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Tristan McLean Is Just Getting Started
Clarissa Harding for Esquire Magazine
Tristan McLean raises his eyebrows at you over a beautifully starched white table cloth.
The waiter has been listing elaborate entre options for the last 5 minutes, and shows no signs of slowing down. Between appreciative “hm”s and polite smiles, he locks eyes with you with increasingly amused expressions - ‘where on Earth have we two regular people ended up?’ his eyes seem to say. He looks like he’d prefer to order a burger and fries, but can’t find it in him to let the worshipfully attentive waiter down, and thus settles on grilled octopus served with onion stifado and wild oregano dressing, alongside the recommended wine pairing.
He’s an award winning actor, millionaire, People’s Sexiest Man Alive, and a popular contender for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his performance as a disgraced American spy playing off Scarlett Johanssen’s straight arrow in the midst of World War II in Silent Cipher. We’ve chatted briefly about the role, and I’ve received some canned responses about the honor of portraying such a pivotal point in American history, and what a pleasure it was to work with Scarlett, but for all his polished Hollywood charm, his mind is clearly elsewhere.
It’s not hard to guess why. King of Sparta, McLean’s longest running and most profitable franchise, is currently closing filming of its fifth installment before it’s moved into the purgatory of post production. He’s managed to muster the manners to keep his cellphone off the table, but he just reads the live production updates off his Apple Watch instead.
While the original King of Sparta was a thrilling action adventure that launched McLean’s career and is considered by many to be a modern classic, many of the subsequent films have fallen prey to the familiar missteps of Hollywood cash grabs - plots becoming more predictable, characters less memorable, and CGI less believable. This isn’t to say that the franchise has never attempted a face lift: King of Sparta IV: Seas of Change was an ambitious attempt to pivot the franchise into a kind of historical political drama. As McLean’s first time behind the camera as a producer, the concept had real potential, and attempted to grapple with what a political system based on violence does to a society and what a lifetime of trauma does to a man.
What resulted was a kind of plodding political machismo, overwrought with condescending monologues on archaic litigation systems interspersed with apparently random battle scenes when the filmmakers panicked about losing the audience.
McLean was as charming a protagonist as ever, but that wasn’t enough to save it. The film was panned by fans and critics alike.
It was a humiliating defeat for McLean personally, and resulted in a brief hiatus from the public eye while he “recovered creatively”.
But nevertheless, McLean has returned as producer on the upcoming sequel: King of Sparta V: Dynasty, and there is much more than just his career riding on it this time.
The story, Tristan tells me, goes like this: he and long time friend and King of Sparta producer Douglas Hankin stagger into his stylish Malibu kitchen after yet another grinding Golden Globes award ceremony, pouring glasses of scotch and reminiscing about the good old days.
The conversation takes a pit stop on a familiar topic: the future of the King of Sparta franchise. They volley some of the same old ideas back and forth, exhaust themselves quickly, and move on to discussing Hankin’s fledgling whiskey distillery. Then, Tristan’s adult daughter ducks into the room to grab a glass of water, smiles at Hankin, and bends to kiss her father on the cheek. Faces side by side, the family resemblance is so striking - “and she really is, like, my little clone” - that Hankin has an idea.
“Thinking of legacy,” Tristan muses, “really got us back to the heart of what made King of Sparta - the first film - so powerful at the time. Building something you believe in, making it strong, making it part of history. That’s really only something we can do through, and for, our children. That’s the next step of the story.”
Introducing Alexios’ long lost child to the King of Sparta saga forces us to delve into his mysterious past, and consider the future of all that he’s fought for so far. King of Sparta: Dynasty brings us intimate family drama never before seen in the series, although, McLean promises, audiences won’t miss out on the legendary battle scenes in this installment either.
And playing Alexios’ long lost child? Why, the girl in the kitchen, of course.
Piper McLean is a 21 year old sophomore at UCLA, majoring in Psychology and minoring in French. From a potentially biased source: she is athletic, popular, charming, and intelligent. Tristan is the picture of a proud father, complete with the iPhone photo album shoved under your nose: Piper on a surfboard, Piper graduating highschool, Piper, age 12, on a horse, Piper, age 6, wearing a pink tutu and a murderous expression. The resemblance really is striking.
But does she have what it takes to take on a major role in a project this size? For all her apparent talents, she doesn’t have a credit to her name. In a popular climate already exhausted with famous offspring, is casting Tristan’s untested daughter a breath of fresh air or a death knell?
Tristan looks thoughtful.
“I see where you’re coming from, I do. But what you’ve got to understand is that Piper really gets King of Sparta. I mean, she’s been running my Alexios lines with me ever since she could read. She understands the energy, the force you have to bring to make this genre make sense. She even has the accent down,” he chuckles, referencing the occasionally corny kinda-Greek-or-is-that-Arabic accent he invented for the role.
“I won’t pretend there isn’t a sentimental aspect to her casting, but I think it stands to make the film stronger, rather than weaker. I mean, when I imagine losing her like that, thinking she was dead for so long… well, let’s just say no one has to break out the onions.”
“But while I have the utmost faith in her, I understand that not everyone does. Piper had to undergo all the same screen testing any other actress might have for the role, and we would not have moved forward with her if Rob,” Robert Adelson, Emmy winning director of Old Bones and upcoming King of Sparta: Dynasty, “hadn’t also signed off on her.”
But at 45 himself, Tristan McLean isn’t exactly the decrepit King Pleistarchus, looking for someone to hand his crown down to. For the 20 years we’ve known and loved him, his image has been consistent: the mysterious, sexy lone wolf. The unattainable hunk everyone wanted but no one coulg have. What does this shift towards being the publicly announced family man mean for his future?
Tristan chuckles and turns a bit red.
“Come on, be serious. I never asked people to see me that way.”
It’s not impossible, I point out. A carefully crafted star-persona isn’t so uncommon.
“No, no that’s true,” he sobers up.
“I suppose I held off on dating for so long because I already had the love of my life: my daughter. We only really had each other, and that little girl needed me. Between her and my career… it wouldn’t have been fair to add another person to the equation. And then that whole story… sprung up in the cracks, I guess.”
“But she’s not that little girl any more. She’s a strong young woman who can handle whatever the world throws at her, and it’s really exciting to get to share my other passion, my career, with her now.”
And his personal life?
“Well,” his famously warm chocolate brown eyes twinkle at me from the other side of the starched white table cloth, “it’s pretty exciting to have the house to myself again, too.”
I think I’m blushing.