When 17-year-old newcomer Tony Revolori first met Bill Murray on the set of Wes Anderson’s latest film, the legendary bizarro actor was even kookier than Revolori could have imagined.
“On [Anderson’s last set,] ‘Moonrise Kingdom,’ there were a lot of stage parents. My dad was the only stage parent on this set. [Murray walked up to] my dad and said, ‘You know, I’ve thrown people in a pool for being bad stage parents. Don’t make me throw you in a pool,’ ” Revolori tells The Post. “By the end, after his week of shooting, Bill comes to me and he says, ‘You have a really cool dad. I’m not going to throw him in a pool.’ And I said, ‘Can you please? Because that’d be a great story.’ ”
As it is, Revolori’s own story is nothing to scoff at. An unknown kid actor, he stars opposite Ralph Fiennes in Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” in theaters Friday. Revolori plays the lobby boy and straight man Zero Moustafa to Fiennes’ eccentric, geriatric-humping hotel concierge, M. Gustave H. The film sees the duo steal a famous painting, pay the price and attempt to set things right amid the changing tides of Europe between the two world wars.
Guatemalan by heritage, Revolori grew up in Anaheim, Calif., and began acting at age 2 when his father, a former actor, started putting him in auditions. He still calls Anaheim, where both his separated parents live, home along with his two brothers — one of whom, 19-year-old Mario, is also an actor. People regularly mistake Tony and Mario for twins, and the two still share a bedroom. “We used to have bunk beds, but now we have separate beds to do separate things,” he says. “That could be taken wrong. To sleep!”
The brothers are hyper-competitive, regularly going for the same roles given their appearances — they both had parts in the 2009 baseball film “The Perfect Game,” and they were the final two actors Wes Anderson was deciding between for the part of Moustafa.
“I’ve lived in my brother’s shadow for a very long time,” says Tony. “But it’s a healthy competition. If I beat him, he’ll give me a hug and say, ‘Great job.’ ”
The director had fruitlessly searched for a young actor all over the world, from Lebanon to North Africa, for the character, who comes from a fictional Middle Eastern country. But an open call in good ol’ California found him Revolori. Four days after the audition, Anderson invited him to Paris to discuss the script. Two months later, he gave Revolori the career-making role — one that sees him joining a league of Anderson’s usual suspects: Murray, Edward Norton, Jason Schwartzman, Owen Wilson, Tilda Swinton, Willem Dafoe, Adrien Brody and Jeff Goldblum.
“I felt like we were really a family. It’s just kind of like [I was] a new cousin coming into town,” says Revolori. “We’d have dinner together every night. At the head of the table you’d have papa Wes, [then] uncle Owen, uncle Bill, cousin Jason.”
It was a surreal experience for the young actor, who was already an Anderson fan — he wishes he were most like Dignan [Wilson’s character] from “Bottle Rocket” but admits he’s probably more of the decidedly less cool Max Fischer [played by Schwartzman] in “Rushmore” — so it was particularly exciting that his purple lobby-boy costume is one of the most memorable visuals from the film.
“I want to lie and say it was beautifully comfortable, but no — It was tight,” he says. “The first day we went to a costume fitting, and I thought, ‘Oh, this is great.’ And then Wes comes in, he looks at it and he says, ‘Make it tighter!’ So I tried to lose some pounds, that way he wouldn’t notice that it got loose.”
As for his twee-to-the-max lobby-boy hat, all he has now is his memories.
“I wanted to keep it so bad but Wes was like, ‘Nope, I’m going to beat you to it,’ and he took it. I think it’s in his NewYork apartment, where he has a basement where he keeps mementos from all his different films,” he says.
“I joke that soon we’re going to see Bill Murray in an ice cube down there.”