But then I met Frank Serpico in Bregman’s office. Bregman had set it up. I took one look at Frank and I knew. I said, I can play him. I’ve got to play him. I saw it in his eyes, and I thought, I want to be that. I’m often offered real people, and I turn them down. I didn’t want to be them. Not because they’re bad or good. Just because I didn’t feel any connection to them. I spent more time with Frank that summer before we made the film. He came to visit me at a house I was renting in Montauk. We were sitting on my deck, looking at the waves coming in. Finally I said something to him that he’d probably heard a thousand times before. “Frank, why didn’t you take those payoffs?” I asked him. “Just take that money and give your share away if you didn’t want to keep it?” He said to me, “Al, if I did that”—long pause—“who would I be when I listen to Beethoven?” There was something about that statement that just made me want to play him.”
Al Pacino has been one of the world’s greatest, most influential actors for more than 50 years. He’s audacious. He’s outrageous. He’s Al Pacino, and I’m pretty sure you know what that entails…Though he can go small and internal, Pacino’s ability to really emote is one of his singular gifts… Has he always been perfect? No. He strives for something riskier and more alive than perfection. Is he always perceptive, free, unmissable? God, yes.
In a recent Washington Post newsletter, he (Ron Charles) marveled at the actress Judi Dench’s astonishing ability to recite most of the lines from her long-ago parts in Shakespeare plays. He wrote:
“Such memorization is a lost art, and much substance was lost with it. In high school and college, I used to memorize hours of stage dialogue and long passages from the Bible, which were a great comfort to me in times of stress. These days, only the stress remains. Most nights, staring at the ceiling for hours, my mind is a tangle of bits of string, and all I can come up with is something like: ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. Won’t you lay me down in the tall grass and let me do my stuff?’”
For those of you not fluent in Fleetwood Mac, that last sentence is a lyric from the song “Second Hand News.”
If we take style to mean a manner of doing something, could you articulate the John Malkovich style? Not really, because it’s not something I think about much — what I am or what I do. But I’ve always felt style is the only constant in life. By style I mean, simply, the way you move through life. If you get sad news, how do you respond? What do you do if you’re angry, if you’re amused, if you’re moved? That’s what style is. It’s not really up to me to say what mine is.
The book has a long interview with you where you say: “I’m capable of belief, at least inside the theater. Outside of the theater, not so much.” Why? Because that’s what my life has taught me. It took me seven years of analysis to learn that when people said something, it isn’t necessarily what they meant. I’m not very clever. I remember once meeting the head of a country — I won’t say which one — at a dinner one night after a performance in a faraway land. He kept telling me about how uncorrupt the country was because he was running it. I think he’s still in prison. That’s what I mean. Theater, it’s a perfect world. Life is more like making a movie: push a boulder up a hill every day and hope it doesn’t flatten you. So I’ve always felt most at home in the theater — at home with myself, my emotions, my colleagues, their emotions, with how we express them. That’s harder to find in life.about:blank
Aside from work, what do you believe in? I believe in people, generally. I believe in humanity, somewhat. I have a great mistrust of ideology. Maybe even more than I do religion. I’m not a believer, but I don’t make some big show of it. I’m wary of all the things that people believe that make them think they’re them.
Aside from Charlie Sheen’s work, what might you turn to when you’re trying to combat existential malaise? I’m not very existential because I’m not profound. So many people think a lot about this or that. I don’t think about this or that. I just do this or that.
Hard to say. That’s my problem.
That makes me think of your being able to find belief in the theater more easily than outside. So many things in life are kind of unsolvable and therefore, at a certain point, incredibly tiresome. People feel that and then absolutely know the opposite is true. As they say in New Jersey, “g’head.” I don’t know.
I want to go back to the line that you quoted from “Death of a Salesman”: “Life is a casting off.” You’re 70 now. What are you casting off? You have to let go of the past, of connections. At this age, there are people who are dead now that were very close to me. There are people I love to have a conversation with — who I sometimes dream of and have the conversation in dreams — that I’ll never see again. That’s a natural part of life. You have to let it go. It’s cast off in the sense that it’s allowed to float away. It’s also not weighing you down. It’s gone.about:blank
And what are you holding on to? Family, work, friends. Not as many as I used to because some people close to me didn’t choose to maintain that relationship, and sometimes I didn’t choose to, which, of course, is everyone’s choice. I just, as Joan Didion said, play it as it lays.
— John Malkovich, excerpts from “John Malkovich on (Really) Being John Malkovich” interview by David Marchese (NY Times, January 28, 2024)
Perhaps then it’s no surprise that the idea of preening on social media makes Ruth Wilson physically recoil. In some respects, Instagram would be useful – somewhere her fanbase could find her smaller projects, for instance. But the very idea fills her with dread. She dramatises an imaginary feed: “Oh, heyyy guys. It’s Ruth Wilson herrre.” Then shudders. “The self is so important on social media, it’s created a very narcissistic society. Everyone is their own famous person; everyone can be the centre of their own world.” She jabs a finger at her phone. “But it isn’t human. It’s a constructed world. It lacks actual connection or feeling.”
What’s more, she’s watched friends become “obsessed. You can’t have a conversation because they’re looking for the next shot. Everything is, ‘What can I put out there?’ When they don’t get hits, they feel low, not validated.” She clicks her tongue at the performative feminism, the performative activism; the fact that everyone rushes to post on national whatever-whatever day. “Nothing is real. I don’t believe any of it. No one has real or strong beliefs. They are just dictated to.”
Quite apart from anything, being a slave to her phone would intrude on the things she loves best – “thinking. Just thinking” is one. She has a “restless mind”. Also, reading. […]
“I think back: brilliant, you made people so uncomfortable they had to leave. I think it’s important to face things you don’t want to see. Because only then will you grow. Only then will you live properly…Art should change the way you think. Art should change your life. Art can save you.” Wilson wants her work to be art. […]
Standing on that hinge between pre- and post-#MeToo was, Wilson says, “extraordinary. To actually witness Hollywood” – she makes a whistling sound – “shift like that.” The most disappointing aspect was the volte-face hypocrisy. “To see the survival instinct. You realise how fickle that industry is. There’s no moral backbone.” Attitudes, habits, the way people spoke changed, yes – but only out of fear of being caught. “People were like, ‘We’re going to have a meeting about how badly we’ve behaved and then we’ll all be fine.’ It blew my mind.
“It made me understand a whole swathe of human behaviour. So many people don’t really believe anything – only what makes them money.” Weinstein knew “how to get people Oscars”, so his behaviour was ignored. “They’re opportunists. You see that. But it makes you sage about what you want, what’s important. Do you want to live in that world? Or would you prefer to be doing something else, like this weird 24-hour play, where you can explore things in a safe environment?” […]
This is her safe environment, among artists who challenge. I’m not surprised that Katharine Hepburn – who won Oscars, but “paid no heed to the awards system” – is one of Wilson’s heroines. “I love her. What a legend.” She didn’t play the Hollywood game? “No. And I’m useless at playing the game. I don’t want to play the game. Like, what game? What does that even mean? That’s my answer. I can’t. I physically can’t.”
In a recent 
