Straight to the Heart

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Straight to the Heart
On stage and screen, Ed Harris goes deep
November 10, 2006
By Andrew Salomon

Ed Harris sits in a chair onstage at the Public Theater in Manhattan and plays a familiar part: that of the standup guy. Starring in Neil LaBute's one-man show Wrecks, he has just concluded his nightly performance as Edward Carr, a widower at his wife's wake who goes on a 75-minute tangent — journey, really — to set the record straight. At the moment, Harris is fielding questions from the audience during a post-show talkback, and a woman has remarked on the play's denouement. Though she has nothing but praise for the actor's performance, she criticizes LaBute's choice to have Harris' character directly reveal — not once but twice — the secret he has been carrying all these years.

Harris won't accept the praise for himself without challenging the criticism of LaBute. He tells the woman that one night during a performance he said the crucial line once, then repeated it, almost to himself. LaBute was so taken with the choice that he told Harris to keep it. If he hadn't done that, Harris says, "maybe it wouldn't have seemed as if it had been, you know, shoved down your sensitive throat."

The actor smiles as he says it, and the audience laughs. However, it isn't clear if the woman, sitting half in shadows, has joined in. When told of the exchange a week later, LaBute himself laughs: "He could have just as easily said something like that to me. He takes everything on a moment-to-moment basis. He's very honest and he expects others to be the same."

Harris' ability to infuse any moment with the truth is one of the hallmarks of a career that has spanned more than a quarter-century. In that time, he has earned four Oscar nominations — for his work in Apollo 13, The Truman Show, Pollock, and The Hours — playing characters with a presence so real that his performances are, at times, discomforting.

Harris has also come to represent a kind of actor that LaBute says is "quintessentially American.... He exudes a strength, but he's not afraid to show his weaknesses."

If Harris possesses some of the qualities associated with the American ideal — directness, accountability, a strong work ethic, a willingness to take risks — they are reflected in his most recent roles, though one of them, the title character in the upcoming Copying Beethoven, would seem an unlikely choice.

"I just read the thing and went, gulp. You know, 'Good luck, buddy,' " Harris says of the film, which opens Nov. 10. "Ed Harris and Beethoven: They don't seem to really necessarily go together, and they certainly didn't in my head. But I also figured, 'Hey, man, you're an actor, you know? Get to work on it; you can pull it off.' "

Ready for Work

At a recent interview, Harris is dressed as if he's ready for a day of heavy lifting, wearing blue jeans and boots, a white T and a brown flannel shirt, which sports a small hole in the right shoulder. But the work he has for the day is simply sticking close to his character for the night.

"Every night it's a whole new trip out there," Harris says of the play. "I'm very committed to being there every night.... I don't want to let go of it. I can't let go of it and not think about it for 24 hours and show up a half-hour beforehand and go do it. It doesn't work that way for me. At least, not in this piece."

As for the conviction and certainty he brings to his roles, Harris says it's not a matter of working his way to the truth of a particular character but of starting from that place: "It's not so much about finding the truth but allowing the truth to get deeper and deeper and more specific."

And for that, a great deal of work is required. For his role in Wrecks, an automotive entrepreneur, Harris read everything he could about cars. For Beethoven, he studied and listened to the composer's music endlessly. "Some actors are really good at just basically acting," he says. "And they're great at it. I admire that. I don't like doing that. It doesn't feel good to me. I like investing myself in it. Not just with my craft, but with my heart."

'An Opening Process'

The Oscar-winning actor Kim Hunter once said of acting, "It doesn't get any easier. It gets harder. I find it more challenging as I do it and realize how much more has to go into it."

Despite the amount of preparation he goes through, however, Harris says acting hasn't gotten harder for him. "I don't know if it gets any easier," he says, adding, "I feel like I'm improving on some level. I feel more accessible to myself as the years go by. You keep trying to grow as an individual.... You work as hard, but in a different way. You're not forcing something. You're allowing it to take place. You don't have to manipulate yourself. It's more of an opening process."

There can be degrees of openness to Harris, however. There is a scene in the movie Pollock that may reveal as much about the actor as it does about the mercurial artist he plays. Lee Krasner (Pollock's wife, played by Marcia Gay Harden), shows up at Pollock's apartment for the first time. He opens the door slightly and says almost nothing as Krasner talks, more at him than to him. He neither blocks her entrance nor opens the door all the way. Krasner simply keeps talking as she sidles like a salesman into the room.

"He's a bit of a mystery," LaBute says of Harris. "He looks at you with those very clear blue eyes, but you never know what he's thinking. He holds some cards back."

Nonetheless, if one sits quietly with him and allows a moment to unfold, Harris can become quite expansive, particularly about his approach to his work. "It's like playing golf," he says. "I'm not a very good golfer, but when you play golf, it's such a head game, and you're either present, you're either there at the moment or you're not. It's like that thing where you take a swing at the ball, you hit some crappy shot, and then you swing again and you hit it perfect because you're relaxed. You know you can do it. The reason you can't do it every time is because you get some stuff in your head. It fouls you up.

"And the acting thing, it's the same thing," he continues. "It's such an exercise to me in 'Am I present or not? Am I living in the moment right now or am I bullshitting people?' "

A Keen Eye

Judging by the characters he so often plays, it would seem Harris possesses the keen ability to spot the nonsense when he sees it. "That develops over the years," he says. "That's one I've always had, a good bullshit detector."

Harris acquired his unvarnished view of the world growing up in Tenafly, N.J., in the 1960s. In high school he was a decent student but loved sports, and he went to Columbia University to play baseball and football. He dropped out after two years and moved to Norman, Okla., where his parents had moved. After taking theatre courses at the University of Oklahoma, he moved to Southern California, where he got a degree in theatre from the California Institute of the Arts.

After that, he worked painting houses while acting in theatres around L.A. During that time, he lived in part of a garage that he rented from a woman for $25 a month. "And then she kicked me out 'cause I didn't pay that for, like, six months," Harris told an audience at the San Francisco International Film Festival two years ago.

Harris got a break when a friend asked him to read with him at an audition for an agent. The agent wanted Harris and not the friend.

"I haven't talked to him since," Harris said in San Francisco. "He really wasn't that good a friend to begin with. He wasn't that good an actor, either."

After a few guest spots on television shows such as The Rockford Files and CHiPs, Harris was cast in a Charles Bronson movie, Borderline, in 1980, then did Knightriders the next year, the same year he started dating his future wife, actor Amy Madigan. (They were married in 1983 and have a 13-year-old daughter.) Two years later, he was cast as the astronaut John Glenn in The Right Stuff, and his career moved steadily forward from there.

In between movies, Harris has kept his hand in the theatre, appearing on Broadway in Taking Sides in 1996 and, 10 years before, Precious Sons, for which he earned a Drama Desk Award and a Tony nomination. He is also considered an excellent interpreter of Sam Shepard's work, originating the role of Eddie in Fool for Love in 1983 and starring in Simpatico at the Public Theater in 1994.

"Sam's just got that real American voice," Harris says. "I think it's really honest in terms of where it's coming from. There's always humor to it, a kind of razor's edge to a lot of his stuff. It's exciting."

In the mid-1990s, Harris also tried to start a theatre in Santa Monica, Calif., with Madigan, Holly Hunter, and some others, but the project stalled when they could raise only $250,000 of their $1.5 million capitalization. It was an idea, Harris says, that existed in the moment, and now "people are going on with their lives."

Above the Noise

As a high school student, Harris read John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, a book that would help shape his thinking. "It opened my eyes," he says. "It offered me a different way of looking at the world."

With his penchant for denim, flannel, and work boots, along with an Everyman's compassion, it's easy to see Harris playing Tom Joad. Though he says he's not a political activist, he is attuned to the larger world, both as a citizen and as an artist who has to help interpret it. And, Harris says, that particular part of his job can be frustrating in the new-media age, which seems more cacophonous than the '60s era.

"The big difference is the amount of information, and the outlets for information," he says. "We're bombarded by information, and much of it is useless.... You know, when you get mail, 90 percent of your mail is garbage. You turn on the television, there are 200 channels on there and 185 of them are about nothing."

Selecting projects in this climate isn't always easy. "It's the corporate greed of America, and it's also playing to the lowest common denominator, a lot of it," he says. "I mean, you get people to pay all the money to go see what they go see, and they go, and then [producers] keep making more of it. That's just how it happens. It's a tough sell, you know. It's not bad; that's what it's become. That's what is."

As for his own work, Harris says, "You try to do things that you feel matter, that you think at least have some point of view about them. I'm not going to say that Wrecks is going to change the world or Copying Beethoven [will], but at least they're intelligent. They're written with some integrity."

And it's an integrity that Harris demands from himself. "At a certain point, you have to accept who you are, at some level," he says. "One of the things that's fun about being an actor, you get to play other people than who you are. But on a day-to-day level, there are certain truths of who we are as individuals, and you kind of have to accept that, I guess. With humor, though."