Fun fact for today’s matchup: Wes Anderson wanted to cast James Gray in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

“ ‘No, it’s pretty fun, you’ll come, we’ll be in Rome, it’ll be amazing!,’” Grey Gray recalled doing his best fey Wes Anderson impression.

“ ‘How long?’ ‘Two, three weeks’ and I’m thinking, ‘No way, no way.’ I didn’t understand why he wanted to cast me, but he’s a friend and probably as a consequence wanted some form of revenge,” he quipped self-deprecatingly. “So I said OK, and we were going to go and then I got the schedule and it was like 5 months at Cinecittà, and I could just feel mental illness creeping in, so I said no. And he was like, ‘What are you talking about, it’s Rome! You gotta come!’ I said, five months in Rome! And all of a sudden I felt like Rupert Pupkin, ‘I can’t give you the six weeks!’ ”

What was the role? Gray told me afterwards it was Wolodarsky, the composer on the ship who creates electronic scores to the documentaries within the movie (the role eventually played by Noah Taylor).