Atlanta actor learns lessons from John Cena’s Netflix comedy ‘Little Brother’
Actor Pilot Bunch was in an orphanage as a young child in Kazakhstan, where he was barely touched before being adopted by an Atlanta family.
“As a result, I have a sensory processing disorder,” said Bunch, promoting his role as John Cena’s older son in the new Netflix comedy “Little Brother.” “I’m constantly seeking that attention I didn’t get as an infant.”
Acting fulfills part of that need, he said, on top of hobbies like skating and breakdancing. He recalled that power while playing Scar in a stage rendition of “The Lion King” as a third grader at Woodward Academy in College Park.
“When I first stepped on stage, it hit,” Bunch said. “I could take all this pent-up energy and pressure and throw it at the audience tenfold. I could fully let go of it all. Boom! All this power. I can control it and use it to tell the story. It was incredible.”
More than a decade later, Bunch gets to funnel his energy into “Little Brother,” which stars Cena as Rudd Landy, a driven, uptight real estate agent, and Eric André as possibly mentally disturbed Marcus Pinchel, who shows up unexpectedly to see his former “Big Brother” from a community service project more than two decades earlier.
Rudd Landy has his own sibling issues with his more successful older brother Josh (Christopher Meloni).
Bunch plays Shane Landy, the mildly obnoxious older brother to Cory Landy (Bryce Gheisar). It’s a younger-generation mirror image of Rudd and Josh, as illustrated by a scene where Shane and Cory battle over a girl.
Cena’s character spends most of the film steaming about Marcus, who moves into his home and endears himself to Rudd’s family and the producers of a reality show he’s on called “NYC Hustlers,” a parody of Bravo’s “Million Dollar Listing.”
While the premise sounds like it could be a family-friendly film along the lines of the 1991 Bill Murray comedy “What About Bob,” ”Little Brother” opts for more R-rated hijinks featuring a copious amount of scatological and sexual jokes, both verbal and visual.
And André, who has embraced absurdist extreme humor for his entire career, steals the show with little effort. “Working with him was extremely hard to keep a straight face,” Bunch said. “It was some wild stuff. The first thing he said to me was, “You want to go sniff some glue?’ He was in character doing his thing.”
At the same time, Bunch said André was genuinely kind and “an absolute treasure to work with. It was a dream. He taught me a lot not just about comedy and the industry but about life.”
On set in New Jersey, Cena was the grounding element. Each day, Bunch said, Cena would pose a question to each actor to learn more about them. “I would go to set with these full-on handwritten essays on a sketchbook answering these questions,” he said. “‘Why are you here? What keeps you going?’”
When Bunch was 14, a family friend who was an assistant director on AMC’s “The Walking Dead” gave him a chance to be on the most popular basic cable show of the 2010s. He played the bully of lead character Rick Grimes’ daughter Judith for two episodes.
“They threw me in there,” he said. “For a regular 14-year-old, it would have been horrible, but I was eating it up. I was ready for everything. There are rules on how many hours I could work, but I was begging them not to wrap me. I would have done it for free!”
Despite Bunch’s desire as a kid to go into acting, his parents resisted moving to Los Angeles.
“They wanted me to live a normal kid life,” he said. So he did local theater, including Serenbe Playhouse and Theatrical Outfit, and stayed at Woodward Academy, graduating last year.
His father, Kenny Bunch, is no stranger to media. He started a company, Dreamsocket, in 1995, creating apps, mobile sites and multi-user digital displays for clients like Turner Entertainment brands Cartoon Network, Adult Swim and CNN.
“When agencies and managers first started approaching us, my answer was always no,” Kenny Bunch wrote in a public post on LinkedIn. “I had lived in Los Angeles during the ‘90s and had seen enough of that world through friends to know it wasn’t something I wanted for anyone … It’s hard enough growing up and figuring out who you are without doing it in front of everyone else.”
Now 19, Pilot has two agents and a manager, landing a string of smaller roles in productions like the dramedy “Run Amok” starring Patrick Wilson and Molly Ringwald that is currently on the film festival circuit and HBO series “The Righteous Gemstones” and “Task.”
Pilot just completed his first year at Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah. SCAD, he said, gives him the flexibility to act in between classes.
“I am very grateful I found an institution that lets me work,” he said. “The coolest thing for me is finding people I am going to work with later in life.”