Post by bobdoc on May 21, 2010 18:39:46 GMT -4
From www.vanityfair.com/online/oscars/2010/05/the-michael-emerson-interview-on-acting-ben-linus-and-lost.html
Michael Emerson, a stage-trained actor, joined the cast of Lost in 2006, playing a mysterious fellow who claimed his name was Henry Gale. As fans know, this man was actually Benjamin Linus, the leader of the Others. He would prove to be the show’s main villain, with the possible exception of the Smoke Monster.
The cast of Lost is a mongrel unit, its actors having come out of stand-up comedy, sitcoms, movies, the stage, and modeling. Along with fellow veteran thespian Terry O’Quinn, who plays John Locke, Emerson is one of the regular cast members who has theater in his blood. Whenever Emerson and O’Quinn play a scene together, they have a great time rolling around in the dialogue and dragging out the dramatic beats. Both men have won Emmies for their Lost work, with O’Quinn beating out Emerson in 2006, and Emerson taking one for himself last year.
From his first moments on the show, Emerson sucked in viewers with a certain mesmerizing quality. Like the equally humorous and menacing Christopher Walken, he manages to project a flicker of comic wit behind his intensity. No matter how horribly his character behaves, whether it’s calling the bluff of hired thugs who threatened to kill his daughter (they weren’t bluffing) or massacring an entire village, he somehow keeps the audience on his side, at least to some degree. In the penultimate episode of the show, Ben Linus came back, in a big way, serving as the assistant-in-evil to the John Locke/Man in Black/Smoke Monster character, after having spent much of the sixth season in the background.
I met with Emerson at an open-air restaurant called Cheeseburger Waikiki, not far from his rented apartment, on a typically warm February morning. He was a regular at the place; the waitresses and busboys kept stopping by to say hello. He seemed sad to be leaving Lost but happy he would soon return to the mainland and a more settled life with his wife, actress Carrie Preston. Listening to him speak was a pleasure. He chooses and delivers his words in precise and playful manner that is not dissimilar to that of the heinous character he has played with such gusto.
Emerson didn’t make it as a New York actor until he was 43 years old. For many years he even tried to put the dream of being an actor out of his head, while working as a magazine illustrator. Then he built up his skills little by little in regional theaters. He talked about his years of apprenticeship, his thoughts on Benjamin Linus and Lost, and acting in general.
Michael: Honolulu’s the damnedest place to try to find breakfast. There are a couple of places that specialize in outrageous pancake concoctions that the Japanese tourists really love. I think it’s an American novelty to them. But I’m a New Yorker; I’m used to eggs and a bagel, you know.
VF: You live in New York, mainly?
New York is home, but Carrie and I are rarely there. She works in L.A. on True Blood, and I’m here a lot. When Lost is over, we’ll divide our time between the two coasts, and that will seem simple. You’ve probably never had a Hawaiian breakfast, have you? They’ve got a hamburger patty on rice, with eggs and gravy. The traditional Hawaiian breakfast is two scoops of rice, scrambled eggs, and Spam.
You live right in this neighborhood?
Every season I’ve lived in a different apartment building in Waikiki. A lot of people would say I’m insane to live in Waikiki. The locals think Waikiki is like Sodom and Gomorrah. It’s a place they go only if they have to. It’s crowded, it’s full of tourists -- all the things they want to escape, but all the things I embrace, because I can’t sleep if it’s not noisy.
Where do you live in Manhattan?
The theater district. West 55th. Getting around in this town, you’d think, “Oh we’re in the middle of the Pacific. Life will be so much quieter and simpler.” Try the freeway out here. The H-1 is a parking lot at rush hour.
How far is work for you?
You can see Diamond Head down there. The studio sits on the shoulder of Diamond Head.
Does your wife come out here?
Yeah, she’s here sometimes. And I get a place big enough to accommodate guests, in the hope that I’ll have visitors. Some seasons, no one comes. This is the last season, so now everybody’s getting the idea: Strike now or give it up.
Does any part of you feel like you got trapped too long in a single role?
I’m conscious of how it has occupied a long chapter of my working life -- all to the good. Everybody should have my set of problems. But being in the middle of the Pacific has kept me from doing all the things a New York actor does. I can’t do readings or workshops, can’t do voice-overs or commercials. This is the thing. I long to be somewhere where I can step outside and run into people who do what I do.
What was it like for you, when you were doing theater all those years in Florida and Alabama?
It was all I could do. It wasn’t a choice between two things. It was all I could do. Alabama Shakespeare Festival had an M.F.A. professional-actor training program, where you get a degree out of the University of Alabama, but you would never set foot in Tuscaloosa. We had our classes in the morning, and the rest of the time we were either rehearsing our own stuff or understudying and playing small parts on the main stage. It was just a way for me to make contact with the world of grown-up professional actors and directors. It was the closest I could get to New York and still be in the South, where I lived.
Are you from the South?
No, but it’s where I started acting. I ended up in the South by a fluke. An ill-considered marriage and divorce left me high and dry in St. Augustine, Florida. I had started out my grown-up life in New York City, but I couldn’t figure out how to be an actor there. And so I had been a magazine illustrator instead.
You talked about that on Conan one night, and he showed some of your drawings.
I don’t know where he found them. That was insane! Those weren’t just from my former career; they were two of the first illustrations I did as a working illustrator; 1979 was the date of those drawings.
What magazines did you illustrate for?
Psychology Today, Business Week, Barron’s, New York Times. In those days, you’d see eager young men with black portfolios running around near Rockefeller Center. And in those four or five tall buildings were half the magazines on the planet. So every day I would wake up, put on clothes, go into town from Brooklyn, leave my portfolio at some magazine, and then go kill a couple hours, because they would look at them on their lunch breaks. Then the deal was trying to figure out if they had actually looked at it. The illustrators had these Holmesian tricks, like we would wrap a pale thread around two pages, and if those two pages had been separated by opening, the thread would fall away. But if the thread was still in place we would know no one had looked.
It’s like rigging your bathroom cabinet before you have people over.
It’s like reading tea leaves to figure out if we were going to get work or not. Crazy times.
Did you have a two-track dream of illustrating and acting?
I had always wanted to be an actor, but I lost track of it. The city just knocked the wind out of me. I was from a small town in Iowa, and it was just overwhelming. I put it out of my mind for a long time. But then, as I say, when I found myself in my early thirties, divorced, and living in St. Augustine, Florida, I thought, “Well, nothin’ to lose now. Nowhere to go but up from here, so I might as well do what I please.” So I tried out for a production of Othello at a local university. Got the part of Iago. That’s interesting, isn’t it, that my first big part was a Shakespearean villain?
And here you are.
And here I am.
You give a theatrical performance as Benjamin Linus, but I guess there’s a mesh of different acting styles on Lost.
Oh, definitely. We have every kind of actor. We have people who never acted before in their lives.
Real ingénues, like Evangeline Lilly.
Like Evangeline.
In the first couple years, she gave a flat performance that was cute on its own, because it was so unstudied.
Right. Yeah. Everything works on TV, if it’s cut right, if you use the right takes, and position them in the right context.
But then you and Terry O’Quinn can also do some of the hand-rubbing stuff, too.
Yeah, we can chew it up, and chew it long, and spit it out well-digested. We’re old theater men, both of us. It’s partly why those scenes work so well, and partly because they’re just written so well.
Although I suppose you could take real B-movie dialogue and do the same thing with it, if you had to.
We figure out something, the two of us, oh, yeah.
I notice Jack Bender directs a lot of the big Lost episodes. Does he do a lot of work with actors, or is it mostly camera work? But he was an actor, too, wasn’t he?
He was. Jack Bender is real actor’s director. Because he was an actor, and because he directed theater, he really enjoys that process. It’s a lot like we’re doing a play, only he also takes care of the camera part of it. He’s very skillful. And he is our über-director. He’s the last word on this island of what’s in and what isn’t and what our style book is.
When you think about Lost, you think of action, but there are a lot of quiet scenes. When your character arrived, you were in a tiny room for four episodes.
Our show has always been made up of a combination. The Lost style book is really quite set. We do things like we walk through the jungle and we stop and turn and talk to each other. We never talk and walk. We always stop to talk.
I did not know that.
Think about it. Go back. Look at a hundred episodes and you’ll see we always stop and talk.
Is that written down? Is there an actual style book?
No, it’s just a figure of speech. Probably I use that word because I was in the publishing world for so long.
Were you aware, when you took the job, that the role would continue? Did you sign on for a certain number of episodes?
I was in it so little that I didn’t even sign a contract. I was just a guest player.
Did you consciously think at the time, “If I make myself so riveting, the show won’t be able to do without me”?
I always try to knock it out of the park, if I can. And I suppose you hear stories of actors who made themselves indispensable. But it was so disorienting, to arrive here one evening, all jet-lagged, and the next morning they have me strung up in a tree on the north shore. I was just trying to hang in there and remember my lines. I didn’t have an agenda.
Did you have to audition?
For once I didn’t have to audition. It came out of the blue.
Because of your work in an episode of The Practice?
I think that’s where they got the idea.
Did you play a similar character on that show? I didn’t see it.
It was much worse. Much scarier. The scariest thing I ever played or probably ever will play. A serial killer.
As opposed to a massacrist, if that’s even a word.
And yet we’re likin’ Ben this season. He’s funny, he’s vulnerable.
Do you enjoy playing the character in a different set of circumstances, with the “flash-sideways” world?
In my main story line, I’m without resources and vulnerable. In my flash-sideways, I have no powers of any sort. My flash-sideways is a different character altogether. It’s a lot of fun.
A teacher.
It’s not often you’re a regular on a TV show and you get to play two characters. It’s like the writers came up with your evil twin or your shipwrecked cousin.
What do you do at night around here? You play cards?
I get around in Honolulu. It’s a big city, it has a music scene and clubs. Some theater. We have a symphony and an opera. There’s dancin’ music of some sort every night.
Who are your friends in the cast?
I get together with Terry a fair amount. Jorge [Garcia] and his girlfriend have lots of parties. I always like to go over to their house.
So little by little you somehow made it back to New York after being in Alabama?
Yeah, I did my two years in Alabama, got my degree.
Back in high school, were you also in plays?
Oh, yeah.
What roles did you play?
Old man. I was always the old man. I’m waiting until I’m old enough to re-play all the roles I played in my youth. One of the first roles I every played, I was Grandpa Vanderhoff in You Can’t Take It With You. Walked with a cane, white stuff in my hair. It must have been horrible. Thank God there’s no videotape of it.
Was your family all right with your acting as a kid?
One of the great blessings of my life is that my parents had no notion of what I ought to do with my life. No advice about, “Maybe you ought to get a teaching degree.” They never fussed much about my financial well-being. And I hadn’t a pot to pee in for many, many years, but it was all right. I never felt particularly deprived. If you’re doing the thing you like to do, the money becomes irrelevant. It helps, too, not to have children. That changes the way you think about everything. You can be a starving actor, you can be an itinerant, traveling, gypsy actor.
Do you see repertory actors who are as good as people you see in New York and L.A.?
Oh, yes.
That’s what I’ve noticed, too.
I was an accomplished actor before I went to grad school. I was rattling around the South. I was in a brilliant production of The Importance of Being Earnest in Little Rock. I did great Shakespeare in Jacksonville, Florida. I played Romeo, I played Benedict, I played Iago. I began to have a reputation in Jacksonville, where I lived. In Jacksonville, you couldn’t get paid to act, but you could get paid to direct and design and build scenery. So I did all that. I was the busy little fellow who wore all the hats.
You didn’t leave the theater, I would guess.
Honestly, I used to sleep there. For a while I was working in a theater in Jacksonville, an ancient community theater, and I was acting and directing and designing plays. After rehearsals, at 11 at night, I would put on my jeans and get to work on the scenery. But your point that no one has a monopoly on good acting -- I know people out in the regions who are tremendous actors. If they had the inclination, or were willing to put up with the punishment, they could go to New York and be celebrated. You just never know where you’re going to find it. I went to a production of Peter Pan at the Diamond Head Stage, which is a community theater on the shoulder of Diamond Head. And you think, “O.K., here we go.” But the guy who played Captain Hook was the best Captain Hook I ever saw! The guy was sensational. He’s a school psychologist at some middle school here in Honolulu. I never saw him do anything before that, have never seen him since. How he got that part, how he rose to it, it’s a miracle. I got an E-mail from a friend in Boise, Idaho, of all places, and he went to see a play, against his better judgment, a pair of Edward Albee one-acts.
The Zoo Story?
Right, The Zoo Story and a newer one. The newer play ran first, and my friend thought he’d never get through it. Then, The Zoo Story. He said the kid playing Jerry was one of the five best performances he had ever seen! But there’s a big gap between being an actor and wanting to be in the business of being an actor. So there’s that leap, to making it your business, your work for hire. That’s the leap that will wipe out a lot of guys.
Do you have to change your approach to roles in order to make that leap? Or can you keep doing the same acting you’ve always done and show up and take the no’s?
It’s thick skin. Your craft must be of a high order. But we’re talking about people who already have good craft. Anyone who has good craft can probably make it as an actor, but there’s bunch of if’s. If they can put up with the rejection. If they can wait 20 years. Thirty. That’s what I tell young actors. “If you are good, you are likely to have success at it. But are you willing to delay it?” No one wants to be that 60-year-old waiter in New York, waiting for that break.
At some point you must ask yourself, “Am I crazy? Or am I good?” But you must have had the applause, because of your theater work.
I did. Even though the industry was not taking note of me, I knew I had made it with audiences. When I came back to New York the second time, by then I was 40. I thought, “I’ll take as much rejection as I can, but I’m not going to let New York tell me I’m not an actor. And I’ll give it a couple of years here.” I had met Carrie by then, and wanted to be wherever she was.
She’s your wife now?
Yes.
And she’s been on the show, playing the mom to your character as a baby.
That’s right. So I said, “If I can’t get in the door in New York, I’ll just back South, and she and I will work it out somehow.”
Was she acting in New York at the time?
Yes, she had just gotten out of Juilliard and she was tearing it up.
How’d you meet her?
In Alabama. Her brother was a company actor down there. I’ve known him longer than Carrie. She came down to play Ophelia. I was Guildenstern and the understudy to the lead. I was a grunt at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. I was an M.F.A. candidate, getting small parts. I was useful, because I was mature and experienced, and they could plug me into parts they couldn’t give to 20-two-year-olds.
So you could play Guildenstern without feeling insulted by the small number of lines?
Well, the gig there was loaded with insults, if you were looking for it. I was understudying people who I thought were poor actors. But you have to swallow that. You signed on.
How many years was the program?
Two. If it had been three, I would have killed myself.
In New York the second time, did you swear off the illustrating?
I lived in Queens, with one of my grad-school roommates for a while, and I got myself a humble retail job in Midtown.
Do you agree that it’s a good idea to have a miserable day job, rather than doing something like illustrating, so you don’t get sidetracked?
Exactly. And also you end up using some of the same creative muscles. It depletes your head of steam a little bit. So I got a day job at a shop, maybe you know it, called an American Craftsman. It’s on 52nd Street and 7th Avenue. They sell hardwood things and glass-blown objects.
There’s another one on Bleecker Street, right?
That’s right. Luckily, they let me go on auditions for an hour here or there. But I wasn’t going anywhere fast. And then I lucked out. Carrie talked to a friend and said, “Do you know anybody who needs a grown-up actor?” So I got plugged into a series of readings for [playwright] Moises Kaufman and eventually the show, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, was mounted and became a success. By that time I was playing the lead role. And that was when I got to leave my day job.
Were you living with Kerry at the time?
No, no. I was waiting to make my way in the world before I imposed my sad scramble of an actor’s life on her.
And since then you’ve not had a job outside of acting?
No. Although they claimed that they would always hold my job for me.
How old were you when you got that production?
I was as old as Oscar Wilde was at the trial. I was 43.
I was thinking someone like Josh Holloway [“Sawyer” on Lost] is probably more interesting at 40 than he was at 28, because he might have been bland or too pretty. Maybe some actors make sense once they reach a certain age. Like Terry O’Quinn is older but he has vigor.
I think good actors grow in their craft as they age, if they stay interested. It’s harder for women. There’s a gray zone in the middle of their careers. When you’ve stopped being the pretty young thing, but you’re not old enough to play the mom, the industry doesn’t know what to do with you.
It’s like Susan Sarandon -- she was the mom in Speed Racer and the goofy grandmother in The Lovely Bones. And Meryl Streep is doing great as she gets older.
They’ve both stayed interested and neither of them fought to play something other than their age.
When you get a new Lost script, how much do you plan your performance?
The character I play I’ve done so long, I slip into it easily. I don’t have to do character work or head work. But I think it behooves a character on a long-running show to be mindful of repetition, to somehow find it afresh, if that’s possible. I do pay some attention, if I think my bag of tricks is showing; if I’ve pulled a certain face or tic a little too often, I will try to mix things up a little bit. I worry about the audience becoming tired. But the best way to avoid that is to be fully engaged in the scene.
I’ve read the acting cliché many times -- “listen to the other actor.” Is that honestly a true thing? Or is that an empty phrase?
It’s everything.
Can you explain that to a lay person?
Your reaction to what’s being said to you will be appropriate in tone, in level, in style, if you’ve really heard what’s being said to you. If you’re really listening, then you have a fresh responsorial impulse for every line. Sometimes you see TV shows that grow a little lackluster after a few seasons, because no one is there to challenge the actors to reinvigorate or re-engage. Let’s say it’s a lawyer show, and every show you have two scenes in your office and two in the courtroom. If that drill gets too repetitive, you stop coming up with fresh attacks, and you maybe stop listening.
A benefit to your role is that you’ve been a prisoner, a boss, a flunky.
Each episode I’m somewhere different on the arc of power. The great thing in acting is surprise. We can feel where scripts are going. We know when we’re getting to the point where something is going to blow up or somebody’s going to pull a gun. What delights us is when we go on that familiar journey in a fresh way: “Oh my God -- that’s what people are like!”
When you started off as Henry Gale, did they tell you who your character was?
No. In theater, you spend so much time sitting around talking about character and motivation. On TV, it’s funny, they figure you’ve got it, once you’ve got the part. I didn’t speak to anyone in an artistic capacity until I was hanging up in the tree, saying my lines. And I was just glad I remembered them.
In David Mamet’s book On Directing, he’s a proponent of the actors doing none of that work. He wants them to say the words on the page as simply as possible. What do you think of that?
I think it only works in his plays. And then only 70 percent of the time. I know he wants to escape histrionics. Most of human communication is flatter and more plainspoken. But he’s cantankerous.
How much freedom do you have on Lost?
I don’t get many acting notes, but I do get acting challenges. Jack Bender is blunt with me, in a good way. He says, “That’s great, but do you have something different? Can we do this another way?” Or he’ll say, “We’ve seen you do that.” Or maybe I’ll drift and give a slightly more emotional reading of a line, and he’ll say, “Do it colder.” When my character was new, they would usually choose the coldest take, where the affect was superflat. Where I gave up the least, where I showed the least.
That’s where we find some of the humor of Ben Linus, the contrast between the delivery and the sinister things he does and says.
It brings you right to the cusp of drama and comedy, I think. Sometimes -- and I say this only half in jest -- sometimes I think I’m in a comedy, only no one knows it except me.
Does that mean you’re playing the part ironically? You’re doing these horrible things, and yet the audience senses there’s a light on in your skull.
I think the audience picks it up, if some little light is on behind the eyes, I think they get it.
It doesn’t mean you’re superior to the material, though, does it?
No, no. If you begin to comment on your own work, or the writing, as you’re doing it, that’s too shallow a well.
It’s kitsch.
It’s not enough. It cannot be strung out a long time. It’s not rich enough. What I do is, I think things and don’t act them. As you get older as an actor, you see there’s room for abstraction in your work. There’s room for emotional illogic, and it’s amazing, how effective it can be with some types of material. What if you’re emotional about the wrong things and dispassionate about the wrong things? That’s some of what I do with my role on Lost. I play opposites. Opposites of desire. Which people do in real life. And the people who do it in real life, we worry about them, because there’s something off in their tone, and we pay attention to them. I think that’s one of the reasons people pay attention to Ben. His emotional system is off. It’s sometimes inappropriate, the stuff he gets riled up about, the stuff he doesn’t care about. Americans, in general, although we think of ourselves as rough and tumble people, we are sentimental and soft-hearted, at least with our arts, and it worries us when a character is calculating, evil, cold.
You’ve probably heard this, but I read somewhere that an actor who has to cry in a scene should play like he’s trying not to cry. Because most of the time when you cry, you’re fighting it, you want to hold it back. If you go straight for the crying, it can look fake to the audience.
Yes, but after you’ve spent a few years trying to cry, you realize that’s not how your body works. You can trick your body into feeling things, but the way to do it is to try not to do it. Laughing and crying are two things that dog young actors. When you’re 21, it’s your bete-noire: “Oh, God, I have to cry! I can’t cry, I don’t feel it! I have to laugh? But it’s not funny!” As you get older, they’re two of the easiest things. Partly, it’s because you’ve had more life. It’s not hard to think of sad things.
I could cry right now.
I have to fight not to weep.
The cast of Lost is a mongrel unit, its actors having come out of stand-up comedy, sitcoms, movies, the stage, and modeling. Along with fellow veteran thespian Terry O’Quinn, who plays John Locke, Emerson is one of the regular cast members who has theater in his blood. Whenever Emerson and O’Quinn play a scene together, they have a great time rolling around in the dialogue and dragging out the dramatic beats. Both men have won Emmies for their Lost work, with O’Quinn beating out Emerson in 2006, and Emerson taking one for himself last year.
From his first moments on the show, Emerson sucked in viewers with a certain mesmerizing quality. Like the equally humorous and menacing Christopher Walken, he manages to project a flicker of comic wit behind his intensity. No matter how horribly his character behaves, whether it’s calling the bluff of hired thugs who threatened to kill his daughter (they weren’t bluffing) or massacring an entire village, he somehow keeps the audience on his side, at least to some degree. In the penultimate episode of the show, Ben Linus came back, in a big way, serving as the assistant-in-evil to the John Locke/Man in Black/Smoke Monster character, after having spent much of the sixth season in the background.
I met with Emerson at an open-air restaurant called Cheeseburger Waikiki, not far from his rented apartment, on a typically warm February morning. He was a regular at the place; the waitresses and busboys kept stopping by to say hello. He seemed sad to be leaving Lost but happy he would soon return to the mainland and a more settled life with his wife, actress Carrie Preston. Listening to him speak was a pleasure. He chooses and delivers his words in precise and playful manner that is not dissimilar to that of the heinous character he has played with such gusto.
Emerson didn’t make it as a New York actor until he was 43 years old. For many years he even tried to put the dream of being an actor out of his head, while working as a magazine illustrator. Then he built up his skills little by little in regional theaters. He talked about his years of apprenticeship, his thoughts on Benjamin Linus and Lost, and acting in general.
Michael: Honolulu’s the damnedest place to try to find breakfast. There are a couple of places that specialize in outrageous pancake concoctions that the Japanese tourists really love. I think it’s an American novelty to them. But I’m a New Yorker; I’m used to eggs and a bagel, you know.
VF: You live in New York, mainly?
New York is home, but Carrie and I are rarely there. She works in L.A. on True Blood, and I’m here a lot. When Lost is over, we’ll divide our time between the two coasts, and that will seem simple. You’ve probably never had a Hawaiian breakfast, have you? They’ve got a hamburger patty on rice, with eggs and gravy. The traditional Hawaiian breakfast is two scoops of rice, scrambled eggs, and Spam.
You live right in this neighborhood?
Every season I’ve lived in a different apartment building in Waikiki. A lot of people would say I’m insane to live in Waikiki. The locals think Waikiki is like Sodom and Gomorrah. It’s a place they go only if they have to. It’s crowded, it’s full of tourists -- all the things they want to escape, but all the things I embrace, because I can’t sleep if it’s not noisy.
Where do you live in Manhattan?
The theater district. West 55th. Getting around in this town, you’d think, “Oh we’re in the middle of the Pacific. Life will be so much quieter and simpler.” Try the freeway out here. The H-1 is a parking lot at rush hour.
How far is work for you?
You can see Diamond Head down there. The studio sits on the shoulder of Diamond Head.
Does your wife come out here?
Yeah, she’s here sometimes. And I get a place big enough to accommodate guests, in the hope that I’ll have visitors. Some seasons, no one comes. This is the last season, so now everybody’s getting the idea: Strike now or give it up.
Does any part of you feel like you got trapped too long in a single role?
I’m conscious of how it has occupied a long chapter of my working life -- all to the good. Everybody should have my set of problems. But being in the middle of the Pacific has kept me from doing all the things a New York actor does. I can’t do readings or workshops, can’t do voice-overs or commercials. This is the thing. I long to be somewhere where I can step outside and run into people who do what I do.
What was it like for you, when you were doing theater all those years in Florida and Alabama?
It was all I could do. It wasn’t a choice between two things. It was all I could do. Alabama Shakespeare Festival had an M.F.A. professional-actor training program, where you get a degree out of the University of Alabama, but you would never set foot in Tuscaloosa. We had our classes in the morning, and the rest of the time we were either rehearsing our own stuff or understudying and playing small parts on the main stage. It was just a way for me to make contact with the world of grown-up professional actors and directors. It was the closest I could get to New York and still be in the South, where I lived.
Are you from the South?
No, but it’s where I started acting. I ended up in the South by a fluke. An ill-considered marriage and divorce left me high and dry in St. Augustine, Florida. I had started out my grown-up life in New York City, but I couldn’t figure out how to be an actor there. And so I had been a magazine illustrator instead.
You talked about that on Conan one night, and he showed some of your drawings.
I don’t know where he found them. That was insane! Those weren’t just from my former career; they were two of the first illustrations I did as a working illustrator; 1979 was the date of those drawings.
What magazines did you illustrate for?
Psychology Today, Business Week, Barron’s, New York Times. In those days, you’d see eager young men with black portfolios running around near Rockefeller Center. And in those four or five tall buildings were half the magazines on the planet. So every day I would wake up, put on clothes, go into town from Brooklyn, leave my portfolio at some magazine, and then go kill a couple hours, because they would look at them on their lunch breaks. Then the deal was trying to figure out if they had actually looked at it. The illustrators had these Holmesian tricks, like we would wrap a pale thread around two pages, and if those two pages had been separated by opening, the thread would fall away. But if the thread was still in place we would know no one had looked.
It’s like rigging your bathroom cabinet before you have people over.
It’s like reading tea leaves to figure out if we were going to get work or not. Crazy times.
Did you have a two-track dream of illustrating and acting?
I had always wanted to be an actor, but I lost track of it. The city just knocked the wind out of me. I was from a small town in Iowa, and it was just overwhelming. I put it out of my mind for a long time. But then, as I say, when I found myself in my early thirties, divorced, and living in St. Augustine, Florida, I thought, “Well, nothin’ to lose now. Nowhere to go but up from here, so I might as well do what I please.” So I tried out for a production of Othello at a local university. Got the part of Iago. That’s interesting, isn’t it, that my first big part was a Shakespearean villain?
And here you are.
And here I am.
You give a theatrical performance as Benjamin Linus, but I guess there’s a mesh of different acting styles on Lost.
Oh, definitely. We have every kind of actor. We have people who never acted before in their lives.
Real ingénues, like Evangeline Lilly.
Like Evangeline.
In the first couple years, she gave a flat performance that was cute on its own, because it was so unstudied.
Right. Yeah. Everything works on TV, if it’s cut right, if you use the right takes, and position them in the right context.
But then you and Terry O’Quinn can also do some of the hand-rubbing stuff, too.
Yeah, we can chew it up, and chew it long, and spit it out well-digested. We’re old theater men, both of us. It’s partly why those scenes work so well, and partly because they’re just written so well.
Although I suppose you could take real B-movie dialogue and do the same thing with it, if you had to.
We figure out something, the two of us, oh, yeah.
I notice Jack Bender directs a lot of the big Lost episodes. Does he do a lot of work with actors, or is it mostly camera work? But he was an actor, too, wasn’t he?
He was. Jack Bender is real actor’s director. Because he was an actor, and because he directed theater, he really enjoys that process. It’s a lot like we’re doing a play, only he also takes care of the camera part of it. He’s very skillful. And he is our über-director. He’s the last word on this island of what’s in and what isn’t and what our style book is.
When you think about Lost, you think of action, but there are a lot of quiet scenes. When your character arrived, you were in a tiny room for four episodes.
Our show has always been made up of a combination. The Lost style book is really quite set. We do things like we walk through the jungle and we stop and turn and talk to each other. We never talk and walk. We always stop to talk.
I did not know that.
Think about it. Go back. Look at a hundred episodes and you’ll see we always stop and talk.
Is that written down? Is there an actual style book?
No, it’s just a figure of speech. Probably I use that word because I was in the publishing world for so long.
Were you aware, when you took the job, that the role would continue? Did you sign on for a certain number of episodes?
I was in it so little that I didn’t even sign a contract. I was just a guest player.
Did you consciously think at the time, “If I make myself so riveting, the show won’t be able to do without me”?
I always try to knock it out of the park, if I can. And I suppose you hear stories of actors who made themselves indispensable. But it was so disorienting, to arrive here one evening, all jet-lagged, and the next morning they have me strung up in a tree on the north shore. I was just trying to hang in there and remember my lines. I didn’t have an agenda.
Did you have to audition?
For once I didn’t have to audition. It came out of the blue.
Because of your work in an episode of The Practice?
I think that’s where they got the idea.
Did you play a similar character on that show? I didn’t see it.
It was much worse. Much scarier. The scariest thing I ever played or probably ever will play. A serial killer.
As opposed to a massacrist, if that’s even a word.
And yet we’re likin’ Ben this season. He’s funny, he’s vulnerable.
Do you enjoy playing the character in a different set of circumstances, with the “flash-sideways” world?
In my main story line, I’m without resources and vulnerable. In my flash-sideways, I have no powers of any sort. My flash-sideways is a different character altogether. It’s a lot of fun.
A teacher.
It’s not often you’re a regular on a TV show and you get to play two characters. It’s like the writers came up with your evil twin or your shipwrecked cousin.
What do you do at night around here? You play cards?
I get around in Honolulu. It’s a big city, it has a music scene and clubs. Some theater. We have a symphony and an opera. There’s dancin’ music of some sort every night.
Who are your friends in the cast?
I get together with Terry a fair amount. Jorge [Garcia] and his girlfriend have lots of parties. I always like to go over to their house.
So little by little you somehow made it back to New York after being in Alabama?
Yeah, I did my two years in Alabama, got my degree.
Back in high school, were you also in plays?
Oh, yeah.
What roles did you play?
Old man. I was always the old man. I’m waiting until I’m old enough to re-play all the roles I played in my youth. One of the first roles I every played, I was Grandpa Vanderhoff in You Can’t Take It With You. Walked with a cane, white stuff in my hair. It must have been horrible. Thank God there’s no videotape of it.
Was your family all right with your acting as a kid?
One of the great blessings of my life is that my parents had no notion of what I ought to do with my life. No advice about, “Maybe you ought to get a teaching degree.” They never fussed much about my financial well-being. And I hadn’t a pot to pee in for many, many years, but it was all right. I never felt particularly deprived. If you’re doing the thing you like to do, the money becomes irrelevant. It helps, too, not to have children. That changes the way you think about everything. You can be a starving actor, you can be an itinerant, traveling, gypsy actor.
Do you see repertory actors who are as good as people you see in New York and L.A.?
Oh, yes.
That’s what I’ve noticed, too.
I was an accomplished actor before I went to grad school. I was rattling around the South. I was in a brilliant production of The Importance of Being Earnest in Little Rock. I did great Shakespeare in Jacksonville, Florida. I played Romeo, I played Benedict, I played Iago. I began to have a reputation in Jacksonville, where I lived. In Jacksonville, you couldn’t get paid to act, but you could get paid to direct and design and build scenery. So I did all that. I was the busy little fellow who wore all the hats.
You didn’t leave the theater, I would guess.
Honestly, I used to sleep there. For a while I was working in a theater in Jacksonville, an ancient community theater, and I was acting and directing and designing plays. After rehearsals, at 11 at night, I would put on my jeans and get to work on the scenery. But your point that no one has a monopoly on good acting -- I know people out in the regions who are tremendous actors. If they had the inclination, or were willing to put up with the punishment, they could go to New York and be celebrated. You just never know where you’re going to find it. I went to a production of Peter Pan at the Diamond Head Stage, which is a community theater on the shoulder of Diamond Head. And you think, “O.K., here we go.” But the guy who played Captain Hook was the best Captain Hook I ever saw! The guy was sensational. He’s a school psychologist at some middle school here in Honolulu. I never saw him do anything before that, have never seen him since. How he got that part, how he rose to it, it’s a miracle. I got an E-mail from a friend in Boise, Idaho, of all places, and he went to see a play, against his better judgment, a pair of Edward Albee one-acts.
The Zoo Story?
Right, The Zoo Story and a newer one. The newer play ran first, and my friend thought he’d never get through it. Then, The Zoo Story. He said the kid playing Jerry was one of the five best performances he had ever seen! But there’s a big gap between being an actor and wanting to be in the business of being an actor. So there’s that leap, to making it your business, your work for hire. That’s the leap that will wipe out a lot of guys.
Do you have to change your approach to roles in order to make that leap? Or can you keep doing the same acting you’ve always done and show up and take the no’s?
It’s thick skin. Your craft must be of a high order. But we’re talking about people who already have good craft. Anyone who has good craft can probably make it as an actor, but there’s bunch of if’s. If they can put up with the rejection. If they can wait 20 years. Thirty. That’s what I tell young actors. “If you are good, you are likely to have success at it. But are you willing to delay it?” No one wants to be that 60-year-old waiter in New York, waiting for that break.
At some point you must ask yourself, “Am I crazy? Or am I good?” But you must have had the applause, because of your theater work.
I did. Even though the industry was not taking note of me, I knew I had made it with audiences. When I came back to New York the second time, by then I was 40. I thought, “I’ll take as much rejection as I can, but I’m not going to let New York tell me I’m not an actor. And I’ll give it a couple of years here.” I had met Carrie by then, and wanted to be wherever she was.
She’s your wife now?
Yes.
And she’s been on the show, playing the mom to your character as a baby.
That’s right. So I said, “If I can’t get in the door in New York, I’ll just back South, and she and I will work it out somehow.”
Was she acting in New York at the time?
Yes, she had just gotten out of Juilliard and she was tearing it up.
How’d you meet her?
In Alabama. Her brother was a company actor down there. I’ve known him longer than Carrie. She came down to play Ophelia. I was Guildenstern and the understudy to the lead. I was a grunt at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. I was an M.F.A. candidate, getting small parts. I was useful, because I was mature and experienced, and they could plug me into parts they couldn’t give to 20-two-year-olds.
So you could play Guildenstern without feeling insulted by the small number of lines?
Well, the gig there was loaded with insults, if you were looking for it. I was understudying people who I thought were poor actors. But you have to swallow that. You signed on.
How many years was the program?
Two. If it had been three, I would have killed myself.
In New York the second time, did you swear off the illustrating?
I lived in Queens, with one of my grad-school roommates for a while, and I got myself a humble retail job in Midtown.
Do you agree that it’s a good idea to have a miserable day job, rather than doing something like illustrating, so you don’t get sidetracked?
Exactly. And also you end up using some of the same creative muscles. It depletes your head of steam a little bit. So I got a day job at a shop, maybe you know it, called an American Craftsman. It’s on 52nd Street and 7th Avenue. They sell hardwood things and glass-blown objects.
There’s another one on Bleecker Street, right?
That’s right. Luckily, they let me go on auditions for an hour here or there. But I wasn’t going anywhere fast. And then I lucked out. Carrie talked to a friend and said, “Do you know anybody who needs a grown-up actor?” So I got plugged into a series of readings for [playwright] Moises Kaufman and eventually the show, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, was mounted and became a success. By that time I was playing the lead role. And that was when I got to leave my day job.
Were you living with Kerry at the time?
No, no. I was waiting to make my way in the world before I imposed my sad scramble of an actor’s life on her.
And since then you’ve not had a job outside of acting?
No. Although they claimed that they would always hold my job for me.
How old were you when you got that production?
I was as old as Oscar Wilde was at the trial. I was 43.
I was thinking someone like Josh Holloway [“Sawyer” on Lost] is probably more interesting at 40 than he was at 28, because he might have been bland or too pretty. Maybe some actors make sense once they reach a certain age. Like Terry O’Quinn is older but he has vigor.
I think good actors grow in their craft as they age, if they stay interested. It’s harder for women. There’s a gray zone in the middle of their careers. When you’ve stopped being the pretty young thing, but you’re not old enough to play the mom, the industry doesn’t know what to do with you.
It’s like Susan Sarandon -- she was the mom in Speed Racer and the goofy grandmother in The Lovely Bones. And Meryl Streep is doing great as she gets older.
They’ve both stayed interested and neither of them fought to play something other than their age.
When you get a new Lost script, how much do you plan your performance?
The character I play I’ve done so long, I slip into it easily. I don’t have to do character work or head work. But I think it behooves a character on a long-running show to be mindful of repetition, to somehow find it afresh, if that’s possible. I do pay some attention, if I think my bag of tricks is showing; if I’ve pulled a certain face or tic a little too often, I will try to mix things up a little bit. I worry about the audience becoming tired. But the best way to avoid that is to be fully engaged in the scene.
I’ve read the acting cliché many times -- “listen to the other actor.” Is that honestly a true thing? Or is that an empty phrase?
It’s everything.
Can you explain that to a lay person?
Your reaction to what’s being said to you will be appropriate in tone, in level, in style, if you’ve really heard what’s being said to you. If you’re really listening, then you have a fresh responsorial impulse for every line. Sometimes you see TV shows that grow a little lackluster after a few seasons, because no one is there to challenge the actors to reinvigorate or re-engage. Let’s say it’s a lawyer show, and every show you have two scenes in your office and two in the courtroom. If that drill gets too repetitive, you stop coming up with fresh attacks, and you maybe stop listening.
A benefit to your role is that you’ve been a prisoner, a boss, a flunky.
Each episode I’m somewhere different on the arc of power. The great thing in acting is surprise. We can feel where scripts are going. We know when we’re getting to the point where something is going to blow up or somebody’s going to pull a gun. What delights us is when we go on that familiar journey in a fresh way: “Oh my God -- that’s what people are like!”
When you started off as Henry Gale, did they tell you who your character was?
No. In theater, you spend so much time sitting around talking about character and motivation. On TV, it’s funny, they figure you’ve got it, once you’ve got the part. I didn’t speak to anyone in an artistic capacity until I was hanging up in the tree, saying my lines. And I was just glad I remembered them.
In David Mamet’s book On Directing, he’s a proponent of the actors doing none of that work. He wants them to say the words on the page as simply as possible. What do you think of that?
I think it only works in his plays. And then only 70 percent of the time. I know he wants to escape histrionics. Most of human communication is flatter and more plainspoken. But he’s cantankerous.
How much freedom do you have on Lost?
I don’t get many acting notes, but I do get acting challenges. Jack Bender is blunt with me, in a good way. He says, “That’s great, but do you have something different? Can we do this another way?” Or he’ll say, “We’ve seen you do that.” Or maybe I’ll drift and give a slightly more emotional reading of a line, and he’ll say, “Do it colder.” When my character was new, they would usually choose the coldest take, where the affect was superflat. Where I gave up the least, where I showed the least.
That’s where we find some of the humor of Ben Linus, the contrast between the delivery and the sinister things he does and says.
It brings you right to the cusp of drama and comedy, I think. Sometimes -- and I say this only half in jest -- sometimes I think I’m in a comedy, only no one knows it except me.
Does that mean you’re playing the part ironically? You’re doing these horrible things, and yet the audience senses there’s a light on in your skull.
I think the audience picks it up, if some little light is on behind the eyes, I think they get it.
It doesn’t mean you’re superior to the material, though, does it?
No, no. If you begin to comment on your own work, or the writing, as you’re doing it, that’s too shallow a well.
It’s kitsch.
It’s not enough. It cannot be strung out a long time. It’s not rich enough. What I do is, I think things and don’t act them. As you get older as an actor, you see there’s room for abstraction in your work. There’s room for emotional illogic, and it’s amazing, how effective it can be with some types of material. What if you’re emotional about the wrong things and dispassionate about the wrong things? That’s some of what I do with my role on Lost. I play opposites. Opposites of desire. Which people do in real life. And the people who do it in real life, we worry about them, because there’s something off in their tone, and we pay attention to them. I think that’s one of the reasons people pay attention to Ben. His emotional system is off. It’s sometimes inappropriate, the stuff he gets riled up about, the stuff he doesn’t care about. Americans, in general, although we think of ourselves as rough and tumble people, we are sentimental and soft-hearted, at least with our arts, and it worries us when a character is calculating, evil, cold.
You’ve probably heard this, but I read somewhere that an actor who has to cry in a scene should play like he’s trying not to cry. Because most of the time when you cry, you’re fighting it, you want to hold it back. If you go straight for the crying, it can look fake to the audience.
Yes, but after you’ve spent a few years trying to cry, you realize that’s not how your body works. You can trick your body into feeling things, but the way to do it is to try not to do it. Laughing and crying are two things that dog young actors. When you’re 21, it’s your bete-noire: “Oh, God, I have to cry! I can’t cry, I don’t feel it! I have to laugh? But it’s not funny!” As you get older, they’re two of the easiest things. Partly, it’s because you’ve had more life. It’s not hard to think of sad things.
I could cry right now.
I have to fight not to weep.
