The actor: Reliably excellent character actor Gary Cole, best known for his turn as Bill Lumbergh, the passive-aggressive, coffee-sipping boss in Mike Judge's Office Space. Cole played a lot of heavies in the early part of his career, but has recently won acclaim for his hilarious turns in Talladega Nights, Dodgeball, TV's Arrested Development, and as Mike Brady in The Brady Bunch Movie. His facility for villainy and comedy is currently on display in Pineapple Express.
Pineapple Express (2008)—"Ted"
Gary Cole: Well, Judd Apatow was producing it, along with every other movie out, it seems. [Laughs.] And Judd was involved in Talladega Nights, so that's where I first met him, and I think it was pretty close to when we began shooting. My character is one of many villains in this story. I haven't seen much of it other than my scenes, for some dialogue replacement, but what I've seen is very funny, even though there's an action tone that isn't always necessarily comic. There's an actual body count and explosions and stuff like that, so he's kind of mixing up genres.
The A.V. Club: Was there a lot of improvisation involved? Director David Gordon Green is known for keeping things a little loose.
GC: Yeah, that was my experience on Talladega too—there is a script, and that's the version you usually do first, and then he either tweaks that a little or just opens it up totally. And a lot of times, David will just keep the camera rolling. The scene that's scripted will take place, and then there's no cuts, so you just keep going until you start to stew in your own ad-libbed juices. [Laughs.] Sometimes it goes on for a long time, but the one thing I figured out about that is, the good news about film is, nothing really has to work, other than bits and pieces. If you're onstage and you're improvising and nothing's happening, people are racing for the door. But the director can go shopping later and pick up pieces and moments and insert them. If people get on a roll and it works, then great. But that's what's nice about film. Accidental things can happen, but along with that comes a lot of footage that probably no one wants to look at, let alone pay to see. [Laughs.]
AVC: Do you feel comfortable failing in that respect? Producing unusable footage?
GC: Improv is not something I had a lot of experience with, because for a long time, my only experience in front of a camera was all television, which is pretty rigid script-wise, except for the occasional scene where you toss in an ad-lib just to elongate something. Like, say, you're walking down a hall and you just don't have enough dialogue, and you throw in something. But you don't really have time to do other than what's written. It's very rigid. Shows have a certain rhythm that nobody wants disturbed. So a lot of that doesn't take place on television, at least the television I was doing at the time when I first started. So I didn't have a lot of experience in that until I wound up working with Will Ferrell and [Talladega Nights director] Adam McKay. And that's my first real experience of it on a daily basis. The days I was working on the film, it was always used. Now, a lot of it didn't make it into the film, but some of it did, and the more you realize how that stuff gets in there, you're more comfortable just doing it, knowing if something feels like it's really going south and it's kind of dead, it's not going to be in there anyway. You have to be able to fail in order to get those moments, and then you train yourself to just keep behaving until the cameras cut.
To Live And Die In L.A. (1985)—uncredited
GC: [William] Petersen is an old friend of mine from a long time ago. We started a theatre company in Chicago, and he's the one that got me on that. I was out here in Los Angeles. Billy was renting a big house while he was doing the movie, and there were other Chicago actors out here migrating, mooching off of him while we were out in L.A. auditioning for stuff. And there were some roles in it, and he mentioned me to William Friedkin, so I just got this role as one of a bunch of bad guys that Billy hunted down.
AVC: And he ran after you at some point?
GC: Oh yeah. [Laughs.] I never ran so much in a day in my life. It was somewhere out in a railyard outside of downtown near a bridge, like a train trestle. And it was running there, it was running across the bridge, and it was running through the industrial park, and finally Billy tackles me and roughs me up. But we ran all day long.
AVC: Could he outrun you?
GC: Oh God, yeah. Billy was quite the speedster then. But he had to hold back to make it a chase. [Laughs.]
Fatal Vision (1984)—"Capt. Jeffrey MacDonald, MD"
GC: I was still really in Chicago. I don't even think I made any pilgrimages out here. I was doing theatre in Chicago, and I had a couple plays in New York, which is really what led me to do it. There was a guy by the name of Joel Thurm who was vice president at NBC at the time, and he had seen a production of True West that I was in, in New York. And I think maybe a year before that or less, I had read for Miami Vice and did a network screen test for that. Obviously I didn't get that, but [Thurm] still had a memory of me. They had offered the MacDonald role to a few people who had turned it down, and the time for shooting it was approaching. And the casting director in Chicago, who I had known for a long time, suggested me to Joel Thurm. He remembered the play, and then I flew out and auditioned for it, and it became a reality. But it was one of those right-timing things, because they were getting down to the wire, and they were probably less than two weeks from shooting this thing. They already had Karl Malden and Eva Marie Saint and Andy Griffith. It wasn't a question of getting someone that was known, although nowadays I don't know that they'd cast an unknown in that role.
AVC: Well, they already had two-thirds of the cast of On The Waterfront available.
GC: Yeah, they were set. [Laughs.] It was going, hell or high water, whoever they got.
AVC: What were your feelings about this role, especially given how the real-life story played out when the miniseries was over? [The miniseries and its source material, Joe McGinniss' true-crime book, cast MacDonald as guilty of murdering his pregnant wife and two children, but MacDonald successfully sued McGinniss for fraud.]
GC: I didn't know a lot about how it stacked up to the material that was out in Hollywood. I was a theatre actor in Chicago. It was massive, the role was massive. It was a four-hour miniseries, and I was basically in every scene in the movie. It was an eight- or nine-week shoot out here in L.A.. It was a whole change of life for me, so I was looking at that, too. I read it and re-read the book, and it seemed to me that their take on it was pretty one-sided, and they were pretty convinced that he was guilty. But I didn't disagree with that. That seemed to be the case, although I didn't want to play him like that, because I thought it would be better to play him if he was innocent. It would make him more convincing, which he was to a lot of people—a lot of people were convinced he was innocent.
AVC: So when you're in that role, you really have to be convinced of your own innocence, don't you?
GC: You make that choice. You look at each scene and you make sure that this is not a person deceiving people. And the very smart thing about this screenplay was, there was never a time that he was alone with his own thoughts. He was always in the presence of somebody, so we always had to be presenting that. But if you just make the choice—and that's really what acting is—you have to make a definite choice of how you're going to play. It's word-by-word, scene-by-scene, and movie-by-movie. You make a choice as to what the character believes and then you let the rest, the direction and editing and story, take care of itself. I felt that if I was just playing a guy that was lying to people all the time, that would come through. If I was playing a guy that was indignant and pissed-off that he was being accused of this, that was more authentic to me, even if he was in fact guilty.
Miami Vice (1986)—"Jackson Crane"
AVC: You mentioned auditioning for Miami Vice, but you did appear on the show eventually.
GC: I think the show was in its third season, so it was pretty popular at that point. It was a good experience for me. I was only there five or six days. There was a great actor in that episode who's now a director, Perry Lang. We were kind of partner bad guys, a couple of rich kids who became drug smugglers. I just remember having a decent time in Miami for 10 days.
AVC: And there were pirates involved in this episode? [Including Richard Belzer as "Captain Hook." —ed.]
GC: Yeah. I flew a pontoon plane that was my mode of transport, and Perry had some kind of smuggler's boat, and in the first scene, he wipes out a bunch of people on a boat. They just take over a boat, and though they weren't actual pirates, they fancied themselves to be, and they had the pirate lingo. They didn't dress as pirates. Miami Vice was very stylized, in a weird way. It was kind of like the old Batman. Sometimes the villains were very… I wouldn't say they were cartoony, but they were themed. They were very strong characters. This was not NYPD Blue. It wasn't trying to be hardcore authentic all the time.
AVC: After NYPD and Homicide, it seemed like all cop shows had to go for hard realism.
GC: And this was pre-that. This was before that whole Hill Street Blues blue-collar cop. The famous story about the creation of Miami Vice was that [NBC president] Brandon Tartikoff wrote two words on a napkin: "'MTV cops.' That's what I want as a show." And that's what it became.
In The Line Of Fire (1993)—"Secret Service Presidential Detail Agent-In-Charge Bill Watts"
GC: In The Line Of Fire wasn't technically the first feature I was in, but I'm going to say that it was, because the first one I did, I was basically invisible. I was in a movie called Lucas with Corey Haim in 1986. I played an assistant football coach who had one line, which was looped, and I realized it wasn't even my voice when I saw it. It was me saying the line onscreen, but it was someone else's voice. They lost my phone number, I guess. [Laughs.] But yeah, Line Of Fire was in '93, and that was an audition on tape, because that's the way [director] Wolfgang [Petersen] did it. He didn't usually meet people, and I believe Mr. Malkovich was responsible for getting me the part. I know John from college. I read for it and didn't hear anything for a long time, and in the meantime I saw John, and he had been set in it for a while as this villain, and I just mentioned I read for it, and he said, "Well, I wish I would've known about that." Then a week or so later, I got a call that I was cast in it. So I think John put in a good word for me.
AVC: What was it like going toe-to-toe with Clint Eastwood?
GC: It's intimidating. When I did Fatal Vision, that was intimidating as well, because Karl Malden, Eva Marie Saint, and Andy Griffith were big stars, especially to someone who was coming from Chicago and had never done a movie. But [Eastwood] is in a different league than those folks. Not to take anything away from them, but he is a giant icon movie legend. So it is very surreal that you're all of a sudden on a set, playing a character who has to argue with him, has to fire him, and has to be belligerent in his face. You see that famous face with the eyes getting squinty, and [Affects Eastwood growl.], and you're like, "Oh my God." So it was kind of an out-of-body experience. Part of you wants to look over at the people watching and say, "Not bad, huh? Me and Clint Eastwood." [Laughs.] But you have to get past that and just be an actor. He's a very soft-spoken, humble guy, actually, which helped put somebody like me at ease, who had never worked with somebody as huge as that. I'm sure that's not always the case with legendary people. But he's notoriously humble. He's the type of guy that when they try to put people ahead in line for lunch, he refuses. He just stands there patiently waiting behind the crew, and whenever he gets there, he gets there. That's the kind of guy he is, and it was just a great experience all around. To be in a movie directed by Wolfgang Petersen, and a movie that had a large budget… I got a taste of what really good filmmaking could be, so for my first experience in that kind of setting, it was great.
- Comments