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The funny thing about theater, says actor Liev Schreiber, is that when it works, it provokes the audience in ways that a movie cannot. “You can’t just go get ice cream and forget the feeling” that a play triggers, he says. Instead, it’s the artifice of a play, as opposed to the full-on immersion of a film, that provokes the sense among the audience that “We have to discuss this. We have to deal with this.”
That might sound a bit strange coming from a man who has racked up film credits ranging from Hugh Jackman’s estranged mutant brother Sabretooth in X-Men Origins: Wolverine to a bewigged transvestite in Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock to a Jewish resistance fighter opposite Daniel Craig in the World War II-era Defiance. But Schreiber’s filmic fame is partly based on his ability to translate this kind of heady intellectualism into a visceral performance, an instinct that comes from his stage work. The New York Times has called Schreiber—who has tackled the traditional Big Roles of Hamlet, Henry V, and Macbeth—the nation’s “foremost Shakespearean actor of his generation,” and he also scored a Tony in 2005 for his performance in the decidedly contemporary David Mamet play Glengarry Glen Ross.
During the course of this interview, the native New Yorker—Schreiber grew up on the Lower East Side, pre-gentrification—professed his love for theater (“Rehearsing plays is the most fun an actor can have, I think'), for language-oriented playwrights like Harold Pinter and Mamet, and the German dramatist and director Bertolt Brecht’s take on the relationship between actor and audience. Between his busy schedule of recording voiceovers for PBS specials like Secrets of the Dead: Mumbai Massacre, filming the forthcoming spy thriller Salt, and rehearsing for his new play, Schreiber took time out to speak with RL about his many roles, including being a father to two children, Sasha (two-and-a-half years) and Sam (one), with his partner, British-born Australian actress Naomi Watts.
Right now you’re doing rehearsals with Scarlett Johansson for Arthur Miller’s 1955 play, A View From the Bridge, set to open at New York’s Cort Theatre on January 24. How is that going?
We’re only in the first week, so it’s sort of chaos. We haven’t settled down to really cracking it open and trying different things, working through the play and making sure that we’re all on the same page. But it’s going great.
I know that you are a native New Yorker. What’s it like performing to New York audiences, especially live theater?
Well, it’s the best, because I grew up here. In my mind, this was always the best place to work in the world. To really imagine that I have the opportunity to do a Broadway show, let alone one a year? It’s the best.
Are New York audiences more critical than audiences elsewhere?
I don’t know if New York audiences are more critical. New York critics are more critical. I think it depends where you’re working. Obviously because of the financial end of a Broadway show, the critical stuff really, really matters. I think it matters anyway; I’m always interested in anyone’s opinion, whether they’re a critic or not. It doesn’t mean I take it to heart or let it affect me. But I’m always interested in people’s perceptions of things.
That was my next question. Let’s say you’re doing a play: Do you read reviews as they’re coming in or do you wait until it’s finished and then read the reviews?
I generally read them. They all come in at the same time and you have a flood of family and friends reading them. I always want to know what they’re talking about.
You’re saying you don’t take them to heart. But would you tweak your performance at all based on what somebody in the media says?
If they make a comment that really strikes me as interesting or valuable, I don’t think you can help but absorb it in somehow, at some level. Changing the performance in a way that’s going to affect the other actors is a no-no, generally speaking. But each performance has its own life; that’s why it’s so fun. It may even change from night to night—I think that’s part of the pleasure of doing theater. If it becomes really set, that’s hard for me. It’s hard for me to repeat myself. I get—you get—bored pretty fast. A performance for me I think has more to do with my day—if I’m sick, if I’m tired, if I didn’t get much sleep the night before. Those are not always negative things. Sometimes I do the best work when I’m sick.
Why is that?
You have to focus more. When you don’t feel so great you have to dig a little deeper and oftentimes that makes for a more interesting performance.
At the New Yorker Festival in 2008, you talked about your training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, saying it was the best training of your life. What did it consist of, and why was it so phenomenal?
I think there was something pragmatic about a career in the theater in England—it was realistic. People aspired to it, whereas I think generally people aspire to film careers over here. And there was a tradition that was respected. . . . The various versions of the method of naturalism always seemed a little bit esoteric to me. I liked the formality of voice training, of verse training. I liked the formality of fencing. I liked the formality of dance—I liked the formality of all of those things that were basically helping you develop a toolkit so you weren’t just relying on your emotions and your looks. You had other things to fall back on.
It sounds like a more clinical approach that you’re describing.
Yeah. I think some people work from the inside out and others from the outside in. I am probably one of those people who works from the outside in. Sometimes you have to put yourself through the paces until it occurs to you what it is, and I like that notion—fake it ’til you make it, you know. Walk through the words, walk through the action, and even if you don’t understand it right away, keep doing it. Something will occur to you. I think the body has self-conscious emotional memory that I think is very powerful and very intuitive. It’s good stuff. The French word for rehearsal is répétition, and I think there’s a reason for that. It’s like in any sport, you do something over and over and over again until you develop a really sophisticated relationship to it. You’re then available to anything that could possibly happen...part of the fun of acting is when you surprise yourself.
How do you decide to take on a role for film or theater?
For me it was always about material. Does the material excite you in some way? In film it tends to be a little more, does the character excite you? Whereas in theater it’s more, does the play excite you, the ideas in the play?
Something about theater we all accept to a degree [is] the artifice of it. It’s not real life—it’s an expression of it, it’s an idea. For me plays have always been articulating ideas…there’s something about theater that is much more about ideas, about shared ideas. Sometimes people think [live theater means] more pressure, but oddly enough, it’s not, because you’re not really the event. The play’s the event. I think you want [the audience] to walk away with some conversations among themselves about the play.
You’ve worked with so many luminary actors and directors. Who are you still dying to work with?
I think Matthew Warchus is a phenomenal director. Right now I’m really interested in the crew I’m currently working with: Greg Mosher, Jessica Hecht, Scarlett Johansson, Santino Fontana, Corey Stoll, and Michael Cristofer [the cast from A View From the Bridge]. The most exciting gig is the gig that’s right in front of you. The most exciting gig is the gig that’s happening.
Speaking about a more solo endeavor—screenwriting. I know that you adapted the Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated in 2005. What was that like?
I had actually already written a screenplay to find my grandfather—a very dark thing about a guy who goes to Ukraine to find out what it is to be Ukrainian, and ends up getting robbed and ends up penniless in the streets, and decides that’s what it is to be Ukrainian and to be American, and runs home. I was very happy with it and I was thinking, Oh, geez, I might try to make the film! Then I read this short story in the New Yorker, “The Very Rigid Search”—an excerpt from Jonathan’s novel, which had not yet been published—and I just thought that Jonathan did everything that I was trying to do but had done it with an incredible sense of humor. And so I thought, Wow, this is terrific, and so much better and funnier and much deeper in so many ways. I went and met with him and asked him if I could develop his short story into a screenplay. He said, Actually it’s an excerpt, and I have a whole novel, and he gave me a Duane Reade bag containing the whole manuscript. I read it and said to him, This is an amazing novel, I want to develop this, but we’re never gonna find financing. I still want to do the short story, is that OK? And he said, Yeah, but make sure you call it Everything Is Illuminated so I can sell books. Cut to a month-and-a-half later, the book’s on the cover of the New York Times Book Review and I am having a minor heart attack.
You have two films that are slated to come out in 2010, Salt and Repo Men. What can you tell me about both of them?
Salt is a CIA thriller with Angelina Jolie, directed by Phillip Noyce, and Repo Men is a black comedy about a company in the future, when health insurance becomes entirely unaffordable.
That’s the future?
Yeah, exactly. [Laughing] And people will take out loans to get organs. I run a company that repossesses organs that haven’t been paid for.
That doesn’t actually sound like science fiction. It does, but it doesn’t.
But imagine if someone comes for your heart!
It’s a good metaphor.
It’s a great idea.
You’ve wrapped up working on both of them, correct?
Yes. I also did an independent film, a low-budget film called Every Day, a small domestic drama about a couple. One’s a writer, and the woman’s father is dying and it’s sort of about how it digs into their marriage, trying to raise their kids, and deal with infidelity and dying relatives.
How is it doing a low-budget movie compared with a blockbuster that has a lot of money behind it?
I like them just because they tend to be quicker, fast and loose, and I like that. There are different benefits from both. It was really fun to do all the big action sequences in Wolverine. A different kind of satisfaction comes from working on script-based projects or more actory-based things.
You’ve played so many iconic characters—Hamlet, Macbeth, Orson Welles. Who is your favorite and to whom do you most relate?
I think ground zero of being an actor is a certain degree of identity crisis, you know? You’re constantly looking for things to put on and try.
Hamlet is definitely a change-your-life play. The kind of intellectual and emotional gymnastics that you do in that play are just so much fun. I also really enjoyed Iago in Othello. It was another really fun part. It’s just like that kind of thing—it’s like running a marathon. It’s so daunting initially, but once you complete it there’s a sort of ecstasy afterwards.
I don’t know what I identify with. I think I probably most identify with Raymond Shaw from The Manchurian Candidate. You know, the over-mothered, browbeaten, comatose, just-waiting-for-instructions guy. [Laughing]
So how do you unwind?
A martini used to do the trick. But you gotta be careful with that one. I think you just breathe it out. You just shake it off. And get ready to do it again.
What do you like to do with your family in New York? I’m curious especially since you’re a native New Yorker and you know what it’s like to be a kid here.
There’s a lot of things that we like to do in New York. Two of our favorites are the Children’s Petting Zoo in Central Park and the Museum of Natural History—it’s kind of the bomb.
Obviously your children have the genetic makeup to act. Would you encourage them to do so, based on your own experience?
Sure. I have nothing against it. [Laughing] I believe it’s really important to encourage them in whatever direction they want to go. If, with our kids, it happens to be acting, then that’s fine with me. I think it’s important to make sure they get exposed to a lot of different stuff.
Has becoming a father changed the way you approach your work or choose your roles? In the Neil LaBute play, The Mercy Seat in 2003 you were this kind of louse who faked his own death to ditch his family—would you play that part differently?
I don’t know that it’s changed me that much. I’ve only been a father for about two-and-a-half years now. But I certainly relish [the work] more, because you spend so much time hanging out with kids, it’s fun to go hang out with grownups again.
Your character in View From the Bridge has this inappropriate attraction to his niece. Does that strike you differently now that you’re around children?
But I think I have a very inappropriate relationship with both of my sons! I like to kiss them both on the mouth every opportunity that I get.
That’s a decent role to play, then.
Piece of cake for me.
Rachel Somerstein in a New York–based editor and writer who covers topics ranging from art and politics to urban planning for ARTnews, ART + AUCTION, McSweeney's, PBS, n+1, and Next American City.
Photography credits:
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- John Parra/Stringer
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