Los Angeles Magazine / March 1, 2001

BY: Amy Wallace

ALEC GUINNESS USED to say that he built his characters from the shoes up. Laurence Olivier began with the nose often reshaping it with putty. Al Pacino insisted on the elegant camel-hair coat he wore in The Godfather, Part II. Externals matter, he explained.

BUT WHAT OF THE INTERNALS — the invisible tools an actor uses to make the made-up real? Compared with the surface details, the inner workings are hard to parse. Some actors fear that to deconstruct their talent is to risk its loss. Many clam up when asked how they do it. Or worse, they talk in gauzy platitudes.

WE DECIDED TO SPEAK TO actors about not their own work but the work of others. We asked Joan Allen and Ed Harris — who just turned in what many believe are their finest film performances — to name a few movie scenes that have affected them. Then we popped the scenes into a VCR and let them talk.

HARRIS RECENTLY COMPLETED a ten-year quest to bring the life of abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock to the screen. He directed co-produced, and starred in Pollock, which opened around the country in February. Allen starred in last fall’s The Contender, a political thriller about a U.S. senator whose nomination as the first female vice president is almost derailed by scandal.

WE SELECTED ALLEN AND Harris because they are actors whom actors admire. Like the 16 others in the photo gallery that follows, they are known for disappearing into their characters. We remember their performances even if we don’t always remember their names. They are actors’ actors.

JOAN ALLEN: LET GO OF VANITY. EMBRACE LIFE’S MESSINESS, AND BALANCE WILL BE THE REWARD

JOAN ALLEN ANSWERS HER BELL BEFORE THE elevator in the hallway can shut its doors. She is wearing jeans, a sky blue pullover, black leather slippers, and no makeup. She is tall — five feet ten — and delicate, with long, slender fingers. Her wavy blondish-brown hair is still wet from the gym. Her eyes, what most people remember about Allen, are big, expressive, and the color of slate, and they stand out against her pale, clear skin.

Allen invites me into the Upper West Side apartment where she lives with her husband, actor Peter Friedman, and their six-year-old daughter, Sadie. In the kitchen, Midnight, a small green parrot, squawks from a wooden perch. Her husband’s allergies, Allen says, prevent them from having a dog or a cat, and “a fish you can’t hold.” She slices a few cherry tomatoes for the bird, pours some water for us, and heads for the living room.

Sheepishly, Allen admits she has agonized over what she calls her “assignment.” Before settling on three favorite scenes, she says, she considered and rejected numerous films: Being There, starring Peter Sellers (“I loved his whole performance and couldn’t pick just one scene”); Glengarry Glen Ross (“It was a scene about listening, with Al Pacino”); A Streetcar Named Desire, with Marlon Brando (“When I first saw it, I thought, ‘Who knew this existed?’”); and Klute, starring Jane Fonda (“It had a big impact on me — her sessions with the shrink, and in the end, when the camera is just on her and she’s cornered and the tears are just falling down her face”).

Allen has always been drawn to tortured characters, two of whom — Elizabeth Proctor in The Crucible and Pat Nixon in Nixon — earned her Oscar nominations in 1996 and 1997. So it is not entirely a surprise that the first scene she feeds the VCR is a monologue from the 1962 film version of Long Day’s Journey into Night.

Katharine Hepburn plays the dope-addicted wife of a pompous actor (Ralph Richardson), and she is telling her maid about how she and her husband met. Reclining in a rocking chair, an addled Hepburn turns suddenly girlish as she recalls her own beauty and her husband’s charm. Then, just as suddenly, she falls to her knees. “What’s so wonderful about the first meeting between a silly, romantic schoolgirl and a matinee idol?” Hepburn asks bitterly.

“I was probably 15 or 16 when I saw this, and I just couldn’t believe it. I just said, ‘Whoa. Not everything is fine,’” says Allen, now 44. “I grew up in a family that was very loving and wonderful but had a very traditional, authoritarian structure. So I probably wanted to express more than I felt was acceptable. This movie opened up a whole new world.”

Allen was raised in Rochelle, Illinois, which had a population of 8,000. A shy, frightened teenager, whose kneecaps used to shake “up and down” when she spoke in public, she took comfort in Long Day’s Journey into Night’s tacit assertion that life is a struggle. Allen had just started appearing onstage when she saw the film. Hepburn’s performance, she says, was a revelation.

“She talks over the maid sometimes, and she’s sloppy and she falls out of the chair. It is not a neat, tidy sort of scene — there is something very messy about it. It’s a sensual performance, too, as she drifts in and out. And I admired the fluidity with which she went back and forth from pain to laughter to fuzziness to trying to find herself again. It’s a very split character. She’s so tied in to her husband that she can’t extricate herself. But at the same time there’s all this resentment and anger about the past. I guess,” Allen says, laughing softly, “that’s very lifelike to me. We all have these dualities that we swing back and forth between.”

ALLEN’S NEXT CHOICE IS The Deer Hunter, the 1978 film about three Pennsylvania steelworkers and best friends who are drafted to fight in Vietnam. In the movie’s most famous scene, Vietnamese captors force Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken to play Russian roulette. Allen, who has been sitting on her couch, moves to a leather armchair and pulls it closer to the TV.

De Niro is screaming, trying to get Walken to do the unthinkable: aim a half-loaded revolver at his own head and pull the trigger. De Niro knows that playing the game is their only chance for survival, so he is relentless. “You’re going to die, motherfucker!” he shrieks when Walken hesitates. “Go ahead!”

Walken balks again, and one of his captors shouts an order while another slaps him across the face. With every slap, Allen flinches slightly. The corners of her mouth turn down. Her eyes glisten. Walken lifts the gun to his temple. Allen bites her lip and raises her left hand to her mouth.

Walken fires — click! — and the hammer strikes an empty chamber. It is De Niro’s turn, and in a blur, he uses the gun to kill the Vietcong in the room. Allen clears her throat and takes a breath.

“This was another moment for me of saying ‘Oh my God, I have never, ever seen anything like this,” she says. “I remember being at the movie theater with my boyfriend at the time. I’d never had such a visceral response to anything in my life. I remember thinking that the gun was at my head.”

Allen was living in Chicago then, having been invited by a college friend, John Malkovich, to join Gary Sinise, Terry Kinney, Laurie Metcalf, and others in the Steppenwolf Theater Company.

“I don’t know what I would have done if he hadn’t called and asked me to do a show with him,” Allen says of Malkovich. “I was acting, but I was a small-town girl. I think I would have been too intimidated to really go for it by myself. But it was ideal for me to go from one family, my own family, into another family, which is what Steppenwolf was.”

Within Steppenwolf, The Deer Hunter’s grittiness was something to emulate. “We all responded to it. It blew everybody away,” Allen says, grimacing at her choice of metaphor. She rewinds the tape, wanting to look at an earlier, similar scene in which De Niro coaxes his other boyhood friend, played by John Savage, to aim a bullet at his own head.

“One of the reasons I love this scene so much” — her voice is a whisper — “is that there’s so much love underneath what De Niro is doing,” she says as Savage fires, grazing his skull and drawing blood. The camera turns to De Niro, who has tears in his eyes. “How he talks his friend through it. The look in his eyes. The love, the strength, the anger. All these things he has going on. He is just staggering.”

Allen’s best performances — on both the stage (she won a Tony for Broadway’s Burn This) and the screen — are elaborate constructions, layer upon subtle layer. Though often they appear repressed, her characters conceal unexpected passions: A timid housewife indulges herself by shoplifting (The Ice Storm); a straitlaced ’50s supermom’s desires are awakened by art (Pleasantville); a crone covets the very sensuality that threatens her (Ethan Frome).

In her most recent film, The Contender, Allen plays a nominee for vice president of the United States whose confirmation is threatened by a sex scandal. She has a lot of threads to weave together — ambition, confidence, vulnerability, competence, pride. But to watch her as she faces her detractors, sitting erect and unflinching in a congressional heating room, is to believe she actually could be on Air Force Two.

“This notion of what does a thought look like on somebody’s face — it’s challenging, because it’s not anything that you’re conscious of when it’s happening. It becomes, I think, very tricky because you are working from yourself. And how many yous are there?” she says. “When I was in my twenties, I thought, ‘I can play this part and that part.’ I played Linda Loman in Death of a Salesman when I was in college, with gray streaks in my hair. It was insane. How could I possibly know what it was like to have her life? It was a great thing to go through, but now I would say, ‘Oh my God.’ I’ll read a script and I’ll say, ‘You know, somebody else would be better for this role than me.’

“The older you get, its kind of weird, but somehow you realize how much harder it is to be a good actor than you used to think it was. I remember hearing that phrase from Sandy Meisner, the acting coach — you know, ‘It takes 20 years to be an actor’–when I was in my twenties. And I said” — she snorts — “‘What is he talking about? Who is he?’ And now, on the other side of it, I see what he means.”

MIDNIGHT SCREAMS FROM the kitchen. Allen rises and returns with the bird on her finger. “Step up, Midnight,” she says, trying to cajole the parrot into its cage. Midnight resists, so she lets it stay perched on her pointer.

“What I’ve been able to do, fortunately, for a long time is believe in the situation when I’m doing it,” Allen says. “I just believe it. I don’t tend to do sense-memory work, thinking of something that really made me cry in order to cry. That takes me out of what’s happening. I tend to have this ability to just believe what’s on the page.”

For Nixon, Allen read biographies and stuffed a Barbara Walters interview to master Pat Nixon’s mannerisms. For last year’s When the Sky Falls, which was released in Europe but so far not in the United States, she read the work and visited the office of slain Irish journalist Veronica Guerin. The details that most enriched Allen’s portrayals, though, were those she learned about her characters’ childhoods.

“I just think it informs the adult you become,” she says, finally easing Midnight into its cage. “It’s amazing — and I haven’t really talked about this with anybody but a couple of friends — but I find the older I get, the more I become myself. The more I’m me, the less I change. I changed in my twenties and thirties, but then you sort of go back and become, sometimes, more who you are, what you always were.”

A perfect segue to her third choice, the 1985 film The Trip to Bountiful, in which Geraldine Page plays an elderly woman who decides to take one last journey to the place she was raised, Bountiful, Texas.

“I know I’m going to cry,” Allen warns. “My parents grew up in an area that looks very much like this on the Mississippi River,” she says as the scene — of Page finally reaching her family’s abandoned farmhouse — begins to play. “We went back to visit the old house where my mother grew up before they tore it down, and it looks like this house.”

A weary Page sits on what was once her family porch, listening to the calls of redbirds, a sound she hasn’t heard for years. “Ever since we got here, I’ve had half a feeling that my father and my mother would come out of this house and greet me and welcome me home,” Page tells the stranger who’s driven her on the last leg of her trip. “I guess when you’ve lived longer than your house and your family, you’ve lived long enough.”

Allen’s eyes are wet. She ducks into the kitchen to blow her nose.

“It’s such an unvain performance. She’s got that body, that dress, that sagging chest. It’s so real,” Allen says, returning to the couch. “She says a line at one point about a woman she knows — ‘Callie Davis kept her farm going’ — and in one line you get how she feels about that woman. That kind of acting is so thorough and so important because everybody in your life you have a specific relationship with. You can tell by the tone of your voice how you feel. When I hear an actor do something like that, I just think, ‘I’ve got to remember to do that.’”

I thank Allen. As I am packing to go, she says there is one more scene she almost included. It’s from Terms of Endearment. Debra Winger is in the hospital, telling her two young sons good-bye. The older one knows his mother is dying. He is sullen. He doesn’t want to be there, as if by not acknowledging her imminent death he can will her to survive.

“She’s amazing in that scene because she’s not sentimental about it,” Allen says. “She strikes a balance. She says something like ‘Someday you’re really going to regret and feel bad that this happened between you and me. And I’m telling you right now — don’t.’”

Allen’s voice is fierce, and her eyes are full. I realize that after two hours of talking with her about acting, I am getting to see her act. “She’s saying, ‘Don’t. I know that you love me. I know.’” A tear travels down Allen’s cheek. “She just keeps saying that. She wants to free him. ‘Don’t regret that I’m dead.’ It’s just” — she pauses a moment, her voice again a whisper — “beautiful.”

ED HARRIS: LOSE YOURSELF IN SUBTLETIES, GET COMFORTABLE WITH SILENCE, AND TRANSCENDENCE WILL COME

ED HARRIS STANDS IN HIS DRIVEWAY IN A patch of sunlight, thumping the head of a large black dog. Compact, five feet nine, the actor wears blue jeans, a faded black T-shirt, running shoes, and a backward baseball cap that says SKI THE BIG ONE. When he waves hello, Harris looks more like a housepainter than a movie star. Except for his eyes. On the screen, those fierce, observant blue eyes — combined with his square jaw and wide mouth — have convinced more than one moviegoer that hair is overrated.

I park my car in front of the low-slung Malibu home where Harris lives with his wife, actress Amy Madigan, and their seven-year-old daughter, Lily. Harris’s dog, Barkley, is the first to greet me, and Harris observes that Barkley is not one to play fetch or other dog games. He says this admiringly.

Harris isn’t a guy who likes to jump through hoops. At times, he has been blunt about the failings of Hollywood, and he can chafe at some of its rituals, including the necessity of talking to people like me. His most recent film is Pollock, which he directed, coproduced, and stars in, and it matters to him that it do well. Still, he doesn’t relish the process. On a recent press junket, he says, he answered and re-answered the same 20 questions.

“I was beginning to feel like George Bush,” he says with distaste.

We climb some stairs to a bright, comfortable room over the garage. The Pacific sparkles outside the window, but we turn our backs on the view to stare at a huge television. Harris explains that he has chosen scenes from four movies that he saw before he decided to become an actor. He likes the idea that he initially responded as a fan, not as a student of the craft. If the scenes have stuck with him after 30 years, he reasons, there must be something there.

He slides his first selection, John Ford’s Grapes of Wrath, into the VCR and sinks into a small, plump leather chair. Harris, now 50, saw the film — about the Okie migration to California during the Depression — in high school in the mid ’60s. His parents grew up in southwestern Oklahoma, and even after they settled in Tenafly, New Jersey, they took the family back every summer when Harris was young. Later, after he realized he wasn’t big enough to play pro football, he studied acting at Oklahoma State University.

“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.

“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.

“The goal, maybe not for some actors but for me, is to be unconscious. And if not, to feign it as well as possible. To see an actor who is self-aware of what he’s doing as an actor — that really bugs me. The goal is to get to that place where you have done it and you’re not aware of what you did. You just trust that you are inhabiting the character, and it’s true.”

Harris experienced that kind of transcendence only once. “It was right when I first started acting,” he says, walking onto a shaded patio to light his cigarette at last. “I did Camelot in Oklahoma City and played King Arthur, and I was literally told by the director, ‘On this line, cross here, sit here, do this, do that.’ The songs were choreographed. I walked with a ruler up my back during rehearsals.”

Harris’s left hand is jammed in his jeans pocket; his right hand guides the Camel to his lips. As he speaks, he stares at the ground and kicks at something. “One night we did it, and I didn’t remember doing it. It was this little 200-seat theater, and the audience was just exploding with applause at the end. Something had really happened.”

Was that what hooked him on acting? “Definitely,” Harris says, his eyes suddenly warm. “It was incredible. It really was. It was way beyond my self-involvement, you know what I mean? It was ecstasy.”

« 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ALL »