October 3, 2004

Yet More Mr. Nice Guy

By Jesse Green, New York Times

HAVING played the nebbishy Leo Bloom in "The Producers" for its first year on Broadway, then broken box-office records on returning with Nathan Lane for three months last winter, Matthew Broderick is to start filming the movie version in February. Can a dinner-theater tour be far behind? For a change of pace - and a taste of top-bananahood - Mr. Broderick will star, with Frances Sternhagen, in the Roundabout Theater Company's off-Broadway revival of "The Foreigner," which begins previews later this month. Last Friday, with his movie "The Last Shot" opening, Mr. Broderick, still boyish at 42 but looking somewhat tired from child-care duties (he and his wife, Sarah Jessica Parker, have a 2-year-old boy), spent an hour before rehearsal talking about his charismatic co-stars (onstage and in life) and the professional dangers of being nice.

JESSE GREEN In "The Foreigner," you're cast as a man so averse to interaction that he pretends to not speak English. He's the latest in a series of characters you've played who are mild or retiring. You've become a sort of icon of timidity.

MATTHEW BRODERICK That happened rather lately. Ferris Bueller, which to this day people call me on the street, was not retiring. But I guess now I seem to be caught in a bit of a wave of these guys. Leo Bloom in "The Producers" is certainly a pathologically retiring person. And if Nathan and I do "The Odd Couple," which sometimes we talk about, then I get worried.

Q. I think you're seen as the nice one, the charming one, the one people would like to have dinner with.

A. And I always wanted to be more than a charmer - because when I started, it was all: "Oh, he's very charming." "He's very likable." And words like that were not what I was after.

Q. What words would you like to have heard?

A. "Surprising." "I hadn't thought of that scene that way." "I believed it." "I didn't expect to be so moved." "I don't know why I was laughing that hard." But as you get older, too, I think you learn not to do something just because it's a stretch. So I have to work within what I'm good at, to some degree. It's no fun to be miscast. The times I've done parts that I don't feel, in retrospect, I was great for - it's a very bad feeling.

Q. Not in "The Producers," I assume.

A. No, but you can't work with Nathan every time. We keep making jokes at rehearsal for "The Foreigner" that the play will start, I'll enter, the audience will be happy and then immediately disappointed because Nathan will not also come out.

Q. But you've got Frances Sternhagen.

A. Thank God. I'm trying to get her to wear a black fedora and a padded black suit.

Q. Aside from being attached to Nathan, you're attached at the hip to your wife. Another big sparkly top banana. Adored.

A. Yeah.

Q. Beautiful like Nathan. Sexy like Nathan.

A. I'm definitely gonna call him after this, 'cause he's gonna be so happy.

Q. Is there any frustration for you in being the sidekick in both of those relationships?

A. With Nathan I always thought of it as a partnership, not him as top banana and me as a sidekick. I think of Bialystock and Bloom as a more brotherly relationship than a father-son relationship. But with Sarah, it's been a big adjustment, the kind of fame that she has gotten. It's radically different this year than last year because the show's on every night in reruns. There's just more exposure.

Q. You can notice the difference?

A. I do. Like you're in a teeny town in Ireland and all the little girls come and ask her things and want her to sign things.

Q. And do they ask you anything?

A. No, no. No, I'm incredibly dismissed. Which I'm pretty much used to. I try very hard to be supportive, and I am supportive, but I'm an actor in my own right, too, so sometimes I don't want to be just the supportive sweet guy who's with this great woman.

Q. Were you ever tempted to take a part on "Sex and the City"?

A. Every now and then they'd say, "Hey, you can be the premature ejaculator," but it never worked out with my schedule. Which may be good. I'm not strong enough in my own self to play the premature ejaculator on my wife's show.

Q. So, O.K., you're married to someone superfamous. But you're not going end up a drunken suicide like Norman Maine in "A Star Is Born."

A. It's one of my favorite movies, but no. Though I like to play that for effect.

Q. There must be things to like about being married to such a big star.

A. You get free sweaters and iPods. We went out for the Emmys, and there was a whole room at the hotel where a person follows you around with a sack, and you say, "I want that watch, that video game." Boy, people will hate me!

Q. I love that they provide you with a graft wrangler.

A. Except it's all for her, not me, actually. I'm the parasite! Oh, God, is this whole article going be about what a little nothing I am?

Q. You're actually quite famous, intermittently.

A. It's pretty much impossible to play that perfectly, because it keeps going one way or the other. You keep sliding into, ''Uh-oh, I haven't worked in a year and a half,'' or, ''I'm on all these bus posters, and everybody thinks I'm the milquetoast guy from 'The Stepford Wives.' " But if you're not famous you don't get the opportunities. I don't know that I would be cast in "The Foreigner" except that they like the idea that they have a name to promote.

Q. Did you want to be famous? You're the child of a well-known actor, James Broderick.

A. Yeah, but he was not superfamous. When he did the TV series "Family," he got a little bit famous, but it used to annoy me. We'd go to a baseball game, and people would come up and bother him. It was not a good thing in my family to be a "personality."

Q. He was a model of seriousness.

A. And my mother, who was a painter, too. Not that you shouldn't do comedies. But you should be trying to improve things, pretentious as that might sound. You should not be making audiences stupider or playing to their basest instincts. Of course, my father once played the butcher in an Oscar Mayer commercial - we all have to make a living. But he took his acting very seriously, and so did I, right from the beginning.

Q. And has it been rewarding on that level? Apart from fame?

A. There can be moments onstage - but sometimes in a movie, too - where you just feel you're in a golden space. You're in this strange world where everything you do makes sense. And it's funny, the audience is right in it with you, and the other actors, and you get these rare moments of feeling at one with something. You hear voices in your head.

Q. Really?

A. Do I sound like Joan of Arc? It's like you're not in a play anymore. You're saying the words, but you're not watching yourself. You know, you spend most of your time onstage, or at least I do, watching and criticizing your performance. And of course the other people who are killing your laughs. But every now and then it's a great feeling.

Q. Did you get a lot of that in "The Producers?"

A. Yes, quite a bit, though musicals are a bit different. It looks very free, but you get on this moving train and then you just hang on for dear life.

Q. You can't draw out that moment, even if you feel like it, because - -

A. Because the band's going to be on overtime. And all those chorus people. But certainly with Nathan, I had those moments. We would sometimes add lines just because of what we'd been talking about earlier that day. Even without changing dialogue, just by the feeling of what we were saying. Nathan is such a confident person about that. Anything that goes wrong onstage is a pleasure for him, basically. He'd be very happy if a set didn't come on. I mean we'd pretend to be upset, but we really liked anything that didn't work, because then we could, you know, be geniuses and save the day. Someone like that gives you a big feeling of safety.

Q. Listening to you talk about being with him, it sounds like you're talking about a spouse. Are there parallels between your personal and professional marriages?

A. God, I hope not.

Q. But do Sarah and Nathan like each other? Do they go at it like competitive shrews?

A. Competitive over me?

Q. "He's mine!" "No, he's mine!"

A. Well, they get along fine. But Nathan and I don't hang out all that much. At least not while we were doing the play. I think we instinctively felt that if we spent three hours a night together and had lunch, we would grow to hate each other.

Q. Three hours a night together, awake, is probably more than most people get with their spouse.

A. That's true. Except those three hours we were, you know, wearing funny clothes and screaming at each other.

Q. You mean you don't do that at home?

A. I don't want your readers to know.

Jesse Green is a contributing writer to Arts & Leisure.