Love Life (7 page)

“Well, I told him since he has no experience being dead, and is in fact a healthy, live, wonderful actor, that he must never ‘play dead.’ He can truthfully be someone tied to a chair trying to
look
dead. Believe me, the difference is huge, and he got reviews actually mentioning his ‘presence’ on-screen, even as a dead body!”

“What did Quentin Tarantino think of his choice to not be dead?”

“Oh you must
never
tell anyone. Particularly the director!”

I am of the school that believes (oftentimes in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary) that the director is the most important person in filmmaking. My first boss was Francis Ford Coppola, after all. The idea of keeping a director in the dark on how you’re going to tackle a role was unthinkable. But I was so blown away by this revolutionary and subversive idea that I began to warm to it. Roy and I planned to meet twice a week to dig deeper into the script.

Eventually, I found myself on location in Salt Lake City, playing a scene with Gary Sinise. I had determined that my character could speak and hear everything but led people to believe otherwise as a survival mechanism in the postapocalyptic world he was struggling with. Watching from the monitor, neither the director nor Stephen King had any idea their beloved Nick Andros, in my hands, could hear and speak. And I never told.

When
The Stand
aired, it broke ratings records, becoming one of the most-watched miniseries of all time. And Roy London was right.
Using our little secret, I received some of the best reviews of my career. And most importantly, I learned yet another technique to stow in my professional tool bag.

And all actors have their tricks. Since the Greeks grabbed the masks of comedy and tragedy, any thespian worth a lick has been figuring out ways to shine, to stand out and sometimes sandbag fellow performers. Our little weapons can be used for good or ill, to make a character more authentic or to throw someone else’s under the bus.

It was always a surprise and a source of some consternation among both fans and the folks responsible for making
The West Wing
that Martin Sheen never won an Emmy for playing one of the landmark roles in TV history. Martin even began to refer to our annual pilgrimage to the awards as his “Passover.” But everyone realized that Jed Bartlet had the bad luck to inhabit the same airwaves as another titan of characterization, the late James Gandolfini, who was playing Tony Soprano. And pound for pound (no pun intended), there was no comparison.

With no disrespect to Martin, if you try hard enough, you can almost imagine a
West Wing
without President Bartlet (in fact, toward the end there was one, with Jimmy Smits center stage), but
The Sopranos
without Tony is a nonstarter. James Gandolfini’s performance
made
that show, just as Aaron Sorkin’s writing made
The West Wing
. After all, who wouldn’t love a Nobel Prize–winning, multiple sclerosis–conquering, Latin-speaking, chain-smoking president of the United States, who also happened to love his staff like his own family? But to make a mob boss who interrupts his daughter’s college tour to strangle a man to death with his bare hands empathetic,
that
requires some heavy lifting. Gandolfini won a boatload of awards and got the reviews of a lifetime (as well as the paychecks) because he humanized a monster. He made us love Tony Soprano in spite of Tony Soprano.

And he did it in a number of ways, from tapping into a reservoir
of complex inner pain, sadness and kindness, to being sneaky funny with his hilarious malapropisms. But I think the key to humanizing Tony Soprano was his use of one of the great and surprisingly difficult actor tricks of all time, which is also the simplest: eating food on camera.

Tony stuffed his face at every opportunity. Cannoli, calzones, ice cream—there wasn’t an episode where he didn’t eat and eat a lot. And here’s the secret: when actors eat, it subtly says to the audience, I have hunger, like you, so I am eating, like you. Like you, I am a real human being. It’s very simple and it works every time.

There is one catch. It’s an absolute nightmare to do. Next time you watch a movie or a TV show and it’s one of those endless dinner scenes (
Brothers & Sisters
, anyone?), notice that almost never do you actually see food entering anyone’s mouths. There’s a lot of knife and fork holding and what I call “napkin acting,” but almost no one ever eats. If you are lucky you might see someone on-screen take a drink.

On a certain level you don’t connect with the noneating actors because you can’t relate to a dinner where no one eats! And let’s be plain: performances are made and broken in the audience’s unconscious. So when Jimmy Gandolfini wolfs down a sub while planning a hit, you believe someone’s gonna get whacked.

But this is a hard trick to pull off. Very few of us could be one of those professional eaters. I know I couldn’t. I wish I could be more like Brad Pitt, who munches his way through many of his movies and has an Oscar nomination for
Moneyball
to show for it. But I’m a pussy when it comes to eating. An average scene takes anywhere from three to six hours to shoot. (I once shot one scene for
Forrest Gump
’s director, Bob Zemeckis, for three
days
. On-screen it played for maybe ninety seconds.) Over that time, multiple angles of the same activity are shot, so if you take one sip of water and you want it to be on camera, you will have to take that sip every single time you do the scene.
Very few can eat or drink for hours on end. I still laugh out loud when I watch one of my early movies,
Class
. There is one of those dinner scenes, and Jacqueline Bisset puts a bit of salad in her mouth that is literally the size of a newborn baby’s pinkie nail.

But there was also Danny Glover, whom I had the pleasure of working with on
Brothers & Sisters
. Sitting at one of those torturous and never-ending Walker family dinners, one of my favorite actors divided his time between cell phone calls to third-world leaders and gobbling every single piece of food that wasn’t nailed to the floor. At one point, after eating his entire “fake meal” for the umpteenth time, he leaned over to his assistant.

“I heard there are going to be some chili dogs at catering. Can you let me know when they’re ready?”

I couldn’t believe it; this guy was in terrific shape. He must have a hollow leg. He took on-set eating to Oscar-caliber levels.

There are many hallmarks of bad acting, but one of the most common is when actors stare unblinkingly into each other’s eyes, rooted to the spot where they stand as they play their scene. Turn on a daytime soap and you will see this style. In real life, we rarely “eye-screw” each other while we talk, unless we are arguing heavily or flirting passionately. Instead we live our lives while we talk, we move, we turn away, we read the paper, unpack groceries or check our phones. Nine times out of ten, in real life, what you are doing is much more important than what you are saying.

For some reason, some actors (and a lot of bad writers and directors) believe otherwise. The writers think their “words” are the most important part of any scene and the actors want to make sure nothing
interferes with how clearly they can be seen on camera, preferably in close-up. So you see actors standing around, “acting.”

But look at your favorite movie moments and I bet you see scenes played while folding laundry, making breakfast, doing office work or “walking and talking” down hallways. Life has tasks. If you perform them on-screen, you look
real
.

Working with everyday objects is called “prop work” in acting parlance and most of us are good at it. It can be harder than you think; the cast of
ER
was among the best ever, with IV bags being hung, rubber gloves snapped on, electrodes placed, all while they delivered some pretty complex dialogue. No standing around for them.

On
The West Wing
, Richard Schiff, one of the best scene stealers of all time, would routinely enter what was ostensibly someone else’s scene, carrying seventeen files, a briefcase, a thermos and a half-eaten sandwich. I don’t think he ever entered on a unicycle spinning plates, but he may have.

And the result? You can’t take your eyes off him. If he dropped a file and picked it up, you could have been delivering the Gettysburg Address and no one would have been looking at you. The masters of “prop acting” can kill you with one flip of a spatula or one perfectly placed puff of a cigarette.

Don’t kid yourself. Acting is both a symbiotic team sport and also a kill-or-be-killed individual death match. To the victor goes the bigger trailer.

I once had to face down the legendary Dame Maggie Smith. She is world-renowned for stealing every scene she is in, sometimes with no lines needed. Just an arched eyebrow and grown movie stars lie in piles like the aftermath of the Battle of Bull Run. (Watch her in
Downton Abbey
to see what I mean. She’s genius.) I was determined that I wouldn’t get mauled by the great Dame. So I plotted.

The amazing Richard Eyre was directing us in a filmed version of Tennessee Williams’s classic
Suddenly, Last Summer
. Maggie had the throw-down role of Violet Venable. I had the incredibly one-note part of Dr. Cukrowicz. (Played by Montgomery Clift in the movie version.) My part consisted mainly of investigating her role in the death of her son.

“How did it happen?” I would ask. She would then have a four-paragraph aria.

“Tell me more,” I would reply, and another brilliant monologue would follow. And so on.

But at one point, she asked my character to hand her a lighter for her cigarette. I used this tiny part in the script to have my little bit of fun.

I asked the prop master to supply me with a book of matches that was empty, save the last two. About a page before she was required to ask for a lighter for herself, I chose to pull out a smoke, light one match to no avail and then light the last one. Unable to light my smoke, I let it dangle in my lips sadly until the next page, where she asked for the lighter.

Now I had created a new moment out of this bit of prop work where she watched me struggle with my matches without offering her lighter until she wanted it herself. It gave my character a little added conflict with hers, where before there was none. In a scene that was all about her, I created a tiny moment for me.

When people talk about the “craft” of acting, it’s these sorts of techniques they mean. Like any other artisan, actors who have the tools use them to accomplish what they are paid to do: build interesting, entertaining, honest, believable characters who tell the story in the appropriate fashion.

I once made a very successful love story with an actress who went on to become a great star. Like any potential star, she knew her way
around her craft as well as her strengths and weaknesses. At the climax of the movie, she had a very long and emotionally demanding scene where she confronted me about our relationship’s future. The screenplay had her start vulnerable, become angry and finally be almost incapacitated by tears. Knowing that we weren’t making a play, that movies and TV are beholden to the god of editing anyway, she never, not once, gave all three of those emotions in the same take.

She did a version vulnerable. She did a version angry, and finally, she did a version weeping from start to finish. She let the editors cut all three takes together, making her look like Meryl Streep. I’ve never seen anyone do that since, and you can’t get away with that onstage, but in that instance it worked and worked brilliantly, so who the hell cares how it was accomplished?

Directors have their own tricks as well.

I had been romantically involved with an actress I was starring opposite, but it had ended well before we began shooting. In fact, she was already well into a painful on-again, off-again relationship. Our director knew this history.

We were deep into shooting a pivotal scene but hadn’t captured any real pain; in spite of some very good writing, the scene had no explosiveness. The director, inexperienced but very smart, pulled me aside and said, “Wait until we do her close-up and then tell her you don’t love her anymore.” Just his saying this to
me
made me emotional. The breakup dialogue was nuanced and subtle. This ad lib would be a cruel hammer. My former lover and costar didn’t know what I was wielding as the take began. I waited for the moment. “I don’t love you anymore.”

Her face quivered slightly. She tried to shake it off, but she was clearly stunned, like she’d been slapped but didn’t want anyone to know it hurt. But the camera saw everything, as always. She was in a big “Warner Bros. haircut”–style close-up, so as she lost the battle
for composure and dignity, the glacier cracked wide open and she sobbed.

The trick opened her up. It’s the best scene in the movie.

Ad libs, in my experience, are either great, out-of-this-world additions or horrific, borderline-embarrassing utterances that send a scene to the bottom of the ocean. Some of the most renowned and talented actors I’ve worked with were terrible ad libbers. I’m not sure why this is, but when it comes to making verbal adjustments on the fly, many are called, few are chosen. You need to learn to be self-reliant. The script may be weak; a scene that seemed great on the page may suddenly not work on the set—you never know what obstacle will be thrown in front of your performance. I once starred in a big miniseries that culminated with the villain giving a two-page monologue trying to goad me into killing him. The actor playing the bad guy wanted to ad lib his own version of the movie-ending speech. Although he was playing a vampire, he went into a soliloquy about being a cowboy.

The director was not impressed.

After a very tense negotiation, the actor was forced to shit-can his self-penned opus and stick to the original script. There was only one problem: He hadn’t bothered to learn it. Cue cards were made and placed next to my head while we filmed his part of the scene. When it was time to turn the camera onto me, he was sent home. My part of the scene called for me to listen to this very intricate two-page speech and run a wide range of emotions at very specific times. The director offered to have the script supervisor read the departed actor’s lines.