Peter Weller

In the 1970s and early '80s, Peter Weller was an exciting young star of the New York stage, appearing often at the Public Theater as his career rose alongside contemporaries such as William Hurt, Mandy Patinkin, Patti LuPone and Dianne Wiest. The late Joseph Papp praised Weller's "sense of realism and truth," calling him "a very profound actor with a great deal of style." Weller's leading man looks and edgy charm led to roles in movies such as Shoot the Moon as Diane Keaton's lover, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai and eventually the title role in the action hit RoboCop. Since then, he has jumped from acting Naked Lunch; TV's Odyssey 5 and 24 to directing including a Best Live Action Short Oscar nomination for Partners, with sideline gigs as a jazz trumpeter, History Channel host Engineering Empires and art history professor at Syracuse University in Florence. But it took 21 years for Weller to get back onstage, lured by the role of architect Frank Lloyd Wright in Richard Nelson's new play Frank's Home. Nattily dressed in a three-piece linen suit with matching hat, scarf and ivory-handled cane, he commands the Playwrights Horizons stage as a man who has sacrificed his family at the altar of his creative genius—and can't pretend to feel an iota of guilt about it. In conversation, Weller is boyish and enthusiastic, especially when talking about his wife of six months, Sheri Stowe, who managed to get this most confirmed of bachelors to the altar in Positano, Italy, last June 24, his 59th birthday.

I understand that your bride, Sheri, helped convince you to star in Frank's Home.
I was trying to decide whether to do it, because you really go broke in the theater, but this is a real good play and Bob Falls is a real good director. I was sitting in Italy hemming and hawing, and my sweetheart of a wife said, "When people stop you on the street, you really light up if it's someone who saw you in a play." And I said, "Yeah, because I haven't been in the theater in 20 years and I did some really, really good plays." She said, "I wish I could have seen you on the stage." She wasn't asking me to do it for her, but it's a part of my life she had never experienced.

What's the last play you did?
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Christine Lahti at Long Wharf in 1985. I bet she hasn't been on a stage since then either.

Why were you away so long?
I haven't read any great plays. Can you tell me a really great one that has come along for a man, other than a revival?

You and Patti LuPone did David Mamet's The Woods together 25 years ago. He's written a lot of good parts over the years.
All my friends were in the original production of Glengarry Glen Ross. Joe Mantegna is one of my hang buddies. One of my best friends, J.T. Walsh, played the part in the original that my cousin Fred Weller played in the revival. Fred seems to be doing really well with plays here. He's become a man of the theater. He's very talented.

What attracted you to Frank's Home?
The first thing is that it's about an architect, and I teach Renaissance architecture as a field trip instructor for Syracuse and I'm a Ph.D. student in Italian Renaissance art history at U.C.L.A. So I was interested in Frank Lloyd Wright the person. And I think the play is very astute and adult. You've got this polemic between what most of us consider accountable morality and what Frank Lloyd Wright considered an acceptable sacrifice for his survival: family. He ran off, and now, at the nadir of his life, he wants everything back. That resonated with me.

Yet in the course of one short speech, Wright calls his adult son "a bitter, jealous little failure," a "leech" and a "parasite."
He's a horrible man! [laughs] But the son was worse than the dad. He had the worst reputation in Los Angeles. The son ran Frank Lloyd Wright's own clients off his construction sites. And, mind you, the first shot in the play is fired by the son. He's spreading a rumor that his father was fired by clients, and once he finds out that the hotel [Wright designed in Tokyo] did not go down [in an earthquake], he's not too joyful. No! His own little agenda, which is getting even, hasn't been fulfilled. Who's cruel to who, really?

I'll bet you've become an expert on Frank Lloyd Wright.
I did tons of research on him. I hung out with his grandson and everybody on the board of directors of every Frank Lloyd Wright society. I've hung out with every single person in this country who's an expert. I went to his houses and his major buildings, and I'm going to a private dinner at Fallingwater [Wright's masterpiece in western Pennsylvania] in April. I'm inundated with Frank!

Well, you've got to love a character whose first line is "Sometimes I think I am America."
I'm enjoying being Frank and enjoying saying that some people dance to a different drummer. It doesn't mean that he's a nice guy; it doesn't mean any of the stuff we all take for granted as supposedly "the moral way." Some people have a thing they've got to get done in life and it doesn't include family. He says the moral act is to "find beauty and create art." That's his morality. And I understand that. I don't know if I quite live that, but I do relate to the fact that he put everything on the back burner except his work. I did that, too.

You certainly threw yourself into the New York theater scene for the first decade of your career.
I was interviewed by Rick McKay for this new PBS documentary Broadway After the Golden Age. He talked to anybody who was working in the theater in the '60s and '70s—Patti LuPone and Meryl Streep and so forth. At the end, he asked me, "What did you sacrifice?" and I didn't know what in the hell he was talking about. People said they sacrificed their family or other work, and I didn't sacrifice anything! I did all kinds of other stuff along with the theater. Elia Kazan once said at a session at the Actors Studio, "You people are putting your life on hold for your career. I've got news for you: Your craft is about everything except your career. Everybody who is not taking a language lesson or a dance lesson or going to see the Great Wall of China because you're afraid of losing out on your career? The best thing you can do for your work is to pack your life with all these other goodies."

So, are you enjoying being back in the theater?
Yeah. Theater is an immense discipline. To do this right, I have to go onstage an hour in advance to read and personalize parts of the play. I've done that for every piece of theater since I studied with Uta Hagen. You've got to get ready to really crank it; I've got to be in fifth gear by five minutes into the play. If I don't, all I'm doing is saying a bunch of words.

Can you single out a favorite stage role from your early years?
The play that made me realize I had something to say was Rebel Women by Tom Babe. [Weller and Mandy Patinkin played gay lovers in this 1976 Civil War drama.] I did that at the Public Theater with Mandy and David Dukes, who's not with us any longer, bless his heart, and Kathryn Walker. And then I did David Rabe's [Vietnam drama] Streamers, which was a big turning point. The Woolgatherer [by William Mastrosimone], definitely. And Serenading Louie [by Lanford Wilson] was a really good play.

Moving to Los Angeles changed the dynamic of your career, right?
I kept my place here. I'm sitting in it now. It's a lovely place. You know, New York isn't the same as it was in the '70s and '80.

You think the old days were better?
Well, I did something like 16 plays and workshops at the Public Theater, and I loved working for Joe Papp. I never worked for [former Public Theater producer] George Wolfe. He moved the whole thing, maybe rightfully so, to have a more multiracial tone, and now the new cat, Oscar [Eustis], is there; maybe I'll go back to work at the Public Theater because I love it. I had two other mentors in the theater: Christopher Walken—I worked with him three or four times, and he and his wife took me under their wing; and Leonard Nimoy, who was in Full Circle on Broadway with me [in 1973]. The director, Otto Preminger, was brutal psychologically, and Leonard became like a dad to me. I did the last two episodes of Star Trek basically as an homage to him. I have no interest in guest-starring on television. None!

And yet you accepted the role of federal agent Christopher Henderson on 24 last season, a show I have to confess I've never seen.
I highly recommend that you don't get into it because it's like heroin [laughs]. If you turn on season one, you will not get out of your house. It's like a 24-hour-long movie. The guy who created [Weller's 2002 TV series] Odyssey 5 became one of the head writers of 24 and asked me to do a five-episode thing. I looked at the show and got completely hooked. After I started, I was smoking cigars at the studio with the creators and said, "What's going to happen to me?" They said, "Everyone on 24 dies eventually." I said, "You could've gotten a guy from Malibu to do this. Why are you asking me to come on for five episodes and die?" The next thing you know, they sign me for the rest of the season. I did it because I loved the show, certainly not for the chump change they paid me. There's nothing on TV that equals 24; it's a cut above anything else.

So, did your character live?
No. I'm dead, I'm dead, I'm dead. I died last June. But I did the whole season.

I have to ask about RoboCop. Is it a mixed blessing to be known for that movie?
I don't mind it. It's given me a lot of clout with the young people I teach. I'm happy I did it, and I'm happy I left it and did a very different kind of movie, Naked Lunch.

Speaking of your students, I bet you're the only actor who starts your Playbill bio with 12 lines about your academic degrees and the courses you teach.
I just decided, "I've gotta put all that stuff down first [laughs]. I've gotta open their eyes." Who cares about all the other crap? Look, I can't do the academia without working as an actor and director. Academia doesn't make any sense to me on its own. It's fun to do as a hobby. Mind you, it's a fairly pretentious hobby [laughs] but it's a diversion and a panacea to all the hits you take in films and theater. I started the bio there because it's more impressive.

What's your Ph.D. dissertation going to be about?
I have no idea. I've gotta get through the damn classwork first. It will be something about Venice.

You've got a pretty darn good life—Positano in the summer, Venice in the winter…
I know [chuckles]. Joel Surnow, the creator of 24, said, "You're either a pathological liar or you've lived 150 years because I don't know how you do everything." But the thing is, it's easy to do a lot of stuff if you just get up early. That's what my dad said: "You can get everything done if you get up early."

I'm amazed you are doing this interview so early in the morning. That's unusual for a stage actor.
It is. The thing about the theater is that you can't get up at 7 o'clock in the morning because you're cooked by 6 at night.

How did you develop your love of Italy? You speak Italian, right?
I speak Italian and Spanish and French and German. Ali MacGraw [Weller's former flame and co-star in the 1980 film Just Tell Me What You Want] sent me to Italy about 25 years ago. She said "You have to go there," and I went straight to Positano.

Is it true that you bullied your wife into proposing to you as you sat smoking a cigar at the other end of a dinner table in Positano?
It's all true. It was fantastic. I had been thinking about marrying her for a year, and I'd shared that thought with only one other person, a dear friend who is an antique book dealer in Los Angeles. About three years ago, he said to me, "How's your wife?" I kind of flipped out and said, "What are you talking about?" He said, "I know she's not your wife, but she should be." Isn't that beautiful?

How long had you and Sheri been together at that point?
We'd been together for 10 years.

After 10 years, you made this woman stand up and propose in front of a crowd of people?
I didn't browbeat her into doing it! Here's the deal: For two nights in a row, we went to the very first place I ever had dinner in Italy. On the first night, just to name drop, we were with Alan Rosenberg and Marg Helgenberger, the star of CSI, whom I've directed twice in film and television. The owner of the restaurant gave Sheri a gardenia candle bouquet and said, "This is for good luck in marriage." The next night, we were at the same table with all these Italians, and Sheri started laughing with some of the women about the gardenia thing.

Was marriage something you joked about?
Sheri had never worked me about marriage. She had never hinted, "You have to marry me." Never, never, never. She lived in her place, I lived in my place and we'd travel around and have a good time. We met in Florida and started with lust [laughs]. Then her job [giving technical presentations for Japanese companies] took her to L.A. and we started hanging out.

So, how did the proposal happen?
I was sitting at the other end of the table and said, "Why do you keep talking about that candle?" She said, "Because nobody else gave me anything that had to do with marriage." I said, "Do you want to get married?" It was the first time I had ever asked her that. I had been thinking about proposing for a year, but I didn't know how. And she said, "At some point in time, yes, that's in my game plan." I yelled down the table, "Who do you want to marry?" She said, "Who do you think? You." I said, "Then why don't you propose to me?" One of the old gentlemen at the hotel had bet me 50 bucks 10 years ago that I would get married before I was 60. I had said, "No way." So he was saying to her, "Do it! Do it!" Everyone got very serious, and she got all red and said, "Stop goofing around." I said, "I'm not goofing around. If you want to marry me, I want you to propose."

Did she call your bluff?
She proposed! And I proposed back. I got down on my knee in the middle of the piazza.

Did you expect to remain single until you were 59 years old?
Yeah. I'm not against marriage, but it just didn't seem the deal for me.

Has getting married changed your relationship?
Yes, it has. It's a good thing. It's good!

Do you want to become a parent now, at 60?
I don't know. Maybe. I think I'd be a good father.

You'd definitely be a better father than Frank Lloyd Wright.
Yes, I talked with a guy in the audience recently who said, "Well, here's a lesson in how not to be a dad."

See Peter Weller in Frank's Home at Playwrights Horizons.