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Fredanded: Fred Ward and Ed Harris: two actors who give a damn - Interview
Interview, March, 1995 by Brooke Smith

BROOKE SMITH: How does working together on Simpatico differ from what you did on The RIght Stuff, apart from the fact that one's a play and one's a movie?

ED HARRIS: It's more out there. It's just me and him. There's nobody else around. When we were doing The Right Stuff, there were, you know, five other astronauts.

FRED WARD: Right - floating in outer space!

BS: Do you find that you have similar ways of working?

FW: I see stuff in Ed that I relate to. His physicality. I see him using the physical to pull stuff out. And he's quite meticulous about it, too.

BS: What's it like to play off each other?

EH: It's really fun. One thing I've grown to appreciate about Fred is that whatever he's giving me, I'll give him back, and it takes care of itself for the next forty minutes. I don't have to create something that's not there. A lot of times when you work with actors you find yourself almost shutting them out, because they're not giving you anything. They're not giving you what you need in terms of where your character is coming from.

FW: In this play we're dealing with relative truths - who's lying, who's telling the truth. But underneath that, Ed and I have hit this deeper level of intimacy between old friends that comes out in the play.

EH: The characters are coming from different directions. Carter, my guy, is very successful at this point. Vinnie, Fred's character, is pretty much down-and-out. He's actually called me to come help him out of a situation. And I ran off with his wife and his car fifteen years prior. They haven't seen each other in a long time. So I'm carrying a lot of baggage and guilt from that around with me. Which he tries to call me on.

FW: And all the bitterness comes out in me.

EH: BUt it'S tricky playing it. Sometimes I think I've been playing the subtext too much. Carter's such a liar to himself. I don't think he's conscious of it. And as an actor playing it, you can't help but be conscious of what's happening to him.

BS: Does he ever have a moment where he realizes -

EH: No. I asked Sam about that. He said, "Sorry. You know, this guy doesn't have a fuckin' clue." [both laugh]

FW: It feels like an existential Abbott and Costello at times, because they're dealing with these deep things in an almost slapstick manner.

EH: I think that last scene works on that level. Yeah.

FW: It has that brutality of comedy at times.

EH: These guys are fairly ruthless with each other.

FW: They slap each other around emotionally.

BS: Do you guys Support each other in terms of the business?

EH: I go see his movies. [laughs]

BS: That's good - you pay! But do you call each other up and say, "Did you read this script?"

EH: We turn each other on to something occasionally. There was a play I was doing a few years back, and I learned that Fred was interested in doing it. And he sent me this script that he's directing, and Amy [Madigan, Harris's actress wife] and I might do it. I think about Fred a lot more than I talk to him. I feel like he's been part of my life over the last twelve years, you know?

BS: What qualities in each other do you wish you had more of?

EH: Well, Fred's a great traveler and a great reader and very fascinated with other cultures and times and different kinds of people. He's had a very interesting life. There's this wanderlust thing that's part of his being. I wish that I had an instinct for that a little bit more. If I'm in Paris for three months, I'll be working or I'll be in my room, drinking wine. I might get out once in a while, but I don't explore the city. I don't get fascinated by all the wonderful things there are to see.

FW: I think Ed is real focused and centered. [EH makes a face] He sticks in there. And there's a real looseness in Ed, too, a spontaneity.

EH: Fred's been a boxer and a martial artist, and he's really on the ground - talk about stable! And his sense of humor is kind of the same, in the sense that it's a little dry. But there's a part of him that's, like, really out of his mind. [all laugh] He appreciates the absurdity of situations, the ridiculousness of things. There's some stuff that he does in the play that I think is just so hilarious, that people don't quite get.

BS: Ed, you recently said that you're trying to do less "male stuff." What did you mean?

EH: I was talking about women, just in terms of understanding them as much as we can ever understand the opposite sex. I'm trying to let go of certain male approaches to things that you inherit, that you grow up with. If some woman tells me how she feels about something, my immediate assumption is that she wants an answer, or that she wants me to solve her problem. In fact, all she wants to do is share, or show how she feels. It's like a prehistoric reflex, you know, going out and getting the meat and bringing it back to the cave. You feel you're supposed to make it better, but more than likely she's asking you to tell her how you feel. Also, as an actor, it's fun to play guys that aren't just locked into some kind of male pattern, but a lot of guys you're asked to play are fairly macho and have a certain rigid standard they're living by.

FW: These parts actually reveal the real tragedy of the male. We're thrown into desolation by trying to live up to some bullshit expectations. We're either trying to compete with or kill each other. It's a major part of world history that men are trying to kill each other.

BS: Do you think that's changing?

FW: No, it's getting worse. It's just one slaughter after the other. We talk about it, but no one's really listening.

EH: But I don't feel - and I don't think Fred does either - real competition in terms of how we work.

BS: Where I went to high school, the actors worn the ones singing musicals and waltzing down the halls. Was it weird for you, in terms of the macho thing, to become an actor?

EH: I didn't get into acting until I was twenty-one. By that time I didn't have any problem with it being a masculine thing or not. People whose work I admired seemed to be pretty secure in their manhood. It was interesting getting involved in the theater world and meeting the kind of people that, five years prior in high school, you laughed at. And realizing that they were usually pretty cool people.

BS: Do you guys have platonic women friends?

EH: Yeah, I think so. They aren't confidants, but there are women I care a lot about that I think care about me. Women I talk to with ease.

FW: But a woman will only understand a man up to a point. There's a limit to it.

BS: Because they're not men and they don't understand?

FW: Has a woman ever had the need to take a beer bottle and break it over her own head, or done any of those absurd testosterone-driven acts that men can understand and that women are pretty befuddled by? [laughs]

EH: That's true. And there's this self-destructiveness in men - a feeling of uselessness, of being used up. But women, I have to say, may feel the same way.

BS: Maybe they just manifest it in different ways. I'm thinking now how much of it is upbringing. I don't have sisters. I have brothers, and they all played hockey - one was even professional. And I definitely felt like I had to be tough.

EH: I didn't have any sisters. My relationships with women have always been as mother, teacher, a hovering controller or an eye watching you. Or else a lover, a sexual thing. So I never really had, growing up, a woman as a pal. I was petrified of women for a long time.

BS: Why?

EH: Because they were omniscient. It was overwhelming.

FW: It's a primal fear - it's in so many myths and ancient stories.

EH: They take your power away. But it's not true, necessarily. I think it's just a big terror inside of you.

FW: I think we're struggling with trying to redefine various positions at this point in history. To allow freedom for women, freedom for men, freedom from these kinds of sharply defined gender roles.

BS: So when did you two actually meet? Was it on The Right Stuff?

EH: Yeah, in '82.

FW: Is that when that was?

BS: Did you become friends right away?

FW: Well, we did hang out together a bit. On my part, there was respect for his work and for Ed as a person.

EH: That's the word I would use, too - respect. I've always had great respect for him. There's always been a mutual respect between the two of us.

~ 지금은 없어진,아마도 최초의 에드 해리스 팬 페이지였을 http://www.wenet.net/~mhoopes/edharris.html 에 올라와 있던 인터뷰.

Interview | Volume 22 | September 1992 | p. 112
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The private face of a fierce actor
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ed harris The name has a down-home feel to it, but the actor who owns it has never gone out of his way to neighborly on screen or stage. Think only of his simmering performances as the redneck fisherman in Alamo Bay, as Patsy Cline's abusive husband in Sweet Dreams, as the surly Vietnam vet in Jacknife , and as the white-hot Irish Mob boss in State of Grace. This month Harris stars (alongside Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin, Alan Arkin, Kevin Spacey, and Jonathan Pryce) as one of the browbeaten real-estate salesmen in James Foley's film of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross-and he shades the sour character of Dave Moss with humor, venality, and impotent fury.

Laconic possessor of a compact physique, cold killer's eyes, and Cadillac cheekbones, Harris might have made a Shane, a Tommy Udo, or a Cody Jarrettt in a different era; as it is he has approached mythic status as John Glenn in The Right Stuff, as the messianic fulfiller of Manifest Destiny in Walker, and as the incestuous wrangler Eddie in Fool for Love, a role Sam Shepard wrote for Harris and for which he won an Obie. Asked to be decent or compassionate―as in The Abyss―Harris is no less complex than when his characters quiver with rage.

He was born in Tenafly, New Jersey, in 1950, played football at Columbia University and CalArts prior to his film debut in Coma in 1976. He met the actress Amy Madigan in a stage production of Prairie Avenue, and they married in Waxahachie, Texas, in 1983, during the filming of Places in the Heart. In July, Harris joined Madigan in New York, where she was playing Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway. We asked her to call the shots.

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AMYMADIGAN: How do you feel about doing this interview with your wife?

ED HARRIS: 1 feel fine about it.

AM: That's good. I saw Glengarry Glen Ross the other day, and one of the things I most like about it is that it's an ensemble piece. I know it's written that way, but did you guys try to create that atmosphere when you were working?

EH: It did feel that way. We rehearsed two weeks and did some of the improvs, read, talked. Everyone's energy was in that ensemble vein. There were no trips being made on it as a vehicle for anybody. Most of my stuff was with Alan Arkin, who has a great, dry sense of humor, which was apparent the first time I met him. It was fun to be working with someone you respected for that. We would shoot five- or six- page scences at a time, though it wasn't really cut like that.

AM: Glengarry has lots of literate David Mamet dialogue with a machine-gun rhythm to it. Did you and the other actors have an easy time wrapping your mouths around that?

EH: These guys are salesmen. Whether it's with their wives, their children, whatever, they're trying to get some point across and have somebody buy the idea they're selling. Pretty much all these characters say what they think―it's not about pensiveness. The first time l read for this piece, I was trying to pay attention to the rhythm of the language. But the danger of relying on the rhythm is that it becomes a bit hollow, because you are not investing it with anything else. During the rehearsals we'd get out of that rhythm and experiment-we'd give certain things more weight, pause here or there. And when we got to shooting it, from take one to take three or five or however many takes we ended up doing, it would finally work when we let the language speak for itself. And I think all of us had done our homework, so it was invested with humanity.

AM: Did you adhere to that adage. Say your lines and don't bump into the furniture and you'll be O.K.? Because the play I'm doing now, A Streetcar Named Desire, is so loaded with language that you just sail on that.

EH: I don't think a lot of actors understand that's sometimes not enough.There's a danger of falling into a pattern of inflection where everything sounds the same, regardless of what you're saying.

AM: What's the glue that holds each of these salesmen together?

EH: Their one thing in life is to close a deal. Alec Baldwin's character tells us, "You close a deal or you're on the street" What do you say?

AM: I guess you close the deal.

EH: Yeah, or you try to.

AM: Do you feel that Glengarry is a morality play?

EH: The thread is that these salesmen are examples of what you have to do in a free-enterprise system in this country. It doesn't matter if you are selling a product that's worthless―you have to make money. My guy, Moss, recalls how he used to sell the same people five cars in fifteen years.They would come back because it was a good product. Now he's selling land thafs worthless because that's all he's being
offered to sell in this company. That makes you start feeling a little desperate.

AM: I'd say a number of the films or plays you've done have had some kind of message that you felt close to. Would you accept a part that was morally reprehensible to you if it was a good part?

EH: If the project was morally reprehensible to me, no. If the character was morally reprehensible in a good project that was not morally reprehensible, probably. A friend of mine showed me a William Faulkner quote a couple of weeks ago. I don't remember it exactly, but he said it's not messages your putting out, it's something that illuminates the human condition, as corny as that sounds. The more human you make the characters you're playing, the more identifiable they are as real people, and the more people can recognize something―

AM: About themselves?

EH: About themselves, or what it is to walk around on this planet for the short time that we're here. Hopefully that's uplifting on some level.

AM: What has prompted you to continue acting?

EH: lt's a barometer, in some way, for my life, and how alive and open I am, and how much I am allowing myself to change, if at all.

AM: If you're doing a good job as an actor, do you feel you're doing a good job as a person?

EH: It's not necessarily a barometer of good versus bad. It's just a barometer of change, of not just stagnating. I think I feel better about my work now, a little bit more relaxed, than I have in the past. Sometimes I get concerned that I'm just the same.

AM: Are you a harsh critic of your own work?

EH: I think I'm honestly critical of it. Do you think I'm a harsh critic of your work?

AM: I think you look at it pretty openly and clearly. I think the need to do good work and the hope of getting better is something that propels both of us. What actors have influenced you?

EH: Eli Wallach. I just saw him on onstage in The Price tonight, and that affected me, because his body is remarkably expressive and he has obviously taken great care of himself and his instrument―to use that word―and if he's not the master of it, he's awful close.

AM: Have you ever worked with any women directors?

EH: Yes, in theater and television, and Agnieszka Holland [in the movie To Kill a Priest, 1988). I love working with female directors, personally.

AM: Why is that?

EH: I feel I have much more of an exchange with them. I feel they are less threatened and more open, a little freer to say things.

AM: You don't have to get into any type of like, mano a mano thing?

EH: Right. And even if a male director is not prone to that. a lot of times he cant help it. It's something instinctively competitive about the nature of the way the men deal with one another.

AM: You just made me think of when Alec is screaming at you guys in the beginning of Glengarry. There's a very funny bit when he walks by his briefcase and says, "You know what you need to be a salesman, what you need to be a man?" and he pulls out a pair of brass balls. Is that what you need.?

EH: Are you asking me?

AM: Yeah.

EH: To be a salesman?

AM: I don't know. . . to be a man?

EH: I don't think a pair of balls ever hurt.

AM: [laughs]

EH: Whether they have to be brass. I'm not sure.

AM: That's a good answer. Do you think audiences - and even friends - have a certain perception of you through your work? And if so, would you say it's true? I don't want to lead you into some―

EH: Yeah, what are you trying to say here?

AM: Do you think you represent a certain kind of guy?

EH: There's the word "intense" that comes up. And maybe I am in different ways - I don't know.

AM: Usually the one I get is "feisty" "Oh, that feisty Amy Madigan," you know.

EH: Yeah. Well, you are feisty!

AM: Thats true.

EH: You're a lot of other things, too.

AM: And I would say that a number of parts you have played have been intense.

EH: Yeah. But I can also be feisty. And you can be intense.

AM: Or corny or soft. Do you get a chance to do those qualities?

EH: Not as much on film as in some theater things I've done.

AM: Would you like to do those?

EH: Oh, sure. I think this HBO project I did with Diane Keaton, Running Mates, isn't necessarily comical, but there's definitely some humor in it. I am more of a straight man for her, but it's not full of pain and heartache, ifs more of a romantic kind of tale, and it was fun to do that.

AM: I'll bet. What do you like to do for fun?

EH: [silent]

AM: Big pause, [laughs]

EH: That's my answer.

AM: He has a big smile on his face. No, what do you like to do for fun?

EH: For fun?

AM: You heard me! It cant be that tough of a question!

EH: I don't really know. actually, for fun. One thing I occasionally enjoy doing is drinking beer. But then sometimes it doesn't end up being fun. I like to play baseball. I like spending time with you.

AM: Are you a person who can have fun?

EH: I thoroughly enjoy acting. I like to fish occasionally.

AM: Are you a good fisherman?

EH: I'm O.K.

AM: Have you ever caught a fish on a fly rod?

EH: No, I haven't. actually. I purchased a fly rod a while ago. I haven't had the chance to really get into it. That's one of my goals in life. Ican have fun, but it's a question that denotes to me the idea doing something that is fun while you're doing it and you are aware that you are having fun.

AM: This one is taking on dynamic proportions!

EH: I could be standing still in the woods, and that's fun to me, in hindsight. But while I'm doing it, I'm just there. We haven't worked together in a while - I think that would be fun.

AM: I think we've been lucky that we've been able to work on a couple of films and plays together. What is it about knowing a person so well that you can work well together?

EH: I think If you can work with your mate over a consistent period of time, it's a great way to communicate without having to sit down and just talk. It's another way of learning about your partner, which is invaluable, though it's been maybe six years since we've worked together.

AM: God, is It that long?

EH: Apart from one night of Love Letters at the Pasadena Playhouse. Let me ask you something.

AM: O.K.

EH: What do you really want to know about me? What would you really like to ask me? You don't have to ask me, but I'm just asking you this question.

AM: I asked you the fun question on purpose because, as well as I know you, there are part to you I don't know. I am always curious about the side of you that can let go, that's not work-related.

EH: Well, there are things that I do with you that are fun that I don't particularly want to talk about.

AM: [laughs] That's O.K. I am working in New York right now and you're visiting me here. What does it feel like for you when you're sitting in the audience watching me perform?

EH: Still. Comfortable. Like, I get proud maybe. I feel focused and attentive. Close to you - it makes me feel close to you. It is fun watching you up there, because you are not aware that I'm watching. You might be, but you're engrossed in doing Stella. So in that sense, it's kind of voyeuristically pleasurable. And, I must say, I've seen it ten times and it's gotten better every time. I've watched you grow in this - watched Stella get deeper - and it's been very exciting to see that.

AM: What's your family like?

EH: Pretty wholesome. Intelligent. A bit, . . not eccentric, but a little bit out there. Loving.

AM: Are you close to them?

EH: Very close to my morn and my dad and my brothers.

AM: Do you want to have a family of your own?

EH: I want to have a family with you, yeah.

AM: How will that change you?

EH: When you wake up in the morning, your first thought is not about yourself. It's about whatever creature is lying in the next room

+ http://www.eonline.com/Facts/People/Bio/0,128,254,00.html

Birth Name:Edward Allen Harris
Birthdate:November 28, 1950
Birthplace:Tenafly, NJ
Occupation:Actor
Quote:"When I realized I couldn't play football, I was pretty lost. I needed something I could be good at. I wasn't even thinking about making a living; it was about survival. I was becoming an adult and...didn't have a way in. I needed to feel I belonged in the world...[Acting] was the closest thing I could think of to scoring a touchdown!...It was physical...required great concentration and meant working with others in public. It was challenging, like sports. What was new was the creative and emotional side, because that hadn't been part of my life before...I wasn't thinking about making money. I was concentrating on what I would become, an actor--and I just got lost in it." --Parade magazine, June 21, 1998

Claim to Fame:1983: Portrayed John Glenn in The Right Stuff

Significant Other(s):
Wife: Amy Madigan, actress; met during a production of Prairie Avenue at the Lee Strasberg Institute (1981); married in 1983 on the set of Places in the Heart

Family:
Father: Robert L. Harris (aka Bob Harris), bookseller, former singer
Mother: Margaret Harris, travel agent
Brother: Robert Harris; born in 1939
Brother: Spencer Harris; born in 1956
Daughter: Lily Dolores Harris; born May 3, 1993; mother, Amy Madigan

Awards:
1981: Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle: Prairie Avenue
1983/84: OBIE: Performance, Fool for Love
1985: San Francisco Critics: Scar
1986: Theater World: Precious Sons
1986: Drama Desk: Outstanding Actor in a Play, Precious Sons
1992: Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle: Scar
1995: Broadcast Film Critics Association: Best Supporting Actor, Apollo 13, Nixon and Just Cause; tied with Kevin Spacey
1995: The Actor: Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role, Apollo 13
1995: The Actor: Outstanding Ensemble Performance in a Motion Picture, Apollo 13; shared award with film's cast
1998: National Board of Review: Best Supporting Actor, Stepmom and The Truman Show
1998: Golden Globe: Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture, The Truman Show

Factoids:
1986: Broadway debut in Precious Sons; received Tony nomination

Education:
Tenafly High School, New Jersey; played football
Columbia University, New York (1969-71); played football
Oklahoma State University; majored in acting (1972-73)
California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California; B.F.A., Theater, 1975