In Never Back Down, Faris plays Jake Tyler, a troubled kid who gets into more than his share of fights. After the death of his father, he moves to Orlando, Florida with his family and his brawling past follows him. It's there that he finds MMA and the teaching of Jean Roqua (Djimon Hounsou) who becomes his mentor and father figure. Faris is in nearly every scene in the movie and it feels like he's right about to break out this summer. Faris stopped by Chicago to talk to The Deadbolt about Never Back Down, his career, his training regiment, and the many movies that inspired him.

THE DEADBOLT: I was just going through message boards about the movie and wondered whether you allow yourself to do that. Do your read posts on seanfaris.com or go to fan sites or do you kind of just let that do its own thing?

SEAN FARIS: I kind of let it do its own thing, because a lot of times there's good and there's bad. I feel bad for the people writing the good stuff because I stay away from it so it doesn't mess with my head too much. But there's tons of bad stuff, too. There are a lot of haters in the world. I don't know if you've seen - who's that guy? Feel free to write about him, Bob_Vila on IMDB? We just think that must be the biggest hating guy that's out there. We don't know who this person is and he claims to know me and writes all kinds of things about me. It's like, "Dude, come on. You're going to spend all your time trying to rip me apart? And you're on MY page all the time writing about me and you have no life. Get a life of your own." There's this one guy in New York who was like, "The movie's going to be a bad representation of martial arts. All the moves are illegal." The thing is - the movie's not about tournament fighting. When you're fighting in the street, you're not going to worry about if the move's illegal or not. And then, of course, I'll bet $50 the guy goes and sees the movie. They'll sit there and tear you apart left and right and then they'll be the ones that get you up to $20 million opening weekend. I think people are bored and they need something to do. Every time someone's up high, people want to knock them down.

THE DEADBOLT: And the internet gives everyone a voice.

SEAN: And it gives them a voice without having to face up to what they say. They can sit there behind their computer screen and type it out. You don't even have to hear their voice. They can go hide behind their computer screens. Come on out in the real world and let's talk about it. Let's have an open press junket. I'm down.

THE DEADBOLT: Were you a fan of MMA before the movie?

SEAN: Oh yeah, I've been following UFC since 2000. The way I discovered UFC was through some old tapes like Royce Gracie and the guard getting beat for like thirty minutes straight and then pulling off an arm bar.

THE DEADBOLT: Are you a big sports fan in general?

SEAN: I watch them but I don't follow closely. I love to watch football. I love to watch basketball. At times, I'll flip on tennis. It depends on what mood I'm in. The other day I was watching NASCAR, I'm down with anything. Believe it or not, one of my favorite things to watch is golf.

THE DEADBOLT: What kind of training regimen did you have to go through to get into shape for the movie?

SEAN: The training regimen from hell. It was about six hours a day, six days a week.

THE DEADBOLT: For how long?

SEAN: Three and a half months.

THE DEADBOLT: So how do us regular people get into shape like Sean Faris in Never Back Down?

SEAN: Eat four to five thousand calories a day. Go and do Muay Thai, Jujitsu, Tae Kwon Do, lots of stretching, and you see a chiropractor twice a week. You see a massage therapist twice a week to keep tuned up so you can come back to work and train more. After that, you go and see your weight trainer and work out for two hours. It was like working from 9 to 5. We were getting up at 7:00am, getting started around 8:00am, and getting home around 7:00pm.

THE DEADBOLT: And I'm sure you had to keep up the schedule during filming.

SEAN: Yeah. But the difference was that all of our [pre-production] work was purely physical and lots of conditioning so that we could do the three weeks of fight scenes.

THE DEADBOLT: So, you filmed all the fight scenes back-to-back?

SEAN: We had to because about three weeks into the film, Djimon Hounsou body-slammed me and broke my back, literally. Not on purpose. Take eight, ten, or fifteen, I don't know any more - He broke my back. We had to push all the fight scenes to the last three weeks.

THE DEADBOLT: Was that the only injury?

SEAN: I also broke my thumb, or dislocated it, or something. I'm not sure what I did to it. All I know is that it still hasn't healed right.

THE DEADBOLT: What do you and Jake Tyler have in common?

SEAN: What we have in common is the fact that I too moved at an important time in my life. I moved right before I started junior high school when I was 12 years old. It was right around that puberty era when the friends you have are going to be your friends for life. I don't talk to those people any more because I was separated from them. I lived in Cleveland and I was a bit of an outcast at first. I was with kids who had been going to school together since kindergarten. In high school, I had my fair share of fights come my way. Other than that, my father's still alive and so is my mom but my parents are divorced, so I also know what it's like to come from a one parent family.

Sean Faris Won't Back Down Page 2