“I have great affection for Oklahoma, period,” Harris says as John Carradine’s bony face fills the screen. Carradine plays Preacher Casey, who is imploring Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) to organize his fellow peach pickers and strike for higher wages: “One ton of peaches, picked and carried for a dollar… You can’t even buy enough food to keep you alive. Tell them to come out with us, Tom. Them peaches is ripe!”
Harris stops the tape. “One of the things that’s cool about this scene,” he says, “is that Carradine’s a Shakespearean actor, a very well-trained guy, who you really buy as this lanky hayseed. His posture is great. Even when he’s sitting down, he’s really relaxed, just telling Tom Joad how it is.
Harris worked with Carradine in the mid ’70s in a San Diego stage production of The Grapes of Wrath. Carradine reprised the role of Casey; Harris played Joad. At the time, the younger actor was living in a converted shed in Sierra Madre and having trouble paying his $25-a-month rent.
“I remember driving down to San Diego for rehearsal. I literally had one dime in my pocket,” Harris says, squinting at the memory. “I had this old ’56 Volvo, and the windshield wipers were broken and had no blades. I’d wadded up a pair of underpants with rubber bands around it. It was pouring rain, and I was manually doing the wipers with one hand and driving with the other, all the the way down there.” It wasn’t exactly Steinbeck, he says, “but it was definitely poverty.”
LIKE EVERY ACTOR FORTUNATE ENOUGH TO get the chance, Harris has at times worked just for the paycheck. “The Rock was impossible because I didn’t buy it,” he says, referring to the 1996 action flick in which he played a bad guy named General Francis X. Hummel. “Some of those speeches I had to do? I literally had to work myself up into a froth to give some meaning to some of the stuff. It was real hard.
“I’m not the most verbal person in the world,” he says, vaguely apologetic, as if he’s had to explain this before. “When we have friends over for dinner, Amy and the people will talk, and I might say a couple of words here and there. It’s not because I don’t want to. I just don’t have that much to say. I’m comfortable with silence.”
This was part of what drew him to Pollock — that and the opportunity to play the lead. Harris has been a supporting player since the second grade, when his class put on a production of Tom Thumb. Harris’s best friend landed the leading role. “I suggested to the teacher that Tom Thumb should have a brother,” Harris says. “She said okay, so I was” — he interrupts himself with a loud guffaw — “Jim Thumb!” He goes goofy for a moment as he emits a dozen ha’s that travel up half an octave and then back down again. “That story shows you,” Harris says finally, “where I’m coming from.”
It has been reported that to nail Pollock’s character, Harris changed his brand of cigarettes to unfiltered Camels, but that’s not true. “Unfortunately for me,” he says, “I’ve always smoked them.”
Harris did, however, build a studio on his land and teach himself how to paint. “I really wanted you to have the sense of being with Pollock. You’ve got to be still with him sometimes to sense him. It’s not about hearing him. It’s about just simply seeing him be. It’s not trying to manipulate something. You’re trying to let something take place.”
There is a banging at the door. “Hello? Is somebody knocking?” Harris yells, getting up and eyeing a delivery-woman through the window. She has a package for Zeke Productions, the indie film company Harris named after a favorite dog. “You can leave it,” he says, waving. The way he moves his hand isn’t dismissive. It just says “I’m busy and I’m not coming any closer.”
“Gesture can kill a performance — a repetitive tic or somebody’s personal gesture that obviously is not a character choice and so takes you out of the scene. But then again, you can’t be afraid of it,” he says, popping his second selection, a scene from David Lean’s romantic epic Ryan’s Daughter into the player. Harris first saw the film when it opened in 1970. It’s the story of a strong-willed young Irishwoman (Sarah Miles) whose marriage to a mild-mannered schoolteacher (Robert Mitchum) is rocked by her steamy affair with a British major. Harris was so moved by the film — “I got swept away” — that years later he visited the stretch of Irish coast where it was shot.
