Between fashion week and promoting the third Deadpool movie, Lewis Tan's Google Calender is stacked. “I'm in London right now,” he says over the phone. “And yeah, I need to be in Paris tomorrow. And then I'm in New York, Los Angeles, New York, back to Paris, all within the next two and a half weeks.” When asked if he'll be doing any sightseeing at all, he said “Well, as much as I can do. I will try.”
Tan is used to this. His dad was a big Hollywood stunt coordinator, and he worked on films like Tim Burton's Batman back in '89. But over the past couple of years, he's been trying to slow things down a little. “I'm in a kind of minimalistic stage in my life right now,” he says. "I just moved from LA to London, and I got rid of like 60 per cent of my closet, maybe more. And I narrowed it down to very few things. But the few things that I do have are very personal to me.”
For the 37-year-old actor, style is about owning all of the right essentials. “You need things that you can wear anywhere. You need things that you can dress up in many different ways. You need lots of clean colours and lots of black.” And that's exactly the sort of vibe that he wanted to bring to his Amiri look for Paris Fashion Week. It's a brand he's very into – for all sorts of reasons.
“Amiri is cool because it started in Los Angeles,” he says. “You know, I've been living in Los Angeles for 20 years. The culture is unique in that a lot of people from LA are not really from LA. They're all from different parts of the world.
“So, it becomes this kind of weird melting pot and it doesn't really have its own culture to grab onto. What I like about Amiri is it's one of the only few brands that really truly started there. It has that kind of Hollywood rockstar influence that only someone that's from LA will be able to understand. And that's what I like and respect about Mike [Amiri] and what he's done with the brand. It's pretty much stuff that I already like to wear.”
When asked if he remembers his first big fit for his first big event, he let out a laugh and he covered his face with his hands, as if he had one in mind that he never wanted to bring up ever again. "It was probably for the third Pirates of the Caribbean. I had a small part in it, but I'm friends with all the action team and I went to this huge premiere after shooting in the Bahamas for six and a half months.
“It was my first big movie. Johnny Depp was there, Gore Verbinski's directing it. And this is going to sound so bad, but I wore the same suit that I wore to prom. This was long before I had a stylist or anything and I didn't really know what I was doing. So, at that point, I was just trying to fit in.”
17 years later, and Lewis Tan's reprising his role as mutant superhero Shatterstar in Deadpool & Wolverine alongside Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds. It's a noisy role, and it couldn't be more different to who Lewis Tan is. Even the character's costume, with the bright red hair and the skinny jeans, is like an alter ego. “He wants all of the attention, whereas I keep things understated and let my work do the talking. But I like his boldness, I like his courage, and I respect his confidence. And these are all good things to have no matter what.”
