Who is he?

The movie Atlas Shrugged: Who is John Galt? opens Friday in Reno at the Century Summit Sierra. It stars a former Renoite, Kristoffer Polaha.

You have a new movie coming out. Tell me about it.

My new movie is Atlas Shrugged Part 3, Who is John Galt?, and I am playing John Galt.

So you have a Reno connection, why don’t you tell me a little about that.

My Reno connection is that I was born and raised here in Reno, Nevada. My mom and dad still live there. My dad is a local judge, and yeah, I’m home-grown, man.

You’ve had good success. What kind of movies—I think you’ve done more TV—have you done?

I’ve been working as a professional actor for the past 13 years now. I’m working on my seventh television show right now, which is a show called Backstrom for Fox. It stars Rainn Wilson who is late from The Office and Dennis Haysbert, who you might know as the Allstate guy, but more importantly as the president in 24. So it’s great it’s a fun show. I’ve done a lot of television and then I just started getting into movies. Last year, I was in a show called Devil’s Knot, which was with Colin Firth and Reese Witherspoon about the West Memphis 3, directed by Atom Egoyan who’s a pretty amazing, Oscar-winning director. That was a really intersting experience because it was about an actual case that took place in West Memphis … do you know this story? About the three guys who were accused of murder.

Sure I do.

And Johnny Depp and Eddie Vetter and all these people focused in and they finally pled the Alford Plea, and they’re all out now, and they’re all free. So that was a really cool movie to be a part of. And now I’ve done Atlas Shrugged Part 3, Who is John Galt? which is very interesting because it’s tied intrinsically to the libertarian movement, so it has become this very interesting political agenda movie. As an actor, I’m not really…you know what I mean, it’s been interesting to sort of see how that’s all worked out.

How has it worked out? I don’t think of Hollywood as being Libertarian in the least. I see it as more liberal or in some cases, extremely conservastive in some ways. Libertarian doesn’t seem to fit for me.

It doesn’t. And I didn’t really even understand who the Libertarians were until I actually did this movie. I think that the great thing about Hollywood is that everything is permissible in this town, and everyone has their voice and so the producers—it was sort of financially backed by private funders, and they just wanted to make this movie, and they had the rights for a while, and it’s three installments, and it’s just about getting the message out. So it’s somebody who loves the book. The producer is a man named John Aglialoro, he and his wife just love the book and they love Ayn Rand, and they love Objectivism, and they just wanted to make these movies. Now the bigger thing for me, when it comes to Ayn Rand is the fact that she’s an athiest, and if anyone knows me, they know I’m a Chriatian, which also someting in Hollywood that’s you knwo … a little more interesting than being Libertarian. But again, as an actor, you do jobs, I’m going to play people that I have nothing in common with, and that’s a part of the job. It’s the fun of the job. Obviously to play John Galt is a huge honor and a fun thing because he’s like a messiah figure for Objectivists. At the premier, people were like “You are John Galt; how does that feel?” I’m like, “It feels fine, it feels good.” But it doesn’t caerry the same kind of weight for me that it does for a lot of people.