Kristoffer Polaha on Working With Angie Harmon for 'Buried in Barstow,' Reteaming With Colin Trevorrow for 'Jurassic World Dominion'

Kristoffer Polaha is one of those artists who has been defining "booked and busy" for years.

As an actor, he has been working professionally since the early aughts, spending most of his time on television, guest-starring on everything from Angel and Tru Calling, to leading the casts of Life Unexpected and Hallmark Channel's Mystery 101. 

He hasn't stopped at "just" performing, though. He created a company called Podunk Productions, through which he is producing an adaptation of his first novel,

, while a second novel in that From Kona With Love romance-drama series is set to be released in October 2022. A Work of Art, a short film he wrote, produced, and starred in just screened at the Cannes Film Festival. And he is helping shepherd the next generation of filmmakers through working with students at his sons' Los Angeles-based school. He also hosts the popular Instagram Live weekly talk show The Polaha Chautauqua.

How his busy-ness is most obviously paying off today, though, is through the release of back-to-back films, all while he is in production on something new. Buried in Barstow, the first in a hopeful franchise, sees Polaha play opposite Angie Harmon, who also executive produces the Lifetime original movie and launches June 4. Then, the following week he can be seen on the bigger screen in the latest Jurassic franchise installment Jurassic World Dominion, which is directed by Colin Trevorrow.

Here, Polaha talks to Metacritic about similarities between the characters in these two films, shaping the ending of Buried in Barstow with Harmon, and working with Trevorrow again — not only 20 years after they first teamed up, but also more than two decades after the director first pitched him the idea for his Jurassic story.

Your character Elliot in Buried in Barstow appears very broken when he is first introduced to Angie's character Hazel and the audience, but things come out about him that make the audience realize he could have been faking that brokenness. How morally comprised did you consider him?

I don't think he's a bad guy. And I think the moment he met Hazel, his whole world pivoted. There's a job that he sets out to do, and he did it for safety, but in the course of the show, he was unofficially bowing out of his deal in favor of taking care of Hazel, and he was changing allegiances. But I think that also speaks to his character: He's someone willing to make a deal and he's somebody who's got a murder on his hands.

[The murder] was drinking and driving, and it was 100% an accident, but to get behind the wheel with somebody and you're drinking and driving, that's a choice, and there's a certain amount of arrogance that comes in. I think he had this idea of like, "Well, nothing's gonna go wrong with me; I got this." And then something went terribly wrong and he ended up in prison.

My dad was a defense attorney and when I was a little boy, he took me to Carson City State Penn, and I had to wait in the car for him when he met with clients. I watched all these guards up in the prison with guns walk around. And it was one of those crazy moments. I was a little kid — like seven or eight — and when he got back in the car, he said, "Kris, whatever you do in your life, don't end up in here."

So, we all have choices that we're gonna make, and Elliot, he, from story point of view, had this really successful career — he was a fancy doctor and living the high life — and he chose to get behind the wheel when he was drunk and and it cost his fiancée's life, which is also his happiness. So, the idea of him meeting Hazel, I liked the idea of raising the stakes on that relationship. I would love for the stakes to be raised so high that she's redemptive for him, and he is somehow redemptive for her, and they kind of save each other.

Jumping into what sounds like the start of a franchise for Lifetime, what does that mean for you at Hallmark?

I don't have an exclusive with Hallmark. I think they love it when their actors work elsewhere because they're like, "Our guy on ABC!" When Wonder Woman came out, that delighted them to no end because there was cross-press pollination, and so, I think it's an "All ships rise with the tide" kind of thing. And [Barstow] is such a different type of content; it's much darker.

But there is a bit of a mystery element to it, and you do have the Mystery 101 movie series.

Mystery 101 is, for all intents and purposes, on a very long hiatus. We will find out about the future of Mystery 101. That's not to say it's canceled, but I have no dates as to when we're going to do No. 8.

I got this random call from my co-star in October and she was like, "Yeah, we're not going to shoot Mystery 101 in November, it might get pushed to January." And I got on the phone with everybody at Hallmark and said, "Hey, what's going on?" My Spidey senses were tingling, and I was like, "I don't know that we're gonna film this one any time soon." And my agents called with Barstow, and it was like a little God wink because it was literally going to shoot at the same time as Mystery 101 was going to shoot. And I signed a contract for four movies, and I know that they have every intention of making more of these in success. And it was a lot of fun. It's a very different thing because it's Angie's show and she's a producer and everyone is there, really, to support her character. But in that, my character and her have a really cool, fun story line, and I'm excited to see where it goes.

How did the idea of four Barstow movies affect the ending of the first movie? Was there a cliffhanger version and an alternative in case they found out they couldn't do more?

We were on the set and [director] Howie Deutch, Angie Harmon, and our producer Laura Notarianni and me were standing in the barbecue restaurant and all of a sudden it dawned on us that we needed a stronger ending. And so, Angie and I literally stood around pitching endings with Howie and Laura, and what you see is what we came up with. We jammed it out. [Elliot] is a doctor — a cardiothoracic surgeon — and it was a fact but it wasn't applicable [until the end]. So I think you'll see how he can use his skills in future movies. So, the ending was tweaked and they shot it thinking, "It's full steam ahead to the next one."

How different is Elliot from your other upcoming character, Wyatt in Jurassic World Dominion?

I'm just gonna say this: There might be duplicity in Elliot, and there might be some duplicity in Wyatt. It might weirdly be similar.

I can't say much about Jurassic World, but I will tell you this: Colin [Trevorrow] and I have known each other for a very long time. He was my roommate in college — we met on Semester at Sea around the world together — and I did a short film for him back in the day. He did some directing stuff for [my wife] Julianne when she worked at the Union Rescue Mission in Downtown L.A.; he was one of my groomsmen in my wedding. We've had a nice, fun, long relationship, and back in 2001, we were watching the third and final Jurassic Park together, and we were both film nerds and he was a student of Steven Spielberg. He taught me so many things about how Steven Spielberg told stories and the camera angles he used and why he used them. He just had this really high IQ for those kinds of stories. And when the movie ended, and he was like, "Yeah, that was an interesting way to end it. I really liked that. But I know what they should do next." And he proceeded to pitch the entire Jurassic World concept: The Barbasol can had DNA in it and it gets off the island and all of a sudden dinosaurs are in the world, they're part of the city and they're running amok, and you literally will call it Jurassic World. And I remember sitting in the theater, hearing the pitch, 21 years ago. So, when he got the job for Jurassic World, there wasn't a shadow of a doubt in my mind that he would crush it.

You worked with him on a short film titled Home Base 20 years ago. Beyond the scope and budget, which is obviously much bigger on a film like Jurassic World Dominion compared to short, how different was it to work with him all this time later? 

We used to to play frisbee back in college, and we would count, "How many we can catch before we drop it?" And [on the film] we just brought in Mamoudou [Athie, who plays Ramsay], and we brought in Ashley the trainer, and Scott Haze [who plays Rainn], so the circle grew, but we were just, every Sunday, playing frisbee during the shoot. [Laughs]

He's not a bombastic director. He knows what he wants; he has a real keen eye for the technical aspects of the things that he's shooting. And so, what that means for the actors is there's a lot of room for play and a lot of room for, "How about this?" And he's like, "Try it, let's see." [That was] how it was on the short: there were shots that he wanted to get, and everything else was, "Have fun."

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What was it like filming with the dinosaurs? Was this an instance of looking at a tennis ball on a stick, or were you interacting with animatronics or stand-in animals?

The special effects have gotten so good that they don't need to do tennis balls anymore unless the actors need specifically a mark to look at. They basically say, "Look around," and you look up somewhere and they're like, "Yeah, great, mark that." So you're looking up in the sky, into space, into empty air.

But having said that, the dyno team — the animatronics team — they have an entire workshop where probably 100 men and women are building these unbelievably realistic dinosaurs. They have all these little, tiny mechanics in their eyes for for every squint, all these micro features, and they're digitally controlling them. They're like these amazing robots. The flesh has texture and somebody comes with paint and they'll do each little bump. My kids got a chance to to walk around and see these dinosaurs getting made and there's one that's like four stories high. That's an actual, practical, physical dinosaur.

My character engaged with Blue, and we were dealing with a real, physical thing in a bag. And then we were also dealing with some stuff that was not real. In the trailer when you see us gunning at something, all of us were just following our own little dinosaur, and they would just put them in. It used to be where the director would have to shoot the panel and the panel would be a static shot. Now the panel can move and can have actors in it, you just have to make room for the special effects that build in post. It's really extraordinary. The future moviemaking is only getting more and more exciting. 

Talking about the future of movies, was Cannes an opportunity to try to grow A Work of Art into a feature? And do you have any updates on the Moments Like This adaptation?

I think that one is what it is. For Moment Like This, we just hired a writer. Anna [Gomez, co-author] and I could have adapted that thing, but I just think it's essential to have a fresh pair of eyes. And the idea would be for like a Crazy Rich Asians or a trilogy of movies based on a series of books. My hope is that we're building a universe and that we're doing something for the theater and for people to go and see a really romantic, beautiful, fun, escapist movie. Having seen what's happening in Cannes and how storytellers all over the world are telling stories and what gets made and what doesn't get made, it's an exciting time. I feel pretty inspired again to be telling stories.

Get to know Kristoffer Polaha:
Polaha broke out playing John F. Kennedy Jr. in the original television movie titled America's Prince: The John F. Kennedy Jr. Story and later went on to star in North Shore, Mad Men (Metascore: 86), Life Unexpected (69), Ringer (59), and Backstrom (51), among others. On the big screen, he recently appeared in Wonder Woman 1984 (60).