CHRISTIAN SLATER CHECKS INTO AMBASSADOR HOTEL

Christian Slater stars as a food and beverage manager of the Ambassador Hotel who has an ongoing beef with the Mexican kitchen staff in the film Bobby. Christian did his homework for the role by talking to hotel staff working in the industry.

Christian lives but a few miles from the Ambassador Hotel where the death of Bobby Kennedy took place in 1968 and where Emilio Estevez actually shot the film. In fact Bobby was the last movie to be filmed there and it seems the construction crew couldn’t wait to tear the historic hotel down around them.

“I did a lot of research. I went to some different hotels and talked to some food and beverage managers because I wanted to get sort of insight of what goes on behind the scenes of a hotel. Some of it was very scary. Just the activity and the value that everybody plays making a whole big ship run. Every role is extraordinarily valuable.”

Aside from getting to shoot as much as possible in the Ambassador Hotel many of the extras used in the film were there the night that Bobby was assassinated.

“I’m still carrying around those souvenirs with me there was so much dust in the air that we breathed it all in. We breathed in the history of the place. We’d pull up to the set and there were dump trucks, bull dozers, dirt piles. It was a construction site. No doubt about it. They were tearing down walls and we had a small, small section of area that we could actually still shoot in. We used that opportunity to the best of our ability.”

Christian got his next couple of acting gigs working on Bobby. He shot a film called He Was a Quiet Man with Bill Macy who plays the hotel manager and got a role in Slipstream written and directed by Sir Anthony Hopkins who played the doorman in Bobby.

“A lot of the background people were equally as helpful some of whom had actually been there on the day. They could point to themselves in the archival footage and say, ‘that’s how I was standing. That’s how I was feeling,’ and that added a certain layer of power and poignancy to recreating those moments.”