Backstory: This month's "BAD GUYS" portfolio features the sorts of leading men - Benicio Del Toro, Mark Strong, John Hawkes - who do bad better than anyone else in Hollywood. And when it came time to pair a photographer with all that evil, director of photography Dora Somosi knew there was just one perfect fit: NADAV KANDER. "We really saw it only with him," she says. "The way he works with actors, the way he creates psychologically charged portraits that have layers to them, with the gorgeous lushness of his lighting and the overall intensity - it seemed so ripe for this subject matter." Kander also shot vignettes of each actor doing things that at first seem twisted and violent but ultimately are shown to be harmless and mundane - a dual endeavor that necessitated the splitting of the studios into separate environments, and that at times required twenty people on-set. "You end up with a film shoot and a photo shoot in tandem," senior photo editor Krista Prestek says. "It was a major enterprise to capture this idea that we all have moments in our day when we have the potential to be villainous." -GQ iPad Edition, June 2012.
