Chris Kerson talks 'Cost of a Soul'

War doesn't end on the front lines if you're from the slums. The Iraq War vets coming home in the independent film, "Cost of a Soul," have new battles to face when they try to slip back into their interrupted lives. For Tommy Donahue (played by Chris Kerson), the only job he can get is as a hitman for a North Philadelphia crime lord -- essentially performing the same service he did overseas. Kerson talks about what it was like to take on his troubled character in record time.

Q: You shot this film in 16 days?

A: My part was 16 days, but I think the whole film was 18-19 days, and these were 12-16 hour days! So basically, on average, we were doing two takes a scene, and seven pages a day. We had to sprint.

Q: That had to be tough, considering the emotions your character Tommy goes through...

And I was cast three weeks before filming. If you got a bigger actor, like Daniel Day-Lewis, you'd get six months to prepare for a role like this. I gained 25 pounds training with the Marines, kickboxing, trying to get the physicality of the role, because [director] Sean Kirkpatrick said, "I need you to get bigger." I went to Philly, I spent a lot of time with blue-collar guys from that area, to get the dialect right. Mark Borkowski [who plays Jake] is from Kensington Avenue, so he had it down. But I was constantly listening, like a hawk. I became this guy. The physicality and the dialect are important, but they're not everything. I was also concerned about his emotional life, but that was the easy part for me. I trained with Charlie Laughton, who is Al Pacino's mentor, and he worked with me for free. Being an actor is like being an emotional athlete. You have to train.

Q: Did it help to have an actress [Judy Jerome] play your wife with whom you'd acted before? She's played your lover in two plays, so you'd already developed that connection with her...

A: Judy, we're good friends. She was cast two weeks after me, so we had one week to get it running. But I told Sean, "You made my job easy now. It's easy to believe she could be my wife."

Q: Why do you think Tommy abandons his wife?

A: When I was talking to Sean, that was a lot of our phone conversations, what's the psychology here? His father was a criminal, his mother was killed in front of him when he was 5, and he has no sense of how to have a family. He hasn't had a good upbringing. So when she gets pregnant, what does he do? He joins the Marines, and he says, "I'll come back to you at some point." And he just keeps going, because the idea of being a parent is so negative to him. He becomes a machine because he's trying to block that whole side of his life out, and he becomes homicidal and suicidal.

Q: But seeing his physically impaired daughter Hope changes that. What was working with Maddie Jones like?

A: That child was the reason I wanted to do the film. When I read the script, they originally wanted me for Jake, but Tommy is an incredible role. I thought, "I got to do this." Because you see the light side of Tommy with his daughter. And amazingly enough, we got a girl who actually has cerebral palsy to play her. She looks like she's 6, but she's 9. I said to her, "You're the most important character in the film to me." She is one of the most intelligent little kids, and we became like best friends very quickly. I loved her so much.

"Cost of a Soul" is out Friday, May 20, in select AMC theaters. Visit the movie's official site for details.