“This is a great line,” he says as Trevor Howard, playing the gruff, benevolent Father Hugh, warns Miles, “Don’t nurse your wishes. You can’t help having ‘em, but don’t nurse ‘em, or sure to God you’ll get what you’re wishing for.” When Howard lights a cigarette, flicking away the spent match in the ocean breeze, Harris unconsciously mimics the motion of his wrist. “I like the way he does that,” Harris murmurs. “Totally in character.”
But he is most struck by Miles’s performance. “She’s totally involved in this scene. It’s coming from her guts,” he says. “She’s not playing the result by sobbing all the way through. She’s really fighting with something. It’s passionate.”
Harris’s best performances have always relied on understatement. As Christof in The Truman Show, he was all controlled tension as the beret-wearing mastermind who made us understand how prurience had morphed into entertainment. Harris received an Oscar nomination for that role, just as he had three years earlier for playing mission commander Gene Kranz in Apollo 13. Again, his acting was more powerful for its small, offhand moments — the loving way he smoothes a new vest his wife has made him for luck, or the way he registers relief when the mission succeeds, squeezing the bridge of his nose, fighting tears.
Next up is the scene in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? when Richard Burton, an underachieving academic, tells a younger colleague (George Segal) a long story from his prep school days. It’s a Burton tour de force — a monologue, shot in close-up, about a night at a gin mill with one of his friends, who has accidentally killed his mother with a shotgun.
“A lot of times,” Harris says, “people who deliver poetic monologues feel like every part is so important. Like in A Streetcar Named Desire, people often take every beautiful sentence of Tennessee’s like it is it. And it’s interminable.” He digs a crumpled Camel out of a pack in his front pocket and begins to fiddle with it. “But watching this, I’m realizing, Burton drives his story to the last statement.”
Harris rewinds and plays Burton’s finale again: “Of course, we suffered, each of us alone on his train away from the city, each of us with a grown-up’s hangover.”
Burton’s voice is slow but sure. “It was the grandest day” — a beat — “of my” — another beat — “youth.”
“Watch that,” Harris says, as much to himself as to me. “It’s just, like, perfect. It’s just beautiful, you know?”
Harris knows what it’s like to go up against a classically trained Brit. In his last stage appearance, in the 1996 Broadway drama Taking Sides, he was an American investigator of Nazi war crimes who interrogates German conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler, played by the famed British actor Daniel Massey.
“I was a bit undisciplined,” Harris says. “Not every night, but some nights I would get into it with Massey more on an ego level than a character level. Massey was this wonderful actor, and he’d done the play 200 times in an earlier London production. I felt if I didn’t push it, I would be invisible on the stage.”
HARRIS IS ON HIS FEET NOW, looking for a match. It is time to watch On the Waterfront — when Marlon Brando, playing a longshoreman, tentatively woos the more refined Eva Marie Saint. As they walk, she drops her glove. Brando improvises, picking it up and putting it on, as if he were holding her hand by proxy.
“There’s something that’s just purely enjoyable about a certain theatricality of acting,” Harris says, though he admits it’s not a style he has felt comfortable adopting. “There’s a part of me that feels it’s not about showing that I can act. It’s really about trying to tell the truth. That’s what I find myself trying to achieve. So unless it’s a really flamboyant character, which I don’t really have many opportunities to play, my stuff’s pretty simple most of the time.
“But Brando was changing an art form, revolutionizing acting, bringing it into another realm. It’s very curious watching it because it seems very self-conscious, which is kind of contrary to what the Actor’s Studio was all about. Then again, the character has never been with this woman before. He’s never met a creature like this in his life. So he should be self, conscious. So it’s actually fucking great.
