April 2000

Interview: Matthew Broderick

Broderick discusses his acting career, including his latest show 'Taller Than a Dwarf'

By Kenneth Lonergan, Interview (p.132)

The actor who's so often good that we almost forget he's more: He's great

Matthew Broderick is almost the only well-known film star of his generation who works consistently on Broadway. What's more, he doesn't just do theater in order to play Hamlet or Stanley Kowalski: He also appears in off-beat revivals (last year's Night Must Fall) and new works, such as Elaine May's Taller Than a Dwarf, directed by Alan Arkin, which opens on Broadway this month.

Hollywood tends to typecast Broderick as the lovable kid (Ferris Bueller's Day Off, 1986) or the sweet-natured, if flawed, adult (Election, 1999). The theater, less dependent than movies on an actor looking the part rather than interpreting it, allows this 38-year-old performer his delightfully wide range. Broderick takes full advantage of his stage opportunities to surprise us with his gifts. For example, before his Tony-winning Broadway turn in How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, who knew that he had a terrific musical-comedy singing voice?

In May's new play, Broderick forms half of an "average contemporary couple" (as average as they can be, that is, living in New York City), who are grappling with definitions of success. His partner is played by Parker Posey, in her Broadway debut. On this occasion, Broderick sat down with Kenneth Lonergan, writer and director of You Can Count on Me, which shared this year's Grand Jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Lonergan, whose new drama The Waverly Gallery is playing Off Broadway, is a former classmate of Broderick's at the Walden School in New York. They talked about their various hats (Broderick directed the film infinity; Lonergan acts in You Can Count on Me) and their shared love of Jackie Gleason.

KENNETH LONERGAN: Does Elaine May seem to be pretty happy with you so far?

MATTHEW BRODERICK: You got me. She looks happy. I hear her chuckle sometimes, which is reassuring. In my experience, when these plays get closer to opening, everything can change.

KL: People get more tense and nervous.

MB: They stop pussyfooting around.

KL: They say, "Be funnier."

MB: That's when you're finally ready to open, when people are shouting, "What are you doing? You're killing the show!"

KL: "You're ruining my play." You said to me you like working with Alan Arkin because his ideas are very good on account of him being such a good actor. Can you elaborate on that?

MB: The ideas he has for a scene or for a character come from a person I find real and funny and interesting to watch. When he's telling me what to do, he's using the same interpretive skills that he would use if he were playing the part.

KL: What kinds of things do you generally like to get from your directors--and what do you find less helpful?

MB: I can't say that there's one style I like and one I don't. It seems to matter a lot who's doing it. I've worked with very surfacey directors, or English-style types in the old-fashioned sense, presentational, who tell you exactly how to move, and if it's a person who is talented, that's fine. But at the same time I definitely like to have some room to discover things. I do try to give directors the benefit of the doubt. I think when I was younger I had a little more attitude. Particularly in film, you have to realize that the director is going to have the last say on everything anyway.

KL: I know a lot of actors who have said the same thing to me, that eventually they realize that the director's the one with the overall view.

MB: When I used to audition, when you got a part, generally that meant the director liked what you were bringing. When you're a little more successful, you find yourself having lunch or dinner and then picking a costume with the director and then coming on a set and starting.

KL: And you've never had any In-depth discussion about what you see.

MB: No, so very often they look at you with a blank expression and say, "Is that it?" Hopefully, you just have a good chemistry. It's a little like a blind date, in a way. Are we gonna have a good conversation? Are we gonna work well together? And then, if you're not working well together, you just try to be professional.

KL: How do you feel you are different as an actor from when you were younger?

MB: Well, sometimes I think I'm worse. You get better at some things and worse at others. There are some happy accidents when you're beginning, when you don't really know what the hell is going on. There are certain advantages to that. Audiences change, too, when they've seen you before. I've tried to not get too typecast, I try to surprise people. I think I can get in trouble by playing likable people too much.

KL: You do have an incredible loathsome side. But some of your most recent roles have actually featured that loathsomeness quite nicely. How do you work on a part?

MB: Well, first I read it. Then it starts to seep into everything. I'll be on the subway and start thinking about a certain aspect of the part. Or something will happen between me and a friend and I'll say, "Oh, this is like Danny [Broderick's character in Night Must Fall]. This is what it means when he gets caught." It's like you're looking for clues. Once I'm rehearsing and it starts to really be on my mind, it does start, without even meaning to, to affect me. I'll find myself behaving in a way that isn't really me. At the same time, I've never been one to tell people, "You have to call me Howard." When it's at its best it gets very hard to describe what it is I'm playing; it's surprising me, too. You want to lay a good foundation, but then at some point you want it to go beyond where you can say, "I'm doing precisely this because she's doing that."

KL: I find that with a lot of skillful actors who are good, but I don't think are great, great actors, I can see how they've solved the problem of the scene; I can see the mechanics of how they've chosen to ground themselves. Whereas somebody who can go beyond that, like I think you can, you don't ever see that work; they become the person in a much more fluid manner.

MB: According to my mom and dad [playwright-screenwriter Patricia Broderick and the late actor James Broderick], you do all this work and the goal is to throw it away before you walk through the door onto the set.

KL: When you're writing, it's the same feeling. A lot of times you're just trying to figure out how to write a scene, and when you're really having fun it just comes out and you don't know where it's going, you don't know what's going to happen. It's almost like you're listening to it.

MB: Yeah, the characters, they're talking to themselves. That's when it's good. Sometimes in rehearsal actors ask, "What does this mean?" And the writer is not sure himself. And then he'll say, "That actor taught me what that speech meant."

KL: That's happened to me a lot, actually. It very often seems to me like the amount of thought actors, good actors, put into their characters is certainly equal to the amount of thought the writer puts into them. I can only act under very limited circumstances.

MB: You were really good in You Can Count on Me, though.

KL: I'm fabulous in my movie, that's true, but I have not much range and I get self-conscious.

MB: It's interesting you say self-conscious, because I get self-conscious when I write.

KL: But you're all alone in a room.

MB: Yeah, but then somebody reads it. With acting, there's a safety to the fact that it's somebody else's material.

KL: There's a safety to the fact that somebody else has to act it.

MB: Another way I could answer the question "How do you work on roles?" is that I basically think almost any situation that happens to human beings can be described by a moment in one of the episodes of The Honeymooners.

KL: It's like the Iliad for us. All culture stems from The Honeymooners. I think your favorite episode was when they try to raise the rent five dollars, and Jackie Gleason has a temper tantrum for half an hour.

MB: To see somebody sustain that anger for that long--it's just fantastically good.

KL: A lot of actors are very focused on their character and their character alone, and I always feel that you have a good sense of the overall story. You see a lot of actors who are just great, but you don't always feel that they're in the same movie or play as everybody else.

MB: I remember my mom once said, "You feel too responsible for the whole thing. You should just take care of yourself." That might even serve the thing better. If it's good material, fine, but sometimes I see myself in not-so-good material and I don't know what I was so concerned about. I should've just thought. This stinks and I'm gonna fuckin' put a corny hat on. What do and don't you like about directing?

KL: One thing I didn't like was the same thing I didn't like about bartending years ago: I don't like having to be in a good mood when I get to work. When you're the director and you're in a shitty mood, it affects everybody.

MB: I didn't like it when I would say, "I think it would be nice if the delivery boy had a bow tie." And the atmosphere on movies is such that rather than say, "I wonder if I could get one," they say, "There is no memo about bow ties, nobody told me I needed to have one." I was always like, "I just got the idea now, it's nobody's fault, it's just, can't we try to make a bow tie?"

KL: My props guy was the exact opposite of that. He loved to improvise.

MB: A director once told me about an actress who had been working with a violin teacher, learning how to fake playing the violin, for a month or so. It was a big scene and he said, "It's amazing the amount of time that has gone into this split second, the amount of people working with the character, for this little shot. That's what I love most about movies. I like this moment when she's faking the violin perfectly, the violinist off-camera is playing right with her, the orchestra is moving with the conductor, and the cameraman is making sure to catch whatever." That is a great thing: There are moments when you realize that everybody is actually trying to tell a story and make a movie together.