The Hollywood Reporter recently gathered Tom Hanks, James Franco, John Boyega, Gary Oldman, Sam Rockwell and Willem Dafoe for an Actors roundtable interview. Here is an excerpt:
What has surprised you most about being an actor?
WILLEM DAFOE It's never the same job because there are so many moving parts. One of the first things you have to do is figure out where to start; it's different every time. It's not like you can figure out a way to approach things and then use that as a template. The target is always moving. And that's the beauty of it.
How do you figure it out?
DAFOE I like not knowing. And if you've done it enough, it's nice to get comfortable with fear. You get in that place of not knowing; you've been there before, and it gives you courage that you don't normally have in life.
Has fear ever overwhelmed you?
GARY OLDMAN Yes. Just before [the 2011 movie] Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. And I'm not really sure what happened. Two or three weeks before we started, I froze and had bone-crushing stage fright. I had never experienced it before, and I didn't know what was going on, whether it was anxiety or a panic attack or …
SAM ROCKWELL You hadn't done a lead in a while, right? Was that part of it?
OLDMAN Perhaps. But it really —
DAFOE — was the ghost of Alec Guinness [who'd played the character George Smiley before].
JAMES FRANCO Gary, were you always that way?
OLDMAN No, I'm glad to say. I have worked with people in the theater who vomit every night and —
ROCKWELL I heard Pacino did that with [the 1981 play] American Buffalo, had pea soup just so he could have something to vomit.
OLDMAN Of course, we all [have nerves] at a first preview or a first night. But I was always a relatively relaxed performer. I looked forward to going out there and wasn't that sort of person who was terrified in the wings. And I would look at these [nervous actors] and think, "Oh, lord, if I had to do that every night, I don't know how I would carry on."
FRANCO It sounds like it was the pressure of the role.
OLDMAN I think also that it was trying to slay the dragon. For many people, Guinness was the face of Smiley. But I've spoken with other actors: Ken Branagh said he was on a set and [stage fright] started to come upon him. I realized I was not alone. It was like an AA meeting or something. "My name is Colin Firth and I have experienced it."
How did you get over that?
OLDMAN A doctor prescribed me something just to calm me down. And you know what? I walked onto the set and went, "Oh, I know where I am."
DAFOE To overcome this fear, you need to hang on to something, and sometimes it can be as simple as a costume. I always go back to [1990's] Wild at Heart. I had these teeth, they were everything. I put those teeth in my mouth, and it kept me from closing my mouth. I always had this expression and I felt like I knew who the guy was.
Tom, you said you're drawn to certain themes. One theme hasn't been explored in film for a while: sexual harassment. Have all the allegations about sexual predators in Hollywood surprised you?
HANKS No, no, no. Because, look, there's a lot of reasons people do this for a living. Making a movie is a life experience that can create an awful lot of joy. You can meet the person you fall in love with, you can laugh your heads off. That's the good stuff. The bad stuff can happen on a movie as well. There are some people who go into this business because they get off on having power. And the times they feel the most powerful, which is why they went into the business, are when they are hitting on somebody who's underneath them, [and] I don't necessarily mean completely sexually. There are predators absolutely everywhere.
Have you ever seen anything like that happen and taken action?
HANKS How do I put this? We produced a project in which someone said, "There is an element of harassment that's going on here." And as soon as we heard, you've got to jump right in. You talk to every one of the guilds and find out what happened and you go there immediately. The difference is, there's stuff that happens on a set that can be really inappropriate, and there can be that type of predatory aspect on a set because you think, "Well, we're in the circus and we're on the road, so therefore the rules don't really apply." The other aspect is, "Come try to get this job from me. You want me to give you a job? Come prove to me that you want this job." That's a sin and that's against the law and that is a degree of harassment and predatory behavior that goes against an assumed code of ethics. I think eventually everybody who has a production office is going to have a code of ethics and behavior. If you don't follow these, you will not work here. And that's not necessarily going to be a bad thing. Somebody said, "Is it too late to change things?" No, it's never too late. It's never too late to learn new behaviors. And that's a responsibility of anybody who wants to obey a code of professional ethics.
Read the full interview at The Hollywood Reporter.
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