By Cole Smithey
Michael Keaton is a tightly wound actor. After a long string of leading man hits during the ‘80s and ‘90s Keaton’s stellar career shifted into an unexpectedly workmanlike series of cameos and secondary parts. In director Michael Hoffman’s ("The Emperor’s Club") adaptation of celebrated novelist Don DeLillo’s "Cosmopolis" Keaton presents a startlingly raw performance as an ‘80s Broadway playwright named Nicky Rogan. Nicky’s well-developed defense mechanisms are built around his connection to the cursed career of his favorite baseball team the Boston Red Sox. Keaton’s character is a chronic liar predisposed to losing, and his best friend Elliot Litvak (brilliantly played by Griffin Dunne) is a fellow playwright succumbing to paranoia brought on by the threat of being reviewed by an almighty theater critic (Robert Downey Jr.). On a day when Manhattan traffic doesn’t move, game six of the 1986 World Series initiates a crisis for Nicky that will bring him face to face with his biggest fears. Michael Keaton makes you feel the riptide of Nicky’s emotional confusion. It’s a vision of redemption that makes you glad to be alive.
CS: Do you have any connection to the Red Sox or fanaticism that’s over the edge in your life?
MK: Yeah, absolutely. I think there may be some photos out there on the Internet right now of me at the Super Bowl that would probably be pretty embarrassing because I’m a big Steelers fan. That I get, but the Red Sox fanaticism is specific. I’ve got some Boston friends who are huge fans and that’s a whole other thing culturally, that’s like a whole different level. I don’t have that kind of thing and I don’t have the living with that infamous curse–how seriously they take it. It makes me laugh, but I’m not making fun of it. You know what else makes me laugh a lot in this movie? I love the notion of a critic who’s just absolutely, systematically destroying lives. People are falling apart. He’s like this weird, eccentric, literate sniper. You can’t see him, you can’t find him, and people are just dropping. Playwrights are falling by the wayside. It makes me nervous, I think that’s why I laugh so hard. I like the idea of that kind of guy out there, I thought that was really funny, it made me laugh in the script. And the fact that Griffin has had a nervous breakdown and his career is totally over, and then it slowly eats away at me. It was so much fun to play.
CS: Were you confident about portraying this kind of eroding character?
MK: No, the thing was I didn’t know if I could do this, which is usually what gets me going. One reason I loved doing ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ was that I didn’t know how to do it. Like this, I didn’t think I knew how to do this. But it’s good, it’s good writing. I had to find my own way into the character, because Don DeLillo’s language is really not like a lot of other people’s language. We had many discussions about how you do this and make it accessible to everyone, to an audience. How do I perform that and at the same time kind of feature it like this is really great language. You don’t want to just shove it down, you kind of want to bring it up but not point it out too much. You want to make this character look like someone who would really speak like this. At the same time, this movie is just a tiny bit surreal. It’s hard, how do you do that? Michael Hoffman is probably the most intelligent director I’ve ever worked with, so he was great to talk to about that because he could explain a lot of this to me. I’ve probably never talked to a director so much about a character in my life and I really liked it, talking and dissecting and agreeing, disagreeing, and kind of looking at it, shaping it. To his credit, being a mature adult, he would totally change things after we talked about it. He would say, "You know what, you’re right, I thought about it last night, and here’s what I think in addition to that." It’s so nice to work with people like that who aren’t big babies about it. So I loved that process, it really challenged me.
CS: Did it remind you of what you fell in love with in acting?
MK: Yes, that’s exactly what it did. You get down to the essence, because you ask yourself, what am I doing this for? And then you go, oh yeah, I know why. And then you sift lower, and it’s because it’s fun, and also I like the challenge. Can I do it? Can we do it? It was really like an experiment that Griffin and I talked about. It’s bare bones, I’m just being an actor, I’m a guy who got hired to be this character and show up in the morning and go to work. That’s it. Then it was ridiculously relaxing because you didn’t have a minute to not work. You had to be focused and locked in, it was all meat, no fat. You had to be ready and prepared. It was good for me to maintain that kind of discipline.
CS: How did Griffin convince you to do it?
MK: It had become a dead issue. We discussed it out of respect for Griffin Dunne and director Michael Hoffman and producer Amy Robinson and Don DeLillo, but it wasn’t going to happen. Then it kind of haunted me. The script wouldn’t go in the waste can exactly, it was kind of hanging around the table. I would read a few pages and go, "Damn, that’s really good language, too bad I’m not doing that one." These calls would go back and forth and it was just kind of lying there, and then Griffin said, "This just fits you like a glove. It’s just kind of you, the baseball thing and the actor thing and you kind of are this guy." We just had a very logical discussion about it. I was in a car talking to him on the phone and I think I got lost because I was trying to concentrate on what we were talking about and I pulled over, and I remember driving on thinking, "I think I’m going to end up doing this thing." He wasn’t pushing or anything, it just started making sense. And I’m really glad I did it, it was a really good experiment.
