Bobby Cannavale
As the curtain rises on Mauritius, the new play by Theresa Rebeck at Manhattan Theatre Club's Biltmore Theatre, Bobby Cannavale is seated upstage with his back turned, almost forcing the question “Who is that guy?” Audiences have been asking themselves the same thing about the 36-year-old actor for the past decade, as he's made a name for himself in a series of charismatic performances in film The Station Agent, Shall We Dance?, Snakes on a Plane, television an Emmy Award-winning recurring stint on Will and Grace, Sex and the City, Third Watch and on stage Fucking A, Hurlyburly. Now Cannavale is making his Broadway debut in the pivotal role of Dennis, a fast-talking stamp aficionado trying to broker a deal for a young woman Alison Pill to sell a possibly valuable stamp to a shady collector F. Murray Abraham and dealer Dylan Baker amidst circumstances shrouded in mystery. Katie Finneran as Pill's half sister completes the cast. Cannavale, who is of Italian and Cuban descent, is a study in contradictions: a sensitive character actor in a macho, leading man's body, and a budding film and TV star who's also a lifelong theater geek. Reticent on the topic of his personal life, including his son, Jacob with ex-wife Jenny Lumet, and his relationship with actress Annabella Sciorra, Cannavale is chattier when it comes to his memorable roles—and his desire to avoid being pigeonholed as an actor.
Despite the fact that you've been a regular presence on the New York stage in the last few years, this is actually your Broadway debut.
My whole life, I've wanted to do a play on Broadway, so this is huge for me. And I'm working with incredibly great, unbelievably talented people who have done it before, so I feel very lucky.
How did you get involved in the show?
I've known Theresa [Rebeck] for quite a few years. I had done a TV pilot for her and I've done workshops of her plays, but I'd never done an actual production. She had been telling me, “I'm gonna have a good one for you, I'm gonna have a good one for you,” and then she handed me Mauritius. I was just blown away. It's an incredible page-turner.
It's a perfect part for me, and a nice thing to happen on the heels of the last thing I did [David Rabe's Hurlyburly, as ex-con Phil], which I also felt really good about. Both characters are guys who are demanding to be heard in a way, who have a hint of desperation to them, who want things very badly and will go to any lengths to get them. I like playing guys who are close to the end of their rope. Both of those characters have that in common.
Dennis is not given much of a backstory in Mauritius.
That's the beauty of Theresa's writing. There are five characters who, in theory, have no business being anywhere near each other. They are their own solitary islands. And she somehow makes them come together because of these circumstances. She's obviously written for the theater, because she writes parts that aren't spelled out for the actors. The actor gets to create his own backstory and have his own secrets. She doesn't create the secrets for you.
Is that challenging, or is it liberating?
It's really nice to have a secret and walk out onto the stage with it. If you've done your homework, people should get the character right away, or through the course of the play. Hopefully they can see a window into what this guy's life is.
As an actor, do you share those secrets with your fellow cast members, or do you keep them close to your vest?
I don't share them with anybody. That's kind of the beauty of it. This is my favorite part, really. I've always wanted to write a play, but I'm not a writer, so what really gives me a thrill is to put my trust in the words of a writer I think is good, with the unspoken agreement that I'm going to create an inner life for this writer who has written these beautiful words.
At different points in the play, it seems that you are on the side of each of the other four characters. Do you think Dennis is loyal to anyone, or only to himself?
He thinks that he can make everybody in this play's life so much better. He wants to see everybody do okay. I profess that if everyone would just listen to Dennis in the show, then everybody would come out okay [laughs].
Dennis is not always honest, though. Do you consider him a thief? Call them what you want. I don't think they're cheats; I don't really think that they are cons. There is a certain honor that Dennis and Sterling [F. Murray Abraham] have. They are gentlemen thieves.
Do you obsess over anything in real life the way these characters do stamps?
I have a pretty good collection of anything and everything related to Bob Dylan that I'm kinda nerdy about. I'm a super-nerd about Dylan. If I go out of the country and I find something that's written in another language or recordings or out-of-print books or dissertations… I try to get everything I can.
Had you worked with anyone in the Mauritius company?
I've known [director] Doug Hughes for a long time, since my Circle Rep days. He's one of those guys I always wanted to work with; I think he is probably the best director working right now. I met Alison [Pill] originally when The Station Agent premiered at Sundance, since she was there with Pieces of April. I've always wanted to work with her, because she was fantastic in that movie. And I had worked with Dylan Baker's wife, Becky, on a movie I did right before rehearsals for this started. I told Dylan, “You gotta read this play, you gotta go in for this part.” I kind of turned him on to the play, actually [laughs].
Does the quality of the cast take away any of the pressure? Do you feel, “I don't have to carry this thing”?
No man, I never thought that I'd be carrying anything [laughs]. I don't have that kind of an ego. That's the beauty of the play: It's really, truly an ensemble. So I did think, “Okay, it's gonna have to be five solid actors who can play five very different people and make it believable that these people could be thrown into this situation.” And I gotta say, every night I can look at anybody on stage and completely stay in the play. That's the beauty of the writing, really, because these people are so different. Hurlyburly was like that, too. I've been really lucky, knock on wood, to have great experiences like that, at least in the theater. It doesn't happen so often on a television show or in a movie.
I did see a lot of shows, but not always on Broadway. I've probably seen more musicals on Broadway and more plays off-Broadway. The musical always seemed to fit Broadway better to me than the play, although there's nothing like a great play on Broadway. The days when you could see a Lanford Wilson play on Broadway every year, from Burn This to Redwood Curtain? You don't see those things very much anymore.
Did you act as a kid?
Yeah, I did. I was raised by a single mom, and went to Catholic school. I wasn't allowed to really hang out in the streets, I had to hang out at the church. The church had a theater company, so I was doing plays from the time I was 11 years old.
Did you know then that you wanted to be an actor?
Completely. I was obsessed with reading plays as a kid; it was one of those things that I just loved to do. And I was doing a play or two every year through high school. I had these cousins who would take me into the city, and they'd drop me off at the theater to see a play while they went to a club. I saw Evita that way, and Ain't Misbehavin. Great stuff.
Did you want to be a stage actor, or did you want to do film and TV?
I never thought I was gonna be the kind of person who would be “in the movies.” I always thought I was going to be a stage actor. But you know, things happen the way they happen. People only got to know my name because of television, and I never would have dreamed that. Before I got Third Watch, I had done hardly any work on camera; all I had done was off-off Broadway. A lot of it. I was working for years and years in the theater, I just wasn't getting paid. Once I started working in the other mediums, that's when I started getting asked to audition for places like the Public Theater and Roundabout.
So all those years of struggle paid off.
I've never planned anything. You just gotta take the work wherever it comes and be grateful that you're working. Somebody told me that a long time ago: Just work, work, work. I'll go from plays to television to movies; I think that's the life of an actor. But I gotta say, there's nothing like being in a hit show. I had never run a play as long as Hurlyburly, which ran for six months, and I could have done it for another year. There's nothing better than being in a play that everybody really wants to see.
In the last decade or so, your work has really spanned every medium.
I've managed to bounce from one to another. People get a mistaken impression that I'm not somewhere [in my career] I feel like I should be, but that's wrong. Because I get the best jobs! I'll get a great supporting part in a big movie, then I'll get a big part in a smaller movie, then I'll get a great play, then I'll get a cool arc on a television show, then I'll shoot a pilot for a show that I know is never gonna get picked up because it's way too cool and edgy, but I'll have the experience of working on it with someone like Spike Lee. I have had a lot of great experiences, and they're all different. As long as I'm working, I'm happy. If I have more than two or three weeks off, I'm insane [laughs].
One of your most memorable early television appearances was as the “Funky Spunk Guy” on Sex and the City.
Sex and the City was one of the first things I did after Third Watch ended. People wanted me to go out to Los Angeles and join the cast of another show, but I didn't want to. I was like, “I just want to play really weird parts here in New York.” So I did Sex and the City and Oz [as a gay drug dealer] back-to-back, two parts that couldn't be any more different.
Do people ever come up to you and quote the monologue Samantha gave your character about a certain sexual act and bodily fluid?
They definitely do. I've now accepted that that is a part I will never live down.
You won an Emmy Award for playing Will's boyfriend on Will and Grace. Did it feel different to work with a cast with so much theater experience?
It was like a little repertory company there, probably because they come from the theater and had the same director for every show. I think theater people are different from strictly movie or strictly television people. They're used to opening up and sharing their vulnerabilities. When you do a play, you can't “play.” There's no acting cool; there's no putting up of the guard. You have to put it all out there. That doesn't happen so much in movies—there's a lot of posturing. You can't do that in theater, because at the end of the day, you've gotta get up there in front of 650 people. And you're nobody without the rest of your ensemble, without your family.
Not really. I'd want to be on something like a Rescue Me that not everyone on the planet knows about, a show that the critics love but you don't know if it's coming back or not every year. I don't think I'd want to be on a show that 50 million people watch every week. If you didn't watch Arrested Development, or you didn't get it, you're probably not as cool as all that [laughs].
As an actor of Italian descent, is it a bummer for you that you were never on The Sopranos along with your friend Annabella Sciorra?
You know, it is a bummer, but it's okay. It just never happened. The one time I got asked to come in, I had something else I had to do. Not that it would have turned into anything.
The Station Agent is the film that really made people start to notice your work.
When all is said and done, that will probably be the film I'm most proud of in my career. Not because it was my breakthrough movie, which it was, but because my best friend [Thomas McCarthy] wrote that part for me, and directed it, and we spent four years trying to make it.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, there's Snakes on a Plane. How were the two experiences different?
What do you think? [Laughs.] You know, I'm not someone who makes $1 million a movie. I had been doing an off-Broadway play for six months, and my first job offer was Snakes on a Plane. You think of the nuts and bolts of being a working actor, and you gotta balance your life too. I had just spent six months in drug-induced, suicidal torture doing Hurlburly, so it was a nice break to do Snakes and jump out of a plane and say things like “I need to get the venom.” Why not? But I don't think I could make a career out of it.
Well, that's what theater is for—as an antidote.
And independent film. You have to wet your feet in everything. I like it when people say, “I know you,” and they name a few different things. I don't ever want to be known for just one thing.
See Bobby Cannavale in Mauritius at the Biltmore Theatre.
