Oliver Platt
You've finally made it to Broadway! Congratulations.
I am totally thrilled to be there. But it's funny, because when you are up on stage it's not like there is this neon light flashing behind the last row saying: You Are On Broadway! [Laughs] You do a play, and that's the focus. Once you put being on BROADWAY out of your mind, the process is the same for putting on a show, from a community theater to a professional stage.
Is it a disconcerting for you to be back on stage after mostly performing on television and film?
You would never mistake stage acting for any other kind of acting I've been involved with. It's far and away the most muscular form of the craft, in the sense that the actors are telling the playwright's story every night from start to finish. When the curtain goes up, it's just us. In film and television, that is so far from the truth. It appears to be us, but there are so many other people at work. Those are much more of a director's medium.
Have you needed to say that during this run?
And I'm sure the line gods didn't make things any easier since you needed to learn the lines and master an Irish accent at the same time.
Why did you feel the need to go to Ireland for the role?
The ladies of the night might recognize you after all your TV and film work—and now a Tony nomination.
Do you think that your celebrity has helped bring in audiences to Shining City?
Still, the star factor does help many shows bring in an audience that might otherwise pass it over. Take your old Flatliners co-star Julia Roberts.
Since you don't want to be pigeonholed, have you given any thoughts to taking on yet another genre? Perhaps a musical?
See Oliver Platt in Shining City at the Biltmore Theatre, 261 West 47th Street. Click for tickets and more information.
There is a different kind of satisfaction. When you are working in front of the camera, it's really just you and the director. So it's a different apparatus. For a play, there's the immediate feedback from the audience and the big difference is that you can't turn to them and say, "I just screwed that up, can we take it again?"
There have been a few glitches, but the smartest thing I did was start to learn the big monologue back in January, and we didn't go into rehearsal until March. I guess another way to look at it is that I'd be pretty stupid not to have done that. I talked to [director] Bob Falls about it first. One of the great benefits of a play is getting to rehearse with actual people and learning lines as you go. It can be counterproductive to learn your lines before you go into rehearsal because you have no idea what the other actors are going to do and how you should respond to their choices or what the director might want. Bob and I decided that so much of the story my character tells is without that much interaction with anyone else on the stage, I could go ahead and learn it before rehearsal. So to answer the question in a really long-winded, roundabout way: Yeah, there have been little spots like the first time a cell phone went off. But I know it well enough—and I'm looking for wood to knock on now—that if I skip ahead I can go back and stitch it back in. I call it freestyling, but thankfully I haven't had to do that much. Life is long, so I'd rather not tempt fate. Put it this way: I'm terrified every night. I'm constantly humbling myself before the line gods.
No, not really. I went to Dublin and hung out with Conor, and he had very specific ideas about how each person should speak. It was just repetition and immersion and then forgetting about it. God knows, the last thing that you want to be doing on stage is playing your accent. It's very far from the classic Lucky Charms or leprechaun accent that most people associate with being Irish. And we had a great dialect coach who steered me away from that, but you can make yourself crazy with this stuff so you have to give yourself a break. I mean, no two people in Dublin sound alike. If you're consistent, the audience will eventually relax and believe you. People have seen me in other things, so the first five minutes of the show is always "There's Oliver Platt doing an accent," but then they get used to it and hopefully just forget that I'm doing anything. We've heard really nice things from Irish people! That's the best thing I can tell you. The complaints come from people who live in Milwaukee. The Irish people think it's great.
I had the free time and it just seemed crazy not to go. When I'm telling my big story in the show, there are all these very specific places mentioned in Dublin. I'd never been to Dublin before and Conor was there and it was a real luxury to sit and talk with the playwright. He was really happy I came. And then we drove to all the places I mention in the story—except the whorehouse. That's for next time.
The nomination is just now sinking in. I found out about it in classic style, as I was in bed and my publicist called me and woke me up. I sleep strange hours now. I can't wake up at 8:00 am if I want to be at my best at 8:00 pm. The nominations are announced way too early.
The one thing that sucks is if you have small children. [Platt's three kids range in age from 7 to 11.] The hours are just diametrically opposed to Daddy hours. So it should say my wife's name on the nomination and not mine. I usually get up with my kids, but I'm not a very good sleeper so I have to get in as much as I can. A lot of it falls to my wife, who is being rewarded handsomely in some way that I haven't figured out quite yet. I'd ask her, but I'm terrified by what she might say.
I don't know the answer to that. You'd have to ask somebody else. I honestly don't think of myself as a celebrity draw. And even if I did, I'd try to forget about it immediately. I know we are doing really well at the box office, but I think that has a lot more to do with the reviews and how we have been received by the audience and Tony nominations. And the play, it plays, man. It resonates with a much broader spectrum of people than I thought it would. I thought it would just appeal to the literate set, but everybody just dove in and they want to talk about it. I get people who call me up and tell me they really want to stop thinking about the play and can I please help them with that. Which, of course, I can't.
I give Julia such credit. It's really great what she did, and you can't ignore how a play is received, especially in the New York theater world. It brands the experience for a lot of people, which is unfortunate. I hope the experience wasn't diminished for her because of that. But for me, the only thing I wanted to do when I was a young naive kid was to become a New York stage actor. I thought that would be nirvana. I think of myself as an actor. If other people want to pigeonhole me, if they want to think of me as a big deal or a medium deal or a small deal, well, that's up to them. I just like to act.
Never say never! Like any actor who ever moved to New York to try and make it, I was a musical comedy star in high school. Of course I went to a school that had a student body of 100 people, so it wasn't so hard. We did Guys and Dolls, South Pacific, Annie Get Your Gun. I've got high school chops from 30 years ago. Maybe I could do some Rex Harrison speak-singing. That I could get away with.