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The stylish Priest star Cam Gigandet takes a break from his steamy shoot in Mexico to chat about his John Wayne aspirations, young fatherhood, and his nastiest habit.
In the past twelve months, Cam Gigandet has played a Jesus freak with chlamydia (Easy A), a frat boy coping with a crazed stalker (The Roommate), and Christina Aguilera’s bowler-hat-wearing arm candy (Burlesque).

That makes this month’s Priest, in which he stars as a small-town sheriff and wannabe vampire hunter, his only recent project that could even semiplausibly be compared to a John Wayne film. And the Washington-state native doesn’t miss the opportunity.

“Priest is like The Searchers with vampires,” the 28-year-old actor explains, though he’ll cop to wearing a lot more makeup in this Westernish bloodsucking thriller than the Duke ever had to.

Gigandet is used to playing dress-up. He has a 2-year-old daughter (“Am I a young dad? Maybe in the year 2011 I am”), and she encourages his homebody habits, if she hasn’t exactly curtailed his smoking. Of the tyke’s influence over him, Gigandet says, “I could go out somewhere and talk to a bunch of strangers. Or I could sit and watch Megamind for the seventh time with my little girl. That usually wins out.”

So how did he explain this little escape to Mexico, then? Sometimes it’s nice to play dress-up with the big girls, too.

Source: GQ

When Cam Gigandet landed in Southern California a decade ago, looking for work, he certainly didn’t anticipate the day when he would be showing fangs in Twilight or ending up in bed with Christina Aguilera.

In fact, he didn’t even expect to become an actor. He was just a small-town kid from the state of Washington seeking to broaden his horizons.

Those horizons didn’t include playing bad guy Kevin Volchok in a TV series like The O.C., or a villainous vampire in the movie Twilight, or a vampire exterminator in the upcoming Priest, or a role in Golden Globe nominee Burlesque that involved getting naked with Aguilera.

In Burlesque, Aguilera and Gigandet both play characters who leave home because there’s nobody around them whose lives they want to emulate. She ends up as a performer in a Los Angeles Club; he’s the bartender who falls for her.

As a teenager in Auburn, Washington, Cam also felt this need to get out of town, even though he loves the place and is close to his parents.

“I respect so many people where I’m from,” he says. “So it was more that I had to try something new, something that I didn’t know, because this world is huge and I didn’t really know anything, living in such a small little city up in Washington.”

But there was no grand plan involved.

“I think the main reason I chose L.A. was because it was in the same time zone that my parents were living in. It was just on a whim, right out of high school — let’s just go to L.A. So just doing that was quite an experience.”

But he had no ambition to perform until a few months later, when a friend suggested he try acting classes.

“And that night, I knew that this is where I was going to be.”

In 2003, he won his first professional job and made his TV debut in an episode of CSI, moving from there to roles on The Young and the Restless, Jack and Bobby and The O.C., before branching into film.

He didn’t even have to audition with Aguilera before winning a place in Burlesque.

“I was working on another movie . . . called Priest at that time. So I’m all dirty in a leather outfit, killing vampires.”

Source: Montreal Gazette