After a few years on the down-low, actor-producer-writer Dane Cook has stepped back into the limelight as both a standup comedian and serious actor. He currently stars as Derek, a struggling actor and waiter, in the locally shot and produced film, the comedy thriller “Boris is Dead,” slated for release in the fall. And he’ll be doing a 10-city standup tour beginning in October, stopping at the Ameristar Casino in Kansas City in November. “People say I am rebounding,” he says, adding that the pause in his career in the early 2000s came about because “real life stepped in.”
“I have never really stopped. With ‘Boris is Dead,’ I am entering into a new, very challenging, sort of plateau over the last two years.”
His involvement with “Boris is Dead” began when director James Cullen Bressack reached out to him through Instagram. “I caught his message, and it was really just very direct,” Cook says. “But something about it stood out. I wrote him back and said, ‘I’d love to read the script.’ I met him for lunch, and then I said, ‘Man, I really do love this, and it harkens back to some of the films that I loved growing up.’” Cook is also one of the executive producers of the film.
Cook has fond memories of Kansas City harkening back to his early standup days in the 1990s when he performed here about a dozen times. “Whenever I look back at my three decades of work in Kansas City in particular, it always takes me back to when I was new,” he says. “This was one of the few regions that really welcomed me and made me feel sort of like I was from here. During those trying and formative days of wondering if I am ever going to get out of the gate, Kansas City always made me feel a little bit like I was home. It’s the people. They’re great laughers.”
He worked on “Boris” for nine days in Kansas City. Filming wrapped in late November. There was a “nice little grace period” at the beginning, Cook says, where there’d be kind gestures and high fives with the locals. “Then there’d be a little bit of a hazing, because I’m a Patriots fan. So every day I had to go through a bit of a gauntlet. We did some verbal sparring.”
Cook didn’t have a lot of time to explore the restaurant and entertainment scene while here—the cast and crew were based out near the airport—but he did get a chance to go to the 801 Chop House in the KC Power and Light District. “I was regretting that I had found it so late in the production, because I would have been there maybe every other night,” he says. “I’m on the carnivore diet. My wife has been getting me in great shape. So I was really only eating steak, and steak and eggs then.”
There’s another production that’s coming together pretty quickly for him that may be coming back through Kansas City. “I’d love that,” Cook says. “So we might be bringing some more work your way, and you might be bringing more work my way.
“I left Kansas City saying not only would I want to come back here again but please get me a cheat sheet of the local crew. Because I would be seeking them out and seeing if they could come on board the next production.”
