“When I first found out that that's who I'm playing, I just wanted to do him justice,” Jeanes said in a phone interview with The Oklahoman. “It's an honor just to even be mentioned in the same breath as the first man who walked on the moon.”
Jeanes said he studied film of Armstrong to attempt to get down the general cadence and character of the astronaut. But he said he aimed to play the experience and emotion of the part more than an impression of the famous figure.
“I knew I wasn't going to get his voice perfect, so I just went as much like it as I could,” Jeanes said. “I didn't want people to go, ‘What is he doing with his accent?' So I wanted to make sure that suspension of disbelief stayed intact, and just got as near to that as possible.”
“Dark of the Moon” supposes there was a secret reason for the moon landing — an artifact that will prove important to the Autobots and Decepticons, two opposing factions of alien robots known as Transformers.
“We were told what we were seeing, but what I did is, I immediately found something in my own life that I had been through that related as closely to what we were supposed to be imagining as possible, and I tried to envision that on top of it,” Jeanes said. “I just tried to imagine that fear of being so far away from home and really not knowing ... because once they landed on the moon, that was just half of it. They had to get off the moon, and then they had to meet up with the orbiter, and then that orbiter had to make it all the way to Earth, not to mention they had to crash-land through our atmosphere to get there.”
Jeanes has a heavy dose of sci-fi among his current projects, with the Web series “Alpha Planet” and the Corbin Bernsen film “The Ascension.” He thinks some of his casting could be because of his military manner: Two of his uncles were military men, and Jeanes considered joining the military before his acting career took off. He plays weapons expert Luke Brodie in “Alpha Planet,” a Web series set 250 years in the future in which humanity is living on a refugee ship. He's one of four explorers sent back to Earth to determine whether the once-ruined planet is again inhabitable.
“We filmed ‘Alpha Planet' over the course of a year, and we would shoot once a month, and the episodes would come out once a month. It's a real independent production.”
Jeanes was born in Lufkin, Texas, and grew up in the Texas towns of Moscow and Humble. He has some Oklahoma in his pedigree, as well, as his grandmother Sally Burnett was raised in Oklahoma City. While he wanted to be an actor from a young age, Jeanes promised his mother he'd first give business a try. Attending college on a theater scholarship after earning his degree, he did business-to-business sales for a staffing agency starting in 2003. He went door-to-door helping to place administrative assistants.
“I've actually been in every floor of every building in downtown Houston,” he said. “I wore holes in my shoes.”
By 2004, he wanted to give acting a full-fledged try, so he followed his college roommate to New York.
After a couple of years, they moved to Los Angeles, where Jeanes has appeared in commercials and TV series including “CSI: New York.”
“Transformers 3,” directed by Bay, is his biggest-budget film to date.
“By any standards, it's one of the biggest movies you can be on, so I really have nothing to compare it with,” he said.
Jeanes said he worked primarily with Cory Tucker, who played Buzz Aldrin, along with Bay and the film's crew and cinematographers.
“Michael Bay was actually really great to work with,” Jeanes said. “I was surprised at how hands-on he was, and personable.”
Jeanes' role as Armstrong is prominently featured in the trailer for the film. Jeanes said he had some indications that might happen, based on things Bay said on the set.
“We were there on the first day of shooting, so I think everybody was fresh and eager and ready to go,” he said. “And just that air, that you can just feel, ‘OK, we're shooting ‘Transformers,' and this is No. 3, and we're going to rock it.”
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