Chris Lowell knows you don’t like him. That’s because he played Piz on the TV show “Veronica Mars,” and he comes between the two characters — Veronica and Logan — everyone wants to get together romantically.
What’s worse, in the new movie based on the TV series, he’s really causing problems, because he’s living with Veronica in New York, where she’s been attending law school. And the bad boy who everyone loves, Logan (Jason Dohring), is back in Neptune, Calif., where he’s a suspect in a murder case.
Will Veronica leave it all behind to resume her private-eye ways and return to Neptune to help Logan? Will she dump Piz and get back with Logan? Lowell isn’t letting out any secrets about “Veronica Mars,” but he understands why you resent him. “Ninety-nine percent of the fans are rooting for Team Logan,” he says, “and I don’t blame them.”
Lowell, 29, is an Atlanta native who has always been interested in acting and movies. While attending Atlanta International School, he studied drama and film and performed in plays. When he turned 18, he moved to Los Angeles to study film production at the University of Southern California.
On Labor Day weekend, while still a freshman, he went to the beach to play volleyball. “There was a guy there who was beginning his career as a manager. And he approached me and asked whether I had considered acting. He was hoping to get a job with an agency, and he wanted to be able to say he could bring all these people” as clients.
Lowell says he was skeptical, but he had photos taken, and then the aspiring manager got him a meeting with an agency. “They told me that they’d send me out on a couple of auditions, and that if they got good feedback, they would consider signing me. Then I got an audition for a pilot on (the 2004-05 ABC-TV show) ‘Life as We Know It,’ (which dealt with three hormonally charged male teens navigating the perils of high school relationships). I had never auditioned for anything, but I got a callback (for another audition.) And then I got another callback and was cast in the pilot,” Lowell says.
After the TV series, Lowell appeared in a couple of films, 2007’s “Graduation” and “Spin,” then got roles on “Veronica Mars” and “Private Practice.”
At a recent appearance in Austin, Texas, for the “Veronica Mars” premiere, Lowell talked about one of his biggest career moments: winning the Austin Film Festival’s 2013 Narrative Feature Jury Award for “Beside Still Waters,” as a first-time writer/director.
The movie focuses on a group of 20-somethings who are having a reunion at a cabin that they often visited while growing up. It stars Ryan Eggold as Daniel, the son of the cabin’s owners, who recently died in a car accident. It’s the last weekend that Daniel will be able to spend at the cabin, because he can’t afford it after his parents’ deaths. And the cabin is loaded with memories for nearly all of his friends.
Lowell says he got the idea for the screenplay from personal experience. “My family had a cabin at Lake Rabun (which is about two hours north of Atlanta), and the movie is a love letter to the place where I grew up,” Lowell says. His parents eventually decided to sell the cabin, and Lowell went back to live in it for the 31 days of escrow. “I wrote the screenplay while I was there, and I wrote like a psychopath. It was my way of finding closure,” he says.
He polished the screenplay with co-writer Mohit Narang and scouted locations for filming before settling on a magnificent log cabin in northern Michigan.
Since winning the award in Austin, Lowell says that he has received three distribution offers for his movie, but that the negotiations aren’t complete. A few days ago, he was back in Austin for a special screening of “Beside Still Waters” and to participate in a script reading for his next feature, “Isolation/Tribes.” He says the script focuses on a teenage boy who is arrested for robbing a pharmacy and is sent to a rehab facility in the wilderness.
But for the next few days, he’s content to focus on “Veronica Mars” — even though he’s expecting a little blowback for being Piz.
About the Author
