We spoke with veteran TV actor Patrick Fabian leading up to the release of The Way We Speak, which is being released to the masses this week. Fabian plays a smooth-talking intellectual named Simon, who might remind Better Call Saul fans of Fabian’s acclaimed turn as Howard Hamlin from the award-winning series. Now that Better Call Saul is finally in the can, there have been postmortem debates about whether Howard was, in fact, a decent human being at the end of the day.
“I think you can make a quick case, over the six seasons of that show, that Howard’s the only one who is actually constant in his character and what he’s trying to do, which is basically just maintain a law firm,” Fabian tells MovieWeb. “It’s those crazy McGill brothers and other characters that sort of, you know, send [Howard] in a spiral, which is unfortunate.”
Fabian continues, drawing a parallel with his determined and opportunistic character Simon in the edgy new film The Way We Speak:
“[Howard] shares a lot with Simon in the same idea that, you know, when you talk from the outside-in about things, it’s easy to say, like, ‘Oh, Simon is
this
and Simon is
that
,’ but I certainly didn’t think he was like that.
I think Simon is merely trying to get what he wants, and he just has really bad tools about going about how to do it
.”
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‘Starstruck’ by Patrick Fabian
The Way We Speak (2024)
3.5/5
- Release Date
- July 23, 2024
- Director
- Ian Ebright
- Cast
- Patrick Fabian , Diana Coconubo , Kailey Rhodes , Ayanna Berkshire , Lowell Deo , Ricco DiStefano , and Reed Diamond
- Runtime
- 1h 27m
- Writers
- Ian Ebright
The Way We Speak writer-director Ian Ebright joined Fabian for our interview — and, like us, is a huge Better Call Saul fan. “It was Season 6 when I screamed on the couch [at Fabian’s shocking moment], and six months later, Patrick and I were working together,” said Ebright. “So my first feature as writer-director, I got to have that nice little, like, ‘Wow, it’s his iconic voice in the room’… It was really fun. I don’t feel like a starstruck person, but I got a little bit of that because he’s so good in the show.”
Ebright’s new film centers on a series of heated debates that Fabian’s Simon endures on a prestigious stage opposite a faith-based writer named Sarah (Kailey Rhodes). We watch as they bicker eloquently about whether God has a place in our world. “I thought that religion was the next closest thing to politics, you know, in the way that everyone holds their political views very firmly, everyone holds their religious or non-religious affiliation very tightly,” Ebright tells us. “So that seemed interesting and more, like, palatable as a setting for the whole thing.”
Given the hot-button issues explored in The Way We Speak, Ebright also shares with us how his new film could serve as a cautionary tale:
“I believe that we human beings can talk ourselves into anything. So we hold these political — or for the sake of this film, religious — views very earnestly, and that’s, you know, not really in question in the film, but we use that to do some pretty extreme things, you know? And so I think the cautionary aspect of it for Simon and Sarah maybe is, ‘Is it worth it?'”
From Gravitas, The Way We Speak was released on July 23rd, 2024. Watch our interview with the cast and crew below.
