Mar 12, 2014 7 min read

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) – Chris Lowell knows you don’t like him. That’s because he played Piz on the TV show “Veronica Mars,” and he comes between the two characters – Veronica and Logan – everyone wants to get together romantically.

What’s worse, in the new movie based on the TV series, he’s really causing problems, because he’s living with Veronica in New York, where she’s been attending law school. And the bad boy who everyone loves, Logan (Jason Dohring), is back in Neptune, Calif., where he’s a suspect in a murder case.

Will Veronica leave it all behind to resume her private-eye ways and return to Neptune to help Logan? Will she dump Piz and get back with Logan? A lot of fans in Austin already know the answer to those questions, since Austin director Rob Thomas’ “Veronica Mars” had its world premiere Saturday at the South by Southwest Film Festival. (The movie opens nationwide Friday).

Lowell isn’t letting out any secrets about “Veronica Mars,” but he understands why you resent him. “Ninety-nine percent of the fans are rooting for Team Logan,” he said, “and I don’t blame them. Jason (who plays Logan) is a very charming guy, and if I weren’t playing Piz, I would be on Team Logan. He’s the classic James Dean-esque bad boy. Who wouldn’t fall in love with him?”

When Lowell joined the cast during the third and final season of the TV show on the CW Network in 2006-07, he said that Thomas warned him about the pitfalls of being Piz. “He told me early on that my character would be controversial because he was breaking up the big romance on the show, but he thought I was a nice enough guy that people wouldn’t hate me too much,” Lowell said.

Despite the negative energy directed toward Piz, Lowell said, he didn’t hesitate when Thomas, the creator and director of “Veronica Mars,” sent him an email to see whether he’d be willing to play Piz again in the movie. (The email came before a much-celebrated Kickstarter campaign to fund the movie in March 2013, which reached its $2 million goal in fewer than 10 hours.)

“I wrote back with yes 11 times,” Lowell says. “I was just thankful that I didn’t have to donate to be a part of the film. Plus, Rob is very easygoing and a great person to work with. He has no ego, and he loves actors.”

Getting started

Lowell, a 29-year-old Atlanta native, has always been interested in movies and acting, and while attending the prestigious Atlanta International School, he studied drama and film and performed in plays. When he turned 18, he moved to Los Angeles to study film production at the University of Southern California.

On Labor Day weekend, while still a freshman, he went to the beach to play volleyball. “There was a guy there who was beginning his career as a manager. And he approached me and asked whether I had considered acting. He was hoping to get a job with an agency, and he wanted to be able to say he could bring all these people” as clients.

Lowell says he was skeptical, but he had photos taken, and then the aspiring manager got him a meeting with an agency. “They told me that they’d send me out on a couple of auditions, and that if they got good feedback, they would consider signing me. Then I got an audition for a pilot on (the 2004-05 ABC-TV show) ‘Life as We Know It,’ (which dealt with three hormonally charged male teens navigating the perils of high school relationships). I had never auditioned for anything, but I got a callback (for another audition.) And then I got another callback and was cast in the pilot,” Lowell said.

“I was just a freshman in college, and while everyone else was sweating bullets in the waiting room, I was doing my French homework,” he says. “In hindsight, I was so naive that it worked in my favor.”

After the TV series, Lowell appeared in a couple of films, 2007’s “Graduation” and “Spin,” then got roles on “Veronica Mars” and “Private Practice.”

Since then, he played Kevin in “Up in the Air,” had a supporting role in 2011’s “The Help” and stars in the current Fox TV comedy “Enlisted.”

Austin award

The Austin appearance for the “Veronica Mars” premiere marks a return to the site of one of Lowell’s biggest moments: winning the Austin Film Festival’s 2013 Narrative Feature Jury Award for “Beside Still Waters,” as a first-time writer/director.

The movie focuses on a group of 20-somethings who are having a reunion at a cabin that they often visited while growing up. It stars Ryan Eggold as Daniel, the son of the cabin’s owners, who recently died in a car accident. It’s the last weekend that Daniel will be able to spend at the cabin, because he can’t afford it after his parents’ deaths. And the cabin is loaded with memories for nearly all of his friends.

Lowell said he got the idea for the screenplay from personal experience. “My family had a cabin at Lake Rabun (which is about two hours north of Atlanta), and the movie is a love letter to the place where I grew up,” Lowell said. His parents eventually decided to sell the cabin, and Lowell went back to live in it for the 31 days of escrow. “I wrote the screenplay while I was there, and I wrote like a psychopath. It was my way of finding closure,” he says.

He polished the screenplay with co-writer Mohit Narang and scouted locations for filming before settling on a magnificent log cabin in northern Michigan.

“I wanted the house to feel like it could be anywhere in America,” Lowell said. “A lot of the lakes in the Hamptons, for example, are distinguishable. But the Michigan location wasn’t.”

Lowell said he lived in the house while he was shooting the movie. “I would wake up when it was still peaceful and re-enact scenes in my head, meditating before the chaos of filming began.”

He readily acknowledges the influence of such reunion movies as 1983’s “The Big Chill” and 1979’s “Return of the Secaucus Seven.”

“I don’t think you can make a reunion film and not reference ‘The Big Chill.’ I would be lying if I said that.” But he notes that “The Big Chill” is about friends who are approaching middle age. “They’ve married, had children, divorced and are settled in their careers. They’re looking back at the decisions they’ve made, and they have a sense, in a bad way, that they’ve become their parents.”

“Beside Still Waters,” meanwhile, is about the same kind of people before they’ve made big life decisions. “And they’re not disdainful of their parents. In fact, they’re worried that they won’t be able to live up to their parents’ example,” Lowell says. That’s especially true for Daniel, who wonders whether he will ever find someone he can love as much as his parents loved each other.

Since winning the award in Austin, Lowell says that he has received three distribution offers for his movie, but that the negotiations aren’t complete. A few days ago, he was back in Austin for a special screening of “Beside Still Waters” and to participate in a script reading for his next feature, “Isolation/Tribes.” He says the script focuses on a teenage boy who is arrested for robbing a pharmacy and is sent to a rehab facility in the wilderness.

But for the next few days, he’s content to focus on “Veronica Mars” – even though he’s expecting a little blowback for being Piz.