessions, how did that inform your performance and did it help being able to see what he was doing?

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