Ron Livingston
It's nice to see you on stage, albeit in a role that's a little darker than we're used to seeing you do.
Thank you very much! It's been a while—probably eight or ten years.
In the meantime, you've kept very busy with film and TV work. So how did this play come about for you?
I did a benefit for MCC a year or two ago, a one-night thing with scripts and music stands; one of those ten-minute plays where you do an hour rehearsal and then up you go. It was a lot of fun, so I kept in contact with them and I'd been looking for something to do. I actually auditioned for a few things in the last year or two but either I didn't get them or I'd get them and then something would come up. It's just been a matter of finding the right thing.
Yeah, it seems like your character says "dude" or "bro" every other line!
So you were a fan of LaBute's work before this?
Was he involved during rehearsals?
Did he make a lot of changes to the script?
How do you explain this play to people without revealing its twists?
Great analogy!
That complicated sibling relationship was fascinating. Originally Jason Patric was supposed to play your brother. Why didn't he stay with the production?
Did you and Fred hit it off immediately?
You two don't look much alike physically but I certainly felt a brotherly connection. Did you do anything specific to make that come across?
…that something's coming.
Does this feel like a homecoming for you since you started out in the theater?
What were some of your early theater roles?
Was there a moment when you had to decide to leave theater and pursue TV and film?
Lucky for you your film career really got going with Straight Talk and then Swingers.
And now you have a series of iconic roles with cult followings under your belt. What do you get recognized for the most?
Office Space fans are probably pretty obnoxious.
Are you past the point of women giving you dirty looks and friends leaving you Post-It notes?
Are we going to see Berger show up in the Sex and the City movie?
You're best-known for these guy-next-door characters. Do strangers treat you as if they know you because of that?
I read a funny quote from when Sprint Nextel announced you as the star of their "Power Up" ad campaign. They said, "We didn't want the celebrity to get in the way of what we're trying to say. You might recognize him or might say, 'I know him but can't remember from where…'"
…be Brad Pitt? Are you happy with the level of celebrity you've achieved?
There's some conflicting information out there about which birthday you just celebrated. Was it…
Is that a big deal for you?
It's certainly a milestone. So, with this incredibly varied career, is there anything work-wise that you haven't done that you're dying to?
See Ron Livingston in In a Dark Dark House at the Lucille Lortel Theatre.
I loved the fact that it's Neil LaBute. I love his writing style. It's very naturalistic, and the words come easily out of the mouth. There's something about it that makes you feel you're eavesdropping on people. Ultimately, it's got its own challenges because there's so many "Yeah. Uh huh. You know," things dropped in. In most plays, it's like, "You talk. I talk. You talk. I talk." [In LaBute], all those little conversational things are woven in that we don't really know we're doing. So it's a challenge trying to be accurate and meticulous about that. His writing at first glance appears very casual, but it's not casual at all. And I think that's part of the reason he's got such a reputation for twists. A lot of times it's not even that the plot twists are doing the heavy lifting; it's that those innocuous words that feel like they're just part of ebb and flow of conversation turn out to have a different function later on. I enjoy trying to take that on.
Right, exactly. But a lot of this play is about masculinity. It's about being a "dude," and also about brotherhood. That's the perfect example. It seems casual, but it's not. In Neil's stuff, even his little flourishes go right to the core of what he's writing about.
Yeah, I was. I hadn't had a chance to really see a lot of his stuff on stage before. I had only read it. Fat Pig just opened out in L.A. And of course, I've seen some of his film work.
He was around quite a bit for the first week and a half, and we did a lot of table work on it, and then he came back for one week during previews. He was in constant contact with [director] Carolyn [Cantor].
No, nothing huge. There were some lines that came and went during the preview process. It got tightened a little bit, and if there was a story point we felt like the audience wasn't getting, maybe a line would be added here and there to make it a little more explicit. But for the most part the play was the play.
The story is about—at the very least—a certain very violent household, and Terry, as the older brother, kind of developed as a lightning rod for all of that. He learned to fight back. I think when you have this constant clash of the titans around and you see how it's going for your older brother, a lot of times the younger brother learns to blend into the woodwork. And that's what happens with my character, Drew. He learns how to manipulate a situation. Because if you're standing next to the lightning rod, but not too close, you can be pretty sure that you're gonna be okay.
Thanks! Also, you're supposed to teach your kids right from wrong; you reward them when they tell the truth and do good things and you reprimand them when they lie and do bad things. In a house where it doesn't work like that, where you basically just get reprimanded for nothing, you don't learn the importance of the truth. In fact, what you learn is the importance of being able to get out of punishment and escape danger. I think in a lot of ways, my character… well, let's just say he's got a very fluid relationship with the truth. And he finds that that actually makes him a pretty competent businessman-slash-lawyer. [Heh.] So the problem then is, "How do you reconcile these two guys with the love they actually feel for each other?"
I wasn't really a party to his decision to leave. He gave me a nice phone call and said, "Listen, I just don't think it's going to work out. I hope I'm not leaving you in the lurch, but I know they'll get somebody really good." Neil wrote the play with him in mind. I think that if someone were ever to write a play for me, I would probably feel obligated to do it whether I felt I was right for it or not. Ultimately, if I had to guess—and it really would just be a guess—in the process of workshopping it and trying it on, I don't think Jason felt the connection to the role that Neil felt. And I have a lot of respect for somebody who can, at a point early on, pull himself out of the process and say, "Look, I don't think I'm going to be able to give you what you want on this." It's not a part that you can…I mean, if I'm climbing a mountain every night, Fred [Weller]'s climbing two.
We did. It was pretty intense from the start. We were working pretty hard, so we didn't spend a whole lot of time outside of rehearsal, but I think that's because there wasn't a whole lot of time outside of rehearsal. For me, having been away from theater for a while, it's nice to have somebody who's just been there and back. You know he's going to deliver every night, and you know he's going to be solid. I'm never that sure of myself when I step out there—if I'm going to deliver and be solid—but I'm always sure about Fred.
Not really. I think we're both sort of doing a Midwestern/Illinois accent. Other than that, a there's only so much you can do and b sometimes brothers aren't related. That shit happens! I don't worry about it too much. If the energy comes across, then it works.
Well we have a lot of—I wouldn't call them red herrings—but there's moments where the play kind of opens up into possibilities of where it's going. And there's a collective gasp because they know…
Yeah, they've seen [LaBute] go there and they know that he's capable of something. It gives an energy. The flip side is that it's kind of hard to surprise an audience that is familiar with Neil LaBute because they're looking for it! But I think this show gets them in a couple of places.
Definitely. I grew up in Iowa, so we didn't really have movies or film or TV… not to be in anyway. We certainly had plenty to watch [laughs]. I had probably done 20 plays by the time I was done with high school, which is crazy. Most people don't get to have that experience. We had one teacher who, that's what she did and it was important to her and she taught us to make it important to us. And there weren't that many of us doing it, so we all got to be in everything.
There were a couple of standards in there. You bang out The Music Man and Oklahoma!, but we also did Moliere and Shakespeare. I did Lysander and I did Sganarelle. We also did some Volpone commedia and Arthur Miller. But by the time I got to Chicago and Williamstown and was breaking in, I still had to learn how to… like, act, in a way [laughs]. There were a lot of the fine points of acting that I needed to figure out, but I definitely had had a lot of experience of just being on stage in front of people, which I think goes a long way.
Yes, there was a big moment. It happened when I tested for a TV pilot. At that time—I think it was '90 or '91—the economy had taken a downturn, and they were weren't flying Chicago people out to test for TV pilots. On one, I got close enough to be the Chicago choice, then I didn't get it. As only a healthy 23-year-old ego can do, I decided it must be because I was "the Chicago guy" and that I had to go to L.A. if I was going to be taken seriously. So I did. I was pretty naïve about it, but I also had a friend who had just opened a theater company in L.A., so I really didn't consider that I was going to leave theater behind. I thought we were going be the next Steppenwolf out in Hollywood. It took a couple of years to realize that the L.A. theater scene doesn't work like that. The audience isn't quite as easy to come by as it is in New York or Chicago.
It sort of took off, yeah. It was probably a silly decision at the time if I look at it in the short-term, because I didn't really work for a year or two… unless you count temp jobs. [laughs]. But, you know, I got lucky. Ultimately, I'm glad I made that decision.
Here in New York, it's probably Jack Berger [from Sex and the City], although I would say Office Space overall. Band of Brothers is up there too. It's funny. They're three very different demographs, although sometimes it's surprising who recognizes me from each.
They're all right! You would think that, but actually the Jack Berger fans can get a little rambunctious themselves.
Heh. Heh. They're over that. They've forgiven me.
I don't have any information to give you about that… yeah, I don't have any comment on that.
You know, I compared it once to being at a family reunion when you're nine and everybody there knows who you are, but you don't know who any of them are [laughs]. And they're all really, really nice people, but the first day or two is uncomfortable because they're very excited to see you and it takes a while to learn everyone's name. It's a lot like that. Exactly like that!
No. But I think I actually slowed down my career great deal by not standing still. There was a while when I was doing sitcoms and then I didn't want to do sitcoms anymore and that's all people wanted me to do. Then I was doing one-hour dramas, and then I was the independent film guy. But I wouldn't call it typecasting. I just think when you're a filmmaker and you have a story you've worked on for three years and you're going to sink $12 million in it, it's a natural tendency to think of casting somebody you've seen do something like that before. I think [casting is] very scary for filmmakers and it's very scary for financers. So in general, a lot of times you have to play a game where on the big ones, you'll do something that's similar to something you've done before and on the small ones, you'll get to stretch a little bit.
Heh. Heh. I thought that was good. I love that, personally. You know, I've never really wanted to…
Yeah it's pretty good! I'm not Daniel Day-Lewis making shoes somewhere, but I'm not Paris Hilton. It's somewhere in the middle, and that's pretty much how I like it.
4-0!
Not yet! Everything's still working for now [laughs]. I'm feeling pretty good about it actually. I like it. It feels like a fresh odometer. The 9s are a little depressing, but I think once you get past the 9s, it's all good.
That's a really good question. I did have a list like that for a long time. I was like, "I want to do a horror film. I want to do a war movie." And I checked off a lot of those, but I need to dig that out again, because I'm sure there's something on it that I haven't done. Like… I haven't done my space epic yet. I tried really hard to get on From the Earth to the Moon, but that didn't happen, so. We'll find something. Heh. Heh.