Random Reminiscing: Looking Back at My Many Random Roles Interviews (Part 19 of Quite a Few)
Featuring anecdotes from Bill Irwin, John Heard, Frank Whaley, Michael Madsen, Sharon Lawrence, Scott Glenn, and Bob Gunton
Back in 2021, when I celebrated the 10th anniversary of my first Random Roles, I was feeling a tad nostalgic, so I decided that I wanted to start looking back at my contributions to this A.V. Club feature, since it’s the portion of my freelance career of which I’m most proud.
If you accidentally missed the previous part of this reminiscing (and you may have, because it was in 2021!), you can check it out by clicking right here…and if you missed the part before that, well, each installment has a link to the previous installment in the intro, so just keep on clicking back until you’ve read ‘em all!
If you’re all up to date, though, then for heaven’s sake, why are you wasting time with this intro? Just dive right in!
Bill Irwin:
Popeye (1980)—“Ham Gravy”
Barring any commercials, it looks like your first time in front of the camera was playing Ham Gravy in Popeye.
Bill Irwin: Ha! You know, I think there might’ve been some stuff before that, but I can’t remember it very well. Ham Gravy, though, is a great set of memories on the island of Malta. Have you ever been there?
I have not. The closest I’ve gotten is the website for Popeye Village, the tourist attraction they made out of the film’s sets.
Let’s see, what’s an anecdote from that? If you made Bob Altman laugh… That was everybody’s object. So I dropped my hat and kicked it down the street, and the next thing I know, he’s saying, “Let’s put that in the next take, too.” I think it ended up in the final movie, didn’t it?
It sure did.
I thought so. Yes, he was a great appreciator of clown shtick, and we were there to please him.
Altman had a reputation of not really auditioning actors, per se. He usually met people, decided if he liked them, and then said, “You’re in.”
Well, I remember putting on some baggy clothes and dancing around his office in—West L.A.? Some part of L.A., anyway. But, yeah, that was my audition. And the next thing I knew, I was on the island of Malta.
How was it to work with Robin Williams, given that Popeye was his debut as a leading man on the big screen?
Oh, man. Being in Robin’s presence was always such a gift. Exhilarating, intimidating. You know, when you get older, when you’re as old as I am, you go out on a limb, and I think Robin’s best work was off-camera on that Popeye movie. We were forever doing talent shows, or he would just riff for a while with somebody. He was a brilliant, brilliant man. So to be on the island of Malta with him and 50 other comedians… It was intense. [Laughs.]
John Heard:
Cat People (1982)—“Oliver Yates”
John Heard: That was a tough one. Paul Schrader, he’s a… son of a gun. [Laughs.] He’s a very feisty, very straightforward guy. He’s your auteur director. He sent me to a fat farm down in Palm Springs, I think it was, and got mad because he said, “You’re just getting massages and backrubs!”
Was he right?
Yeah. [Laughs.] He got the bill, he looked at the itemization, and he said, “You’re not doing anything to lose weight! I could’ve had William Hurt for this part!” And I said, “Well, you’re stuck with me, so…” He was funny, though. He’s a funny guy. And he’s one of those directors who really gives a shit. I mean, he really cares. The whole day, he’s on everything. So it’s a pleasure in the long run. But he’s tough. He knows what he wants.
How was it working with Nastassja Kinski?
She’s a sweetie. She’s very quiet. But smart. I hung out with her mother more than Nastassja. I think Nastassja was more worried about Schrader and doing the part, so her mom and I kind of became friends. She gave me a book—Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations—and said in her Polish accent, “You remind me of this guy.” I didn’t know nothing about Arthur Rimbaud or why I would’ve reminded her of him. [Laughs.] But I remember her saying that.
We were in New Orleans, so we were always cavorting around. Schrader tried to wake me up one morning because he wanted to catch the light in a shot that was down the street at Tulane [University] or something, in a park, and I was out cold. He had someone pull me out of bed and throw me in the car, and he was pissed off at me because he’d just missed the light that he’d wanted to shoot, so he sent me to what they called “the penalty box,” which was the bar next to the hotel, the St. Charles. I think it was called Igor’s or something. He said, “You’re going to have to spend 30 days in the penalty box. You can sit there in the dark bar by yourself and play the jukebox all day.” I don’t know quite what it meant, but it was like having to go to jug in high school. [Laughs.] I got Paul kicked out of Paul Prudhomme’s restaurant in New Orleans. Paul Prudhomme had this cocktail in a martini glass that had cayenne and a lot of peppers in it, but it was a gin drink. And Schrader came in—we were lucky to get in at lunch, there was always a line—and I was sitting there with somebody, and he said, “What are you drinking?” And I said, “One of these. They’re great! Get one!” And he got one. And he got another one. And I think he got another one. And Paul Prudhomme came out and got angry with him and said, “You’re ruining your meal! That drink is only to whet your appetite, not to indulge!” And he asked him to leave. [Laughs.] That was another thing that Schrader blamed me for. Prudhomme was, like, “You’re not here to enjoy my Creole cooking, you’re just getting loaded at lunchtime!”
Frank Whaley:
Swing Kids (1993)—“Arvid”
Presumably you got to know Robert Sean Leonard pretty well while working with him on Swing Kids.
Frank Whaley: Oh, yeah, Bob and I go way back. Like I said, we met… Well, let’s see: he and Ethan were pretty good friends, so when Ethan and I came back to New York after filming A Midnight Clear, he introduced me to Bob, and we started doing a lot of theater together. And then, just by coincidence, we were both cast in the film Swing Kids…which they wanted Ethan to do! The studio really wanted Ethan to play Bob’s role. [Laughs.] And I was begging Ethan to do that role because, even though I liked Bob, I’d only just met him, whereas I knew that Ethan and I could have a great time, because we had to go to Prague. I was just trying to convince him that it would be the best movie that Disney ever made about dancing Nazis! [Laughs.] But I’m sure he regrets it now. I mean, are you kidding me? He could be famous if he’d only done that movie! But we had a great time when we were there. For some reason, I was doing movies back to back in eastern Europe for months at a time. There was another actor in that movie called Jayce Bartok, and he and I ended up spending a lot of time together, just traveling on trains and going to, like, these weird underground clubs in Prague. Christian Bale was in that movie, too, and this was three or four months of epic games of Risk, where everybody would put two or three hundred bucks under the board, and whoever won got all the money under the board, so this would lead to fist fights and people screaming at each other. But also on our off-hours we were scouring the underbelly of Prague circa the early ’90s, going to mosh-pit clubs and drinking shit that you had no idea what was in the glass. People would just give it to you. [Yells.] “Drink this!” And you’d drink it, and you’d wake up four days later.
And you’d go, “Holy shit, I just made a movie about dancing Nazis”?
That’s right! [Laughs.] The funny thing about Swing Kids is that the whole basis of my character was that I was supposed to have, like, this wooden leg. So I think they sent me to, like, a physical trainer to work on the limp, because I was supposed to be walking with a limp and all that stuff, but I didn’t give it one second thought. I got there, and my first scene was a scene where me and Christian Bale and Bob and Jayce were supposed to walk across this bridge, and we’re just talking, shooting the shit about how shitty the hotel was. And the guy said, “Action!” And I just started walking like LeBron James across the bridge. And the guy says, “Cut!” We’re, like, “Why’s he cutting? What’s the problem?” And the director comes over to me and says, “You’re supposed to have a limp!” And I go, “Oh. Oh! Well, that was it. That was the limp. You want more? I can do more!” But the truth is, I had just completely forgotten that I was supposed to have a limp.
Michael Madsen:
Against All Hope (1982)—“Cecil Moe”
It looks your first on-camera role was in a film called Against All Hope.
Michael Madsen: Well, that was actually done for prisons, I think. Believe it or not, I think it was made for the rehabilitation of prisoners, guys who were getting out of penitentiaries after long periods of time. Or it was supposed to be used for some sort of message thing for, like, therapy hospitals. [Hesitates.] You know, it was really never defined to me what it was made for. But, yeah, it seems like there were dinosaurs roaming the earth when I did that thing. [Laughs.] That was a long time ago.
I heard that [Sylvester] Stallone did an adult film, and he bought the negative and burned it, and he supposedly sent his friends around to all the stores to get all the copies. Against All Hope is one of those. If I could get hold of it, I’d do the same thing!
There is unfortunately a clip on YouTube…
Well, God, I… I hope someone will delete it. [Laughs.] I can’t even imagine it what it’s like. There were a lot of interesting things I did, and there are a lot of things that are kind of disturbing. But I’ve learned my lesson over the years about what to say and what not to say in interviews, that’s for sure.
How did you find your way into acting in the first place?
I was basically an auto mechanic in Chicago, and it was my sister Virginia [Madsen] who was the actress in the family. I kind of lucked into the whole thing through a series of unplanned events. I had thought about acting, for sure. I mean, I loved watching movies. I liked Humphrey Bogart, I was a big Lee Marvin fan, and I liked Robert Mitchum. But the likelihood of one person—let alone two, a brother and a sister—coming out of the south side of Chicago from a blue-collar family and making it in the film industry is pretty astronomical, if you stop and think about it. Virginia was doing it long before I was.
I was pumping gas in Beverly Hills at the Union 76 and, Jesus, everybody you could imagine went through there. Jack Lemmon and Fred Astaire, Cicely Tyson and Warren Beatty… every day I’d be squeegeeing the windshield of somebody I’d seen in a movie growing up. It was pretty surreal. And I ended up meeting a young lady who got me an agent, and they started submitting me on episodic television shows. So I did Miami Vice, Cagney & Lacey, Tour Of Duty, Jake And The Fat Man, St. Elsewhere, and did I say Cagney & Lacey? Because Tyne Daly won an Emmy for the episode that I did with her, and she didn’t even mention my name when she accepted it. That was… interesting. Yeah. But it was a slow, unexpected thing that kind of evolved, and then I started getting movie offers. It’s a much longer story than that, but it didn’t happen in the usual way, put it that way.
Sharon Lawrence:
NYPD Blue (1993-99)—“A.D.A. Sylvia Costas Sipowicz”
How did NYPD Blue come about for you? Was it just a standard audition?
Sharon Lawrence: Yeah, an audition. They had decided that they needed more women to populate that world. The role was originally written for a man—it was just “Assistant District Attorney”—and Sipowicz’s line to the attorney after the cross-examination on the stand was, “Ipso this, you pissy little bastard.” [Laughs.] That was in the original script! But when they decided they needed women, I guess they pulled from professional-type women who had been within the Bochco casts before. Because of Civil Wars, I assume that’s why Junie Lowry-John’s team—the casting director—brought me in. It was as a day player, but they decided that the scene in that storyline was compelling enough to become a teaser for the show, and they decided to reshoot that very classic end to that sequence as an exterior. They brought us to New York to shoot it outside of One Center Street, the judicial building in downtown Manhattan, and that gave us all a chance to spend more time together. The creators saw Dennis and I hanging out together, enjoying each other’s company, and that’s when they had the idea to make this an unlikely love story. So it was really just a matter of them creating the Sylvia and Sipowicz couple.
Did you have a favorite Sylvia and Sipowicz storyline?
I thought the way Sylvia dealt with Sipowicz’s alcoholism was very compelling. And accurate. We got to see her backbone. She was not just a saintly gal who only saw the good parts of him. She recognized the rest, and she had good boundaries there, and I think that was something that people felt was important to her. For the real-life average people who have a tender romance, that was very satisfying to a lot of viewers, but I think that hitting those bass notes of the challenges within the relationship was equally valued by our viewers.
Did you have any say in Sylvia’s final fate, or was it presented to you?
I think when Milch was making lots of decisions because he was getting ready to leave the show, there was just an understanding that Sipowicz was always going to be a character who dealt with challenges. And the timing worked out for me, because Ladies Man… I literally shot Sylvia’s gunshot wound in the morning and then had the table read for Ladies Man that afternoon. So there wasn’t much of a time for me to feel like I was losing more than I was getting. Six seasons is a long time, as you know. Most shows don’t last that long.
Scott Glenn:
Apocalypse Now (1979)—“Lieutenant Richard M. Colby”
Scott Glenn: They were doing cattle-call auditions for the film on a big soundstage in L.A.—they took the place over, I believe, three days—and I don’t know if I got a call or if I called, but I found out about it, and I remember finding out that one of the producers was Fred Roos, who was kind of famous and was really a good guy. But it was on a soundstage, and they had card tables in the middle of the soundstage and folding chairs next to the card table and all around the edge of the soundstage. God, I don’t know how many people showed up at this thing, but they would walk around, Francis and these different people, and they would bring people out into the different sections of the soundstage and have them do improvs.
I was there for the first two days and nobody called me, and then on the last day, I was sort of standing up against the wall, and they had these guys—I think Tommy Lee Jones might’ve been one of them—but it was, like, four or five guys, and Francis said, “Okay, you’re in a PBR, you’re on the Mekong River, and you’re having a fight about who should be the Playmate Of The Year. The Latino guy says it should be the Latina, and the black guy says it should be the black girl, the white guy says it should be the blonde girl, and… just have this fight. You’re a boat crew, and you’re a Special Forces guy going up the river, and they don’t know why they’re taking you.” You know, sort of the bare bones of that journey. So these guys started having the fight, and they were doing really well, but they were yelling at each other. And I guess I, like, rolled my eyes or something, and Francis looked over and he saw it, and he stopped right in the middle of the thing and he said, “Look, I know nobody’s called you, but this is serious stuff! Don’t make a comment. These guys are doing a great job!” And I said, “You’re right, they were doing a great job. But if you’re yelling like that in a boat in the Mekong River, you’re going to have a mortar shell in your lap in a fucking heartbeat.” And he said, “What do you mean by that?” I said, “Because sound carries so far. If you’re going to have a fight like that…” [Whispers.] “…you should have it like this.” And he said, “You’re hired. You’re coming to the Philippines.” And that was that.
So how long did you ultimately end up shooting on the film?
[Long pause.] I was on the film for a long while. I probably ended up being on the film for about seven and a half months, but when I say that, an awful lot of it was training. The whole thing took a year and a half to shoot. What happened was, there was a big typhoon. [Hesitates.] I don’t really want to go into everything that happened, but Francis had a feeling that I might have saved his life, which I didn’t, really, but… Anyway, I was hired originally to be in a section called the Dulong Bridge, to be a guy shooting a bloop gun, an M79 grenade launcher, but after the typhoon, there was force majeure, because the typhoon just fucking wiped out all of our sets. So when we were going to come back to the States for a week or two before going back to the Philippines, because of stuff that went on during this typhoon, Francis essentially said, “You know, I’m a really good writer, and I’ll write you a much better part than you had originally as a reward for your behavior during the typhoon, so tell me what you want to do.” So I said, “I want to be in the section of the movie at the end, with Marlon Brando.” And Francis said, “That’s the only part of the movie where I can’t. It’s completely settled. That’s when Dennis Hopper’s coming in, and… any other part of the movie, I can write you a great scene for.” And I went, “No, you asked me, and that’s my answer.” And he said, “Well, you know what, you could be this guy Colby, who went up the river ahead of Martin Sheen. You’ll have maybe two or three lines, but basically you’ll be a glorified extra. But if that’s what you want, I’m good for my word.” And I said, “That’s what I want.”
So when we went back to the Philippines, he had me and a couple of former Green Berets training these Ifugao tribespeople to be sort of strikers like they had in Vietnam, and then he had me teach these guys what it was like to be on a movie set. You know, what “quiet on the set” meant, what “takes” meant, and stuff like that. And I ended up living with the Ifugao for a number of months, learning their language and being taken into their tribe and given an Ifugao name. It was great. Francis basically wanted all of us in that film to get as deep into our own personal lunacy as we possibly could and just sort of live there. But the reason I did it was because I understood that acting, like a lot of things, is really about serving apprenticeship, and that I would learn way more from watching Francis and Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen and great crew-people like [cinematographer] Vittorio Storaro, from being around them day after day, than any great part at that time in my life would give me. And I was right about that, too.
Bob Gunton:
Boat Trip (2002)—“Boat Captain”
Judas (2004)—“High Priest Caiaphas”
Live At The Foxes Den (2013)—“Tony O’Hara”
Bob Gunton: Well, I have to confess… [Laughs.] What happened was that I’d actually been doing a movie for the Paulist Fathers, the order of priests I’d studied with. They have a production arm, and they were producing a movie called Judas And Jesus in Morocco, and they asked me to play Caiaphas. So I was in Morocco, and I get this call from my agent saying, “Somebody just called with this thing called Boat Trip, and it’s a gay captain of a cruise ship,” and they explained that the Swedish Bikini Team drops in. I don’t even remember all of the tags, but this was again a one-day gig, and they were going to shoot all nine of my scenes in one day, and they offered an awful lot of money. And they allowed me to come back home so that I’d go from Morocco to Germany, where they filmed it, and I’d be able to go home via Paris, where I’d get to spend a week. And I said, “You know, I can’t pass that up.” Particularly after spending almost a month in Morocco. So I did it, and my scenes were actually funny, and I enjoyed the character, but they ended up cutting the scenes that made this character make any sense. And I actually asked to have my name taken off, and they said, “Oh, no. No, no. We paid you too much to take your name off the thing.” But I guess we’ll always have Paris, as I told my wife. And we did. We had a wonderful time. But I started to watch it once, and then I said, “Nah. No, I can’t go there.”
I just love the fact that you went from a biblical epic to Boat Trip.
[Laughs.] Yes, I guess that was from the sublime—well, if not sublime, then certainly serious—to the weird. And years later I got to play a gay man opposite Elliott Gould under far different circumstances. That was, again, a very low-budget independent movie, but we played old lovers who hang out at this place called the Foxes Den, and the movie’s called Live At The Foxes Den. The movie wasn’t all that polished or anything, but the storyline between he and I was very nice. And I finally got to play an older gay man who wasn’t a cliché but a real person. So I consider that my redemption for playing a gay boat captain in Boat Trip. [Laughs.]