Alfred Molina
In a season with more than its share of male leads exorcising their midlife demons (think Nathan Lane in Butley, Tony Shalhoub in The Scene, Bill Nighy in The Vertical Hour), none is more volatile than the title character in Patrick Marber's Howard Katz, embodied to exasperating perfection by Alfred Molina. "One day, I swear, I will set fire to myself and run through the streets wailing," Howard declares to his long-suffering wife, Jess (Jessica Hecht), just before mulling the odds of surviving Russian Roulette. Howard's a London-based agent, the son of blue-collar Jewish parents, and Molina gets to display his prodigious comic timing in a series of fast-moving scenes tracking his character's personal and professional downfall. It's the latest in a series of strong star performances for Molina, following his Tony-nominated work in Art, Theatre World Award-winning performance in Molly Sweeney for the Roundabout Theatre Company (which is producing Howard Katz off-Broadway) and Tony-nominated turn as Tevye in the controversial 2004 Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof. Though the London-born actor's movie career is hot (from Spider-Man 2 and The Da Vinci Code to the upcoming As You Like It), Molina remains committed to stage acting, both in New York and his home base, Los Angeles, where he starred in The Cherry Orchard opposite Annette Bening last year. In a recent chat, the 53-year-old actor talked about Howard, Fiddler and his long and happy marriage to actress Jill Gascoine.
What attracted you to this play—other than the opportunity to play a truly larger-than-life character?
It's one of those plays that talks about epic things in a context that's very domestic, very personal. The character doesn't come onstage and discuss big ideas; it's a play about people living what may seem on the surface to be ordinary, everyday lives, but with huge emotions and conflicts and complex relationships underneath. Those are always the best kind of stories.
Where does Howard's anger come from?
I think it's to do with his profound dissatisfaction with his life at the age of 50. He's ended up somewhere he didn't expect, a common experience for a lot of people, particularly men—the sense that your life is more than halfway over and you're facing the stark possibility that whatever you've done, wherever you've arrived, that's it. That's as exciting as it's going to get. Some men find that very hard to deal with, so boredom and ennui sets in, which can lead to strange decisions and events.
I'm not sure it's all that relevant. I think being an agent is a handy hook. Howard could be an accountant or a pediatrician and have exactly the same emotions. I had a conversation about this the other night, and someone said, "With accountants and pediatricians, chances are they're going to be nicer people." I thought that was a huge value judgment. But the point was that an agent essentially deals in other people. He buys and sells their talent; he's the broker for their skills. And the job must, by definition, involve those people's emotional lives and their insecurities. Howard is an aggressive, competitive, selfish, ambitious man who willingly sacrifices a great deal in order to satisfy that drive for success.
Does the audience's response to the character vary at different performances?
Yeah, but what seems to be constant is that people love him and hate him within the same evening. We despise his aggression, his profanity and the way he so easily dismisses the needs of his family and destroys every relationship. His wife, his child, his parents, his job, his colleagues—every relationship that you or I or any normal person would consider part of the fabric of our lives, he just cuts them off and sets them adrift. And then, when he's left with nothing, suddenly we start caring about him.
To say that a lot happens to Howard in 90 minutes is an understatement!
Someone told me the other night that it was almost unbearable watching him beg for his job. When I first read the play, I have to be honest, I didn't feel sympathetic toward him. I enjoyed his downfall. In fact, I kind of reveled in it. I thought, "Yeah, this is a morality play." I still think it is, in many ways. But there's something about the universality of the story: There but for the grace of God go I, you know? There's an urban legend that none of us are further away from being destitute than four or five strokes of very bad luck: getting laid off suddenly, being unable to pay your mortgage, your partner dies—we're all just a few steps from complete destitution.
Do you enjoy being onstage the whole time as the other actors, who play multiple characters, come in and out?
Yeah, it's a wonderfully theatrical device because it keeps us completely focused on the action. And it's amazing how willing audiences are to go along with conventions that are clearly not realistic. In one scene, we've gone back 18 months and then we're months ahead of the last scene. Audiences don't question any of that. And that's the great thing about theater. In movies, you need to be more logical and linear.
There's a strong religious undercurrent in the dialogue, which is unusual in a modern play of this type. How significant is that?
I think it's important because of what it means to the character. Howard belongs to a long tradition in English Jewry of secularism. They're the third or fourth generation of British Jews who are very proud of their social traditions and their history but aren't religious or observant. But when he hits rock bottom, he discovers that that's the only place to turn. So he ends up having these conversations with God in a way that we would normally associate with someone who was religious. People who aren't religious don't often turn around and say, "Okay, help me." We just don't do it. People who have faith—through prayer, I presume, or meditation—will have that kind of relationship with their God on a daily basis, and Howard discovers that. But, typical of [playwright] Patrick Marber, it's not a moment of revelation. It becomes like a conversation with a real person. Howard is asking genuine questions.
Do you identify with the character being a self-made man, since you are, too?
Yeah, I do. As I read the play, I really began to understand him because I'm a son of immigrant parents. My [Spanish] father was a waiter, my [Italian] mother cleaned rooms at a hotel; I'm the first generation of my family who went to college, and I'm the one who moved far away from what were traditional family jobs. So I did identify with Howard a great deal in terms of the way children always have an ambivalent relationship to the level in society that their parents are at; they'll move on or move up or move away. There's always a period of time in a young person's life when his parents become deeply embarrassing.
Did you parents live to see you success?
No, sadly, they didn't. And that's always a little shadow on any success that I enjoy. What I discovered was that even after your parents are dead, you still want to impress them. I wasn't quite ready for that discovery when it hit me. I can't remember exactly what it was, but I did a big movie and was getting a lot of attention, which had never happened before, and my first instinct was to tell my mother, "Look at this."
When did you realize you had a gift for stage acting?
I think I knew I was good it quite early on. I wasn't good at acting, necessarily, but I was a terrific show-off. In my early teens, around the time my parents divorced, I was really good at mimicking people. I was good at accents, good at telling jokes; I was the class clown, which is a typical story with a lot of actors. People would say, "Molina, do that thing with the man farting, sneezing and burping at the same time." I could make ridiculous, obscene noises and all my classmates would be in fits. It wasn't acting in any way that you or I might understand, but it did reveal a desire, a need for it. When I was 15 or 16, we had a teacher who started a drama club. It was the freaks and geeks—all the kids who weren't good at sports, who weren't good looking, who weren't popular with the girls and who weren't academically terribly bright—of which I was one. It was known as the losers' club, and we'd meet every Wednesday night in the library at school. The first time we met, it was this sad little bunch, but after a couple of weeks, we loved it. Oh my god! I used to wish the week away to get to Wednesday night. Our teacher, Martin, was fantastic. We're still friends. He would do improvisational games and give us speeches to learn. In that club, I started understanding that there was work to be done onstage and that this was something I could do.
I'm very proud of what we did. It wasn't everyone's cup of tea. I know a lot of people felt that we sort of sucked all the ethnicity out of it, and on the face of it, I suppose it did look like that [chuckles]. It must have seemed a bit odd to look at the cast list and see names like Laura Kelly and Sally Murphy, Tricia Paoluccio and Alfred Molina [laughs heartily]. Where's the Jewishness here? But I was never upset by people's worry that the show wasn't Jewish enough. I think we had a brief, which was to try and strip away the decades of shtick and the assumptions that had been made about the show, and to get back to the core of what the musical was about. And we did it with the writers' blessing. [Director] David Leveaux really set the tone when he said on the first day of rehearsal, "I'm not going to use the word revival, because that sounds like something you do to something that's already dead. This musical is far from dead."
David Leveaux got caught up in a round of carping that British directors are somehow ruining American musicals.
Yeah, and the irony, of course, is that in some cases, that's true. There is a certain intellectual detachment that a lot of British directors have where they come to a popular, commercial musical and think they want to redefine it somehow, to slightly shift the perspective in some way. Sometimes it can be a revelation: You think, "Oh my god, I didn't realize there was so much to this." Other times it can obscure what's there, which is just great entertainment value. It is bit of a gamble, always, because a musical isn't a British form that comes naturally to us. We didn't invent the musical.
Would you like to do more musicals?
I would love to. The great thing about Fiddler for me was that I learned what limitations I have.
What do you mean?
Vocally, the show was quite challenging for me. I think there really is such a thing as an actors' musical and a singers' musical. There are some that I wouldn't go near because I don't have the vocal quality to pull it off.
Now that your movie career is so successful, isn't it getting harder to make time for theater?
It might seem that way on the surface, but the great thing about enjoying a certain modicum of success in film is that you can afford to be a little more choosy in terms of what you do. I make no bones about it: Thank goodness for the film career because it subsidizes my theater career. I can afford to come work at the Roundabout for next to nothing because I've made my money in movies.
Are you happy with your movie career?
Yes, I am. Very happy. I'm 53 years old, and I'm part of the establishment of character actors.
You could still get your Oscar role, like Helen Mirren.
Absolutely. If Peter O'Toole can get nominated for an Oscar at age 70-something there's hope for all of us [laughs].
Tell me how you met your wife, actress Jill Gascoine.
We met doing a musical, Destry Rides Again, in 1981 or '82. It was the first London revival of that show since it was first done in the early '60s. She was playing Frenchie, the part played in the movie by Marlene Dietrich. I played Destry, the Jimmy Stewart role.
You've worked together a good bit, particularly in California, haven't you?
Yeah. For a long, long time, we didn't work together. We had kind of an unspoken agreement that we weren't going to become a professional couple. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it just didn't seem like what we wanted to do. Jill had her TV career at that time in London, and I was doing a lot of theater. Then she stopped working for a while, and my career came up. But then we did two plays together in Los Angeles and a couple of films together in England. We're open to it now, after years and years of saying no.
My daughter will be 27 this year; she's got two kids now. Jill's boys, my stepsons, are 41 and 36.
Have you ever felt any professional competitiveness?
Not really, because there's an age difference between us.
Do you feel the 16-year difference more now than when you first got together? [Gascoine will turn 70 in April.]
No. One's always aware of it because it's just a fact of life, but it's not like a crisis. When Jill and I first got together, she was 45 and I was 29. I remember going out to dinner with a friend of mine who had just heard about it. Jill was very, very famous on TV and he said, "I've just heard this rumor that you're going out with Jill Gascoine." And I said, "It's true, yeah, I've just moved in with her." The first thing out of his mouth was, "But, the age difference—isn't that going to be a bit of a problem in 20 years' time?" And I remember thinking, "Well, I'll find out." And of course, it hasn't been. When you fall in love with someone, you fall in love, and if you stay in love, you don't think of [an age difference] as something you can change or that you would want to change. That's just the way it is. We've been very happy.
You were the Demi and Ashton of your day.
[laughs] I think their age difference is even more than ours.
Is there anything you're longing to do onstage? You teach Shakespeare in Los Angeles, for instance, but haven't done it here.
No, not in New York; I've done some classics in L.A. I don't have any specific ambitions. I always take my cue from the late, great Jason Robards, whom I had the great fortune of working with at the Roundabout in Molly Sweeney. He was in his 70s at that point, and I asked him, "Are you still ambitious?" And he said [precisely imitating Robards' famous growl], "Yeah, I'm always looking for the next good part." That's what all of us do— look for the next good part and hope it will come.