ON THE CORNER: The cast of “I Just Want My Pants Back” outside the real-life Mini Mart, (from left) Elisabeth Hower, Jordan Carlos, Sunkrish Bala, Kim Shaw and Peter Vack. (
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Over the summer, during filming of an episode of MTV’s new scripted show, “I Just Want My Pants Back,” a man strolled over to Peter Vack and slapped the actor across the face.
The thing was, the cameras weren’t rolling.
The TV crew was on a break from shooting a scene outside Greenpoint bar, Nights and Weekends, when Vack, 25, noticed a bar-goer chatting with a production assistant.
“All of a sudden, he walked over to me and slapped me in the face, just to prove that he was bigger and badder than us,” says Vack, who stars in the series.
“And it didn’t really hurt, but it was shocking. Seriously, who just slaps someone in the face and walks off?”
Add a few jaded quips, an eye roll and a sexual innuendo or two, and it could have been a scene straight out of “Pants,” MTV’s comedy about the struggles and absurdities that plague 20-somethings living in Brooklyn.
The show is a potent combination of “My So-Called Life’s” tangible angst and “Sex and the City’s” sexual frankness. The cast is as sinewy and bed-headed as the dialogue is fast and witty.
Perhaps the most bed-headed of all is Vack.
The long-haired actor plays lead character Jason Strider, a recent Cornell grad who comes to Brooklyn with big dreams, only to end up disenchanted, unemployed and jeans-less when a one-night stand steals his pants.
“I think it’s pretty accurate,” Vack says of the show’s depiction of college grads floundering to find themselves.
“And I think that’s what people are responding to. They see the characters struggling to sort of strike that balance of being not quite an adult and not fully a child . . . everything is uncertain.”
Vack can relate to that in-between stage. The native New Yorker splits his time between an LA sublet (he went to USC) and his parents’ Upper West Side apartment, which for him is “very rent-stabilized. As in free.”
But Vack may be getting kicked out of the nest sooner than later.
“My parents are actually moving to Williamsburg. And there will not be room for me, which is a subtle reminder that I should get the f- – – k out,” he says. (His parents already have some Brooklyn roots — they own a Crown Heights pizzeria, Barboncino, with which Vack was heavily involved, down to the design and menu development.)
Vack was born in the West Village, but spent most of his life on the Upper West Side (which the 25-year-old actor fondly calls “the suburbs”). He patronized West Side staples like Big Nick’s, La Caridad, and the Hungarian Pastry Shop and attended the tony Riverdale Country School.
Somehow, this private-school Manhattanite has become the poster boy for hipster Brooklyn.
“I know the show has been called ‘hipster’ and the characters have been called ‘hipsters,’ but I have to say, I don’t see the show or characters as being hipster,” says Vack, a confessed skinny- jeans lover.
“Even if we take sort of the most basic definition of hipster — which is maybe someone who believes they’re culturally elite and on the cutting edge of everything and has some level of snobbery about that — I don’t think Jason’s that at all. Jason’s the farthest thing from a snob.”