Sam Riley Talks About "On The Road" Mention work with Kristen

guardian At his hippy retreat Salles had Riley and Minnesota-born Garrett Hedlund, who would play Dean, meet everyone he could find who had known the original Beat double act, writers and drug casualties and people who had been around their San Francisco of the 50s.
Neal Cassady's son came for a weekend. And all of these survivors looked Riley up and down. "Obviously I was as surprised as anyone else that Walter wanted a Yorkshireman to play Jack Kerouac," he recalls. "I remember the first biographer we met, a very nice gentleman whose whole life revolved around academic study of the Beats.
Garrett and I greeted him at the door and he said to Garrett: 'You must be Dean.' Then looked over my shoulder and said: 'Which one is playing Kerouac?' I said: 'I am.' He said: 'You are awful tall to be Kerouac, and you don't have blue eyes.' And I started to say something else and he said: 'My God! Are you British?'"

Not surprisingly, after a month of this, Riley and Heglund, and their co-star Kristen Stewart, who plays Dean's wild-child girlfriend, Marylou, were desperately keen to move on. Which was probably Salles's intention. Over the subsequent six months they properly took to the highway. "Walter wanted us to be as bonded as possible. We had to wrap Kristen's stuff in the first three months so we were flying all over the place to get the right weather," Riley recalls. "We went down to Patagonia for four days for the snow, and then Louisiana, 100% humidity, then Arizona, then Mexico, then Calgary, then we finished in San Francisco… "

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