In "Love" with Justin Timberlake!

In the raunchy, funny Mike Meyers comedy (with music) The Love Guru, hot Justin Timberlake is, at first, unrecognizable in the film as he portrays ace L.A. Kings hockey player Jacques Grande. Justin's longer, curly wig reminds us of his early N' Sync days but the freaky mustache totally debunks that image!

It seems that Jacques is quite the ladies' man as he romances the straying wife of a rival team member. The French-Canadian character is famous for being uh, well-endowed and for being a rabid Celine Dion fan! He sports a tattoo on his tummy; two arrows, one pointing up saying "The Man" and the other pointing down reading "The Legend". Get it? 'Nuff said. Justin has come a very long way from "The Mickey Mouse Club"!

After spotting Justin's untapped comedic ability on his "Saturday Night Life" guest appearances, the "Guru" filmmakers were quick to sign him to the movie and his hilarious performance made them all proud.

We got to chat with the mega-star (we were sitting less than a foot from him okay?) in Beverly Hills last week and found Justin to be friendly, charming, far from full of himself and we noticed just a touch of his original soft Tennessee accent.... yum! Picture this: curly light brown hair, slight beard, blue eyes that look directly into yours as he speaks, preppie/cute olive green and black stripe sweater over a black shirt and black tiny polka dot tie, black pants.

As Justin enters our interview room and sits down, he starts playing with the tape recorder in front of him, moving it around...

TeenHollywood: Do you have the OCD [Obsessive Compulsive Disorder] where you have to fix or rearrange everything?

Justin: [laughs] I have OCD mixed with ADD, you try living with that.

TeenHollywood: When you tried on the costume and you looked at yourself in the mirror....

Justin: I said, 'This is going to be funny. I know! All I have to do is show up now and this is going to be funny.'

TeenHollywood: The Member's Only jacket was fantastic.

Justin: Oh, thank you, thank you. You're the first person to comment on the Member's Only jacket and not the speedo.

TeenHollywood: Uh, well, that was nice too. What do you think that Mike Myers saw in you, that he thought you could pull this crazy role off?

Justin: I can't say, really, I would assume that my interaction with Mike promoting Shrek the Third and probably my couple of stints on "SNL", let Mike knew that I could, I guess, play the part.

TeenHollywood: Did he just send you the script or did he call you up and describe the movie to you?

Justin: He called first and then he sent the script and our conversation went something like, 'Hey, I want you to come play the villain in this new movie I'm working on. I've been work-shopping the character.' [in clubs and appearances]. I wish I would have gotten to workshop Jacques Grande. That was pretty amazing. Now he's just going to be too famous, I'm not going to be able to show up and do it.

TeenHollywood: Did you work on the accent or get a coach for the accent?

Justin: Both. Yes. I got the accent down proper and then, for the first couple of days that I was on-set, I just kept the dialect coach with me, and said, 'You have to help me find ways to milk this, because we're in a Mike Myers film, okay, so we have to be funny'. I'm the only other caricature really in the film between Mike and myself. Everybody else plays it kind of straight. But we are the antagonists in the film. I'm the other guy who's basically in a clown suit.

TeenHollywood: Does it help you to stay in character between takes? Did you keep the accent?

Justin: As much as possible. I would say something and then repeat it, you know, in 'zee accent', to try to keep it fresh. But a lot of it was picking out certain words where you could mess with the rhythm of them and sort of make them funny.

TeenHollywood: Was comedy always something that you could do easily?

Justin: I don't think it's easy.

TeenHollywood: But do you find you're funny? Where does that come from?

Justin: Well look at me! [uh, he's far from funny-looking]. Apart from that, I know that there's certain people in the world like Mike who just enjoy making people laugh. My earliest memories as a kid was I would always try to make my mom and my stepdad laugh at dinner. Or make my friends laugh in class. It's something I just really enjoy doing, especially to be part of something like this. You don't get this call every day because Mike doesn't do this movie but ever so often. So, you know, I jumped at the chance I think.

TeenHollywood: Did you go anywhere in your Jacques outfit and wig to see if anybody recognized you?

Justin: No, but funny enough, the first day that I worked there were a handful of crew members who didn't know it was me for the first half day. The director came up to me and he said, 'this is so funny, you're going to love this, a couple of the crew members just came up and said, 'Hey, isn't Justin Timberlake supposed to start shooting today?' And he was like, 'Yeah'. 'Well, did he not show up?' And it was like, 'That's him'. So when things like that started to come to my attention, I was like, 'this is going to be something memorable'.

TeenHollywood: You've hosted two very good episodes of 'Saturday Night Live'. We know it's risque but we have to mention the hilarious short you did 'D**k in a Box'. Did you know it was going to be such a phenomenon, so many plays on Youtube, etc.?

Justin: We totally were thinking Emmy. I finished the last lyrics and melody, and I said 'Emmy' [award]. [laughs]Uh, no. We knew it was funny to us. We knew, we were laughing and that must count for something. If you're having a good time it bleeds onto people. Lorne [Michaels, SNL Producer] said, 'we're having Justin on the show, we have to do some sort of digital short'. And Andy [Samberg] and I just got together and one of his co-writers said, 'What about the old D**k in a Box Joke?' And we were like, 'That could be funny'. Then all of a sudden, it was like, 'What if we made a cheesy, early nineties R&B song out of it?' I was like, 'alright, I got that'. We came back the next day and one of his co-writers had done a bunch of lines. So I just basically modified the lines, added words here and there and put it together like a puzzle and put a melody to it.

TeenHollywood: Do you get nervous when you have to host SNL?

Justin: It's just pure excitement. You get that little bit of nervousness because you know the next hour and a half you're just going to be running. You don't have time to think about it. There's no commercial break between the intro and the next sketch. It's a short amount of time. So that's how fast you're changing clothes. You don't have time to think about anything when the show is actually being taped.

TeenHollywood: Do you get nervous right before a concert or before going on set?

Justin: Not before a concert. But [on a movie set], I think it depends. You take a film like Black Snake Moan, basically, I was just an emotional wreck the whole movie, my character was. So there's a lot of concentration that goes into filming those scenes, you just feel the weight of them more than anything. I think for a performer, anytime the nervousness comes in, the focus jumps in as well and it overbears it in a way. It supersedes it. I think you just become uber-focused.

TeenHollywood: You've appeared in stadiums in front of 50,000 people. No butterflies then?

Justin: Oh, yeah, you get butterflies. It's not like, 'Oh my God, I hope I do good', you just kind of get caught up in the electricity of it, if that's what you mean, oh, yeah, that still happens to this day. And when that stops happening, you should stop. It's addictive, you know what I mean?

TeenHollywood: Was acting always an extension of your music? Was that always a plan of yours?

Justin: Funny enough, my stepdad and I just had a conversation. He goes, 'You know, it's so funny that you're actually still finding a way to get into film.' And I said, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'Remember when you were 14 and you were recording demos in Nashville?' The television show [Mickey Mouse Club] had gotten canceled and I was about to start high school. Our next thing was to drive out to L.A. for pilot season, and that's what I was going to do. But, I got a phone call from Chris Kirkpatrick, and he said 'there's a label in Germany that will sign us and we'll have an manager'. He didn't know [the guy] would end up serving 25 in jail..but that's not my business. It's just funny how it all kind of works out.

TeenHollywood: So are you surprised at how your career has turned out?

Justin: A lot but everybody says, 'Everything happens for a reason.' I don't know about that, but I know that one thing leads to the other. I think I've just been lucky enough to have some opportunities thus far to do films that I think are either good dramatic roles or good stories to tell or, you know... Jacques Grande [we laugh].

TeenHollywood: Do you know anything about hockey, and are you a Celine Dion fan?

Justin: I'm a Celine Dion fan. Maybe not as obsessive as my character.

TeenHollywood: Do you know her?

Justin: I do. Actually, she just left Vegas, right? When she opened up in Vegas, I hosted the television show her first night. I hosted it. An on hockey, I knew a little bit about hockey, but obviously I learned a lot. I got a crash course in how to play goalie, which is not easy at all.

TeenHollywood: The filmmakers said you were good.

Justin: I was okay, I did pretty good. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a pro basketball player. That's the only other thing that I did that I cared about when I was a kid. I played AAU ball, I played junior Olympic, I did the whole thing from the time I was eight until I was 14, and then all of a sudden I was 14 years old and I got the phone call saying, 'Hey, they'll give us a record deal. 'All right, that sounds pretty promising'.

TeenHollywood: Were you hurt during the hockey scenes?

Justin: I was really sore on the shooting days. I have sort of a bad back. I got a lot of back pain being in the outfit for 12 hours and within the first two hours, you do one move where you slide on the ice and the whole thing gets wet so it weighs twice as much. And it gets up to like 50, 55 pounds. I felt like I was carrying my boxer [dog] around all day.

TeenHollywood: What keeps you grounded? How are you able to avoid the whole celebrity thing, all the fame thing?

Justin: I think that it all goes back to family. I think it's how you're raised. At some point or another you have a moment where things become pressure. Because you do feel like people are watching you, and you do feel like you're going to affect people and you feel the weight of that. Then you deal with it one of [several] ways. For me, I was born and raised in a home where we were always taught that everybody puts their pants on the same way every morning. When I was a kid it was Michael Jordan. I remember when I was really young my parents told me, 'He's a great basketball player but that doesn't make him superhuman, you know? That makes him a great basketball player.' How it's affected me in my adult life with too much pressure to meet people's needs or fascinations, is I just let it go. I don't invest in it. And I stay away from it as much as I can.

TeenHollywood: What was the most fun moment on The Love Guru set?

Justin: Well the set was kind of a party the whole time. I think the most fun moment on set was actually getting to take slap shots from Rob Lake; meeting these legendary hockey players and then like skating around with them and them giving me tips on how to actually play goalie. I'm never going to do this after this movie's over, it's too painful. But I didn't tell them that, I was just like, 'Thanks man, thank you'.

TeenHollywood: Any new records coming out soon?

Justin: Not of my own, but I do have a lot of creative juice going into writing and producing my artists on our indie label. It's called Tennman Records. Tennessee Man. That's me!

TeenHollywood: Will there be any DVD extras with more of your performance in them?

Justin: There'll be a lot of them. I was informed that I had the most outtakes so I wasted the most film. When I first danced, I kind of went out there and I was like 'aw man, okay, let me dance ridiculously and see what happens'. You're doing it and there's no music playing. I'm just kinda dancing ridiculously to it and I got to the point where I'm like, 'Man, this is not funny. This is really not funny.' Then finally I just stopped and I was like, 'I can't dance anymore.' I had gone on for four or five minutes. We did a whole roll of film I think and then the director says 'cut' and all the actors were like, 'yeah' [and I got] this big huge applause. I was like, 'Oh, thank God.'

TeenHollywood: Any other movie projects coming up?

Justin: I just wrapped a film called The Open Road with Jeff Bridges and Mary Steenburgen and Harry Dean Stanton, a great cast. It's kind of a dramady and sort of my first time to play the lead, play the protagonist so it was a fun experience.

***

Lynn Barker is a Hollywood-based entertainment journalist and produced screenwriter.