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Talking Shop With Skeet Ulrich

By Amy Wallace — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Photograph by Jill Greenberg

“The best furniture makers know how to fix their mistakes without starting over,” Skeet Ulrich says as a table saw hums nearby. Dressed in jeans, a gray T-shirt, and running shoes, the 40-year-old star of the new Law & Order: Los Angeles is standing in the cavernous House of Hardwood, a custom milling shop in West L.A. Over the years Ulrich has bought a lot of wood here; this is where he comes when he’s looking for walnut to complete the headboard on his handcrafted bed or poplar for the sideboard he designed to display art books.

Each piece of heirloom furniture Ulrich makes becomes an obsession.“It’s almost like acting in that once you start getting connected to it, you cannot stop thinking about it,” he says, nudging the brim of his X Games trucker hat to reveal eyes that are the color of semisweet chocolate. “That’s how I typically know that I have to do a role—if I cannot stop thinking about it, I have to find a way to be part of it.”

Law & Order: Los Angeles, which airs on NBC, is Ulrich’s first TV series since the one that taught him how devoted small-screen fans can be: Jericho. In that show, which debuted on CBS in 2006, he played a bad boy who returns to his Kansas hometown and becomes a hero just before civilization as we know it begins to break down. The program was so beloved that when CBS canceled it after a single season, viewers deluged the network with peanuts—a nod to a line of dialogue (“Nuts!”) uttered by Ulrich’s character.

Jericho was the first series in 26 years to be brought back from the dead, but its days were numbered. The plug was pulled for good in 2008 because of wan ratings, which Ulrich blames on a two-and-a-half-month hiatus between the 11th and 12th episodes. “Whatever moron came up with that in marketing, I hope they lost their job, because they really killed us,” he says. “It was a shame. There was a lot of story left to tell.”

That’s why he’s so pleased to be throwing himself into the role of Detective Rex Winters. “TV is the only place you get to do long-arc storytelling,” he says, ticking off the names of his costars, Alfred Molina and Corey Stoll, who are helping him bring those stories to life. “I’m very grateful.”

The day before visiting House of Hardwood, Ulrich was training to wield a firearm like a real D3 (the highest detective classification). “We did static shooting and then timed exercises—running up to a mark, firing two to the body, one to the head, then going back to another target,” he says happily. By accompanying LAPD detectives on their shifts, he’s learned that they are investigators, not first responders. Only rarely do they chase perps, guns blazing. But this being TV, his character will likely open fire more often. Which is just fine by Ulrich.

“I’ve never played a cop. It’s like doing Ang Lee’s movie and playing a cowboy,” he says, referring to the 1999 Civil War drama Ride with the Devil. “It’s like being a kid again.”

Ulrich was born Bryan Ray Trout in Lynchburg, Virginia. His parents split up early on, and when he was six, he says his father, a hotel chef, kidnapped him and his older brother, Geof. They spent the next three years moving from Florida to New York to Pennsylvania. Eventually the brothers were reunited with their mother in North Carolina, whereupon his father disappeared.

“I didn’t really have a dad,” says Ulrich. He got a new last name when his mother married a former race car driver, D.K. Ulrich. A soccer coach bestowed the nickname “Skeeter” because the boy’s slight stature reminded him of a mosquito’s. A sickly child who had near-constant bouts of pneumonia, Ulrich was ten when doctors found he had a cleft mitral valve and a hole in his ventricular wall. Open-heart surgery left him with a big scar and a defensive posture that he likens to post-traumatic stress disorder.

That was also the year he discovered the joy of building things. A tree fort he and a friend worked on was so elaborate, it had an elevator. “We found a battery-operated winch and rigged it up in the tree,” he says. “It survived hurricanes. It was stout.”

Carpentry led Ulrich indirectly to acting. He was studying marine biology at the University of North Carolina when he began building sets for the theater department. A flyer advertising a summer workshop run by the playwright David Mamet caught his eye, and he applied. There was no audition, just a questionnaire with head scratchers like “What do pineapple and Omaha have in common?” (Answer: They’re both card games). Ulrich got in, transferred to NYU, and soon he was mining the emotions he’d been wrestling with all his life in roles with Mamet’s Atlantic Theater Company.

“I had a lot boiling inside of me,” he says. “As Mamet said, ‘If you didn’t want to be an actor, you should have had a good childhood.’”

Ulrich came to Los Angeles in 1995 and soon was getting noticed in a string of films. He played a crazed teen killer in Wes Craven’s franchise-launching Scream (1996) and a gay hustler in James Brooks’s 1997 drama As Good as It Gets.

That same year, when he was 27, Ulrich married the actress Georgina Cates, and they moved to Virginia, settling into a house he designed on 500 acres. Between roles he built furniture in a huge workshop on the property. The couple returned to L.A. in 2002 after having twins, a boy and a girl. They have since divorced but share custody.

As he continued to work in film, Ulrich did a stint on Miracles, a short-lived ABC series that dealt with the supernatural. All the while he was making things out of wood, learning to address his mistakes without starting over. “I have a table saw. I have a joiner,” he says, grabbing a piece of Honduran mahogany from a stack and holding it level. “You flatten this face first. That’s your reference point. Then you lay it down on the planer and create another face that is exactly parallel. Then you have a true piece of wood.”

Recently he was reminded of the price—and the rewards—of error. Just as he was about to attach the sideboard’s legs, he accidentally severed the mortises and tenons that formed the crux of one joint.

“Years ago I would have scrapped it,” he says. But over time, with practice, you learn: “You can find fixes.” In so doing, your needs are met. “Film acting is a director’s medium. TV is a director’s and producer’s medium. And I love both,” says Ulrich. “But with woodworking, I’m in control. That’s something I don’t get in acting.”

Skee Balling With Kristen Bell

By Lesley Bargar Suter — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Photograph by Jill Greenberg/Corbis Outline

Kristen Bell squeezes her five-foot-one-inch frame between two bouncing eight-year-olds in matching yellow day-camp shirts and slips a few tokens into a hot pink Skee-Ball machine. On cue her ammunition—five white balls—lands with a clunk. She palms one in her right hand, gives it a toss, and groans. “These aren’t regulation,” she says. “They’re not made of wood, and they’re too small.”

Bell may look a bit buttoned-down in her pin-striped blouse and stiff black boots, but she is the first to admit she’s a Skee-Ball freak. Once the 30-year-old actress even considered installing a machine in the Hollywood home she shares with her fiancé, actor Dax Shepard (Bell abandoned the notion, she says, because $2,000 seemed too much to pay for an arcade game, even a beloved one). Bell exudes a mix of sass and snark, and to watch her adopt her pitcher’s stance—petite body curved forward, arm cocked tight—is to understand: Bell’s got mad Skee skills.

Since 2004, when she won the lead on Veronica Mars, the cable series about a teenage detective that would provide her breakout role, Bell has often made a living not looking her age. Her new movie, the Touchstone comedy You Again, about a feisty publicist who discovers her brother is marrying the woman who was her archnemesis in high school, is no exception. Bell plays two versions of her character: the present-day grown-up Marni and, in flashbacks, the acne-prone adolescent Marni.

It’s hard not to see the dual role as a metaphor for her career. “I think I’m in the process of graduating,” says Bell. “But it’s still a strange, in-between period.”

Bell grew up in a suburb of Detroit. Her dad, a TV news producer, and her mom, a registered nurse, divorced when she was two. As a kid, Bell likes to brag, she played on an all-boys baseball team for two years. “I was such a tomboy that I was unrecognizable as a girl,” she says. She immersed herself in the theater program at her Catholic high school, and by her sophomore year she was auditioning for film jobs. After graduation, Bell moved to New York to attend the Tisch School of the Arts but left during her final year to star in the Broadway musical version of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. That would be the first of several stints on Broadway that ran the gamut from Reefer Madness to The Crucible.

Bell moved to L.A. in 2002 and spent the next two years auditioning for a string of TV shows, but she landed few parts. After a two-episode arc on Deadwood and a couple of made-for-TV movies, she scored Veronica Mars.

*****

Last Christmas Bell’s fiancé received a photo from the actress’s mom. Taken when she was a girl, it shows Bell standing in the middle of a Chuck E. Cheese’s, her face beatific. She remembers the source of her bliss: Skee-Ball.

Since then Bell’s developed a winning strategy. She shuns the lower-scoring easy holes and focuses her energy on the most difficult ones. She slings balls up the ramp, banking them off the side of the cage and aiming straight for the impossibly small, high-scoring holes in the upper corners.

“I’m a firm believer in always going for the 10,000s,” says Bell, her grin wide as she yanks a long curl of pink tickets from the flashing machine. “Go big or go home, I say.”

Her first opportunity to go big on film was the 2008 comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall. In it she portrays the title character whom Jason Segel, the movie’s writer and star, is trying to forget. Produced by Judd Apatow and featuring several actors from his slacker-guy coterie, Sarah Marshall gave Bell the chance to hone her comedic timing while also playing her age for once: 26.

“It was, like, ‘Oh wow, this is a fantastic feeling to not have to erase the last ten years of my life before I attack a part,’” says Bell. “There’s so much growth that happens in that chunk between 16 and 20.”

No wonder she was eager to reprise the role of Marshall—a shallow, self-absorbed actress—in a cameo in the recent sequel Get Him to the Greek. “I love that she is the not-so-likable girl. I love that she is an antagonist,” says Bell. “But hopefully you don’t walk away hating Sarah Marshall. There’s nothing funny about perfection. What’s funny is people trying to be perfect, but they’re actually not.”

Unlike many of her nightclubbing peers, Bell is a bit of a homebody. She arrives at the interview with her purse stuffed with food magazines, and she’s quick to recognize (and be impressed by) a scar on my forearm. “Oven burn?” she asks, and when I answer yes, she offers her wrist to display her own pale stripe.

When she cooks, she’s just like everyone else—an aspiring chef trying to master a recipe. That just-like-everyone-else feeling can be hard to find and maintain for an actor, says Bell, “because the world puckers up when your butt cheeks walk by—literally. When you have 100 yes-men in your life, it’s difficult to stay who you are.”

One way to combat yes-men is to emulate great women, she says. She adores Cher (“She’s fucking awesome!”), her costar in the movie musical Burlesque, which is due in theaters in November. You Again, which opens September 24, allowed her to rub elbows with three seasoned costars: Sigourney Weaver, Jamie Lee Curtis, and the so-hot-right-now Betty White. “Working with people like that—there’s a moment of intimidation, but it passes as soon as you realize that these women don’t keep working for decades because they have bad personalities.”

Ask her to list her role models and Bell ticks off stalwarts Kathy Bates, Toni Colette, and Tilda Swinton. “Despite my being categorized as an ingenue, I have a strong desire to be a little bit weirder,” says Bell. “I mean, Tilda Swinton? She’s about as weird as it gets. Don’t get me wrong, I feel very lucky because I really enjoy doing comedy. I always want to snow-globe my life a bit—just shake it all up, you know?”

Unfortunately the glass prize case into which Bell peers, clutching her stack of neatly folded tickets (60,000 points’ worth), is fresh out of snow globes. In her price range is a miniature back scratcher, a pair of neon-glowing eyeglasses (“I had a pair and wore them until they broke,” she says), and a bundle of Dora the Explorer and SpongeBob pencils. Dissatisfied, she approaches a little girl who is standing near a giant blinking wheel.

“Hey, would you like my tickets?” Bell asks gently.

“What?”

“Do you want my tickets?” Bell repeats more loudly to compete with the sirens and bells. “I can’t use them.”

“Um, I don’t think I’m supposed to…” the girl mumbles.

Bell smiles reassuringly, places her tickets in the girl’s hand, and walks away. Next stop, the batting cages.

Vegetable Shopping With Jeffrey Donovan

By Amy Wallace — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Photograph by Brian Smith/Corbis Outline

On this sunny morning at the Farmers Market, Jeffrey Donovan isn’t booby-trapping a doorway or defusing a bomb. He isn’t shaping cake frosting into blocks of counterfeit C4 authentic looking enough to fool an arms dealer or making an audio bug from a pair of cheap, rewired cell phones. No, the 42-year-old star of the number one show on cable—the wry spy drama Burn Notice—is simply reciting his recipe for vegetable soup. But since he’s already confided that he believes the best part of Burn Notice is that “nine times out of ten what we’re telling you is counterintuitive,” it’s easy to see his veggie brew as a metaphor.

“Take a lot of parsnips and carrots, summer squash—a medley. Then chop everything up, sauté it with a little bit of butter and olive oil, and boil it,” he says as he surveys rows of organic produce. “What most people do is make that their soup. No.”

This last directive he utters with a finality that fans of his USA Network series, whose fourth season premiered in early June, will recognize. Jaunty in a white formfitting T-shirt, gray suit pants, Puma sneakers, and a gray baseball cap, Donovan looks taut, like you could bounce a quarter off almost any part of his body. Not that you’d dare. His navy blue eyes squint slightly now as if to say: Pay attention. There might be a quiz later.

“What you do,” he continues, politely making way for an elderly shopper as she eases by with her cart, “is you boil it, strain it, then boil it some more. There’s going to be scum. Take the scum off. Then put that into the fridge. Then you come here”—he waves a muscled arm around the stalls at Fairfax Avenue and 3rd Street—“and buy what you’re going to put in the soup: more carrots, some green beans, a little onion, some celery, more squash. You can add a little pasta. Then I add fresh dill right at the end. Because you don’t want to cook dill.”

Anyone who’s watched Burn Notice, which follows a former spy named Michael Westen as he tries to figure out who issued the order (or “burn notice”) that got him expelled from his agency, will see the irony of taking cooking lessons from Donovan. His character, after all, keeps only one thing in his fridge: yogurt.

“You know the whole story about the yogurt?” Donovan asks. Apparently the show’s writers have an ex-intelligence operative on call as a consultant. “They asked him, ‘What do spies eat?’ And he said, ‘Protein in a cup.’ On surveillance you’re sitting in a car for 12 hours. So you pack a cooler. Yogurt has enzymes, cultures, proteins. It’s a perfect little meal.” A beat, then he adds: “I get pretty sick of it.”

*****

Don’t feel bad if you haven’t heard of Burn Notice. It’s plugging along just fine without you, with 7 million viewers a week. Equal parts spy-games cool and slapstick funny, it’s been compared to MacGyver (for the homemade gadgetry), The Avengers (for Westen’s chemistry with his ex-lover Fiona, an Irish terrorist played by Gabrielle Anwar), and The Rockford Files (for Westen’s Mutt-and-Jeff relationship with a drunken FBI informant, played by Bruce Campbell). It also recalls the ’60s British series The Prisoner, starring the late, great Patrick McGoohan.

“I rented it for research,” Donovan says of that show. “I wanted to find these kind of fish-out-of-water flawed characters who cannot escape their own circumstances.” Donovan’s Westen, like McGoohan’s Number Six, is consistently confronting his previous employer in search of answers (Number Six is stuck on an island; Westen is trapped in Miami).

“He doesn’t enforce the law, he solves problems,” Donovan says of Westen. “He’s a rogue operative helping the little guy.”

Donovan relates to little guys. Raised in Amesbury, Massachusetts, he grew up on welfare after his mom left his dad, taking Donovan and his two brothers (he’s in the middle) with her. As a kid, he was a cutup. He discovered acting in high school after an English teacher attempted to have him focus by making him memorize Shylock’s “Hath Not a Jew Eyes?” speech.

An acting major at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, he went on to get his M.F.A. at New York University. Small roles on soaps led to Broadway, where he won praise (The New York Times once noted his “convincingly ragged charm”). But until Donovan moved to Los Angeles, on New Year’s Day 2002, he says he struggled. Nine months later he landed his first pilot, Touching Evil. “That changed the landscape,” he says.

Though that USA series was short-lived, the network liked Donovan enough to find him another vehicle, Burn Notice. A black belt in karate, the actor does most of his own stunts (thus the physique). Despite good reviews and a loyal viewership, the show has endured its share of ribbing, most notably on Saturday Night Live. Last season a skit revolved around “What Is Burn Notice?,” a mock game show on which three contestants, one of them played by Ashton Kutcher, try in vain to describe the program. Finally Kutcher blurts out, “Are they in Miami?”

The show is, in fact, shot on location. Donovan moved recently to Miami, though he still owns a house in Topanga Canyon, whose remoteness he adores. “I loved how hard it was to get there and how hard it was to come down off that mountain,” he says. “There’s an entire side of Topanga that gets no cell service. It’s a black hole. I love that.”

As for what else he loves, Donovan is amiably tight-lipped. “I’ve never spoken about my personal life,” he says. “It’s not that I’m so guarded. My life isn’t that juicy. I’m not in the tabloids. I’m not stumbling out of clubs.” Of paparazzi, he says, “I don’t understand these stars who are going ‘Why won’t they leave me alone?’ Well, because you’re shopping on fucking Robertson and Rodeo! There are other places to shop. Or, ‘I just can’t stand it when the paparazzi take photos of my kids.’ You’re in the Malibu playground where all the paparazzi wait for you to bring your child!”

Now Donovan’s assessing green and purple kale. “It’s really good for you. Chop it up. Squeeze a few lemons into the leaf,” he advises. He’s equally as clear about the best way to manage a career. “You don’t want to be a flash. As fast as you rise in this business is as fast as you fall,” he says as we wander past Pampas Grill, the Brazilian barbecue place he calls “my favorite restaurant.” Like Clint Eastwood, who directed him in the 2008 film Changeling, Donovan is directing now as well as acting (he did the third episode of this season’s Burn Notice). But he’s in no rush. “If it takes me 20 years to rise in this business, then hopefully it’s another 20 years till my demise. That’s a good 40 years. Then I can retire.”

Swinging Metaphors With Bryan Cranston

By Jesse Katz — Sat, 01 May 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Photograph by Kharen Hill/Corbis Outline

If Bryan Cranston were a Dodger—a notion not without appeal to him—he would be the consummate utility player, a grinder, a veteran of countless unsung assignments who finally gets his chance to deliver in the clutch and, just like that, captures the heart of the city. More, say, Mickey Hatcher than Andruw Jones.

Watch him in the cage, a smudged Easton bat wagging in his hands, a fitted blue LA cap snug around the creases of his forehead. His legs spread wide, butt down, elbow high, jaw pumping, he waits for the machine to spit out 60 mph fastballs. Thump. Miss. Clang. Foul. Ping. Linedrive. The plan was for me to meet the Emmy-winning star of AMC’s Breaking Bad—the darkest, most daring series on television—for some Sunday-morning hacks, but even though I have arrived at the BatCade in Burbank a few minutes early, Cranston is already in the box, tokens at the ready, working on his stroke.

“Hey, no fair,” I say.

“What?” he asks, surprised at being discovered.

“Warming up before me,” I answer.

“At our age—at my age…” shrugs Cranston, who, at 54, has been a fixture on TV for three decades, ever since he played an outlaw drag racer in a 1982 episode of CHiPs. He leaves the thought hanging, but when he tugs off a weathered Mizuno batting glove to offer his hand, he explains that meeting at this corrugated shed on Victory Boulevard is no stunt: The BatCade has long been a routine—part exercise, part therapy, part fountain of youth. “This is where I come to escape,” he says. “This is where I come to get away from myself.”

Cranston’s name might not be household material still, but his face—the granite chin, the dimpled cheeks, the road map of furrows and crinkles—has that archetypal I-know-you-from-somewhere quality. Rugged enough for drama and elastic enough for comedy, it is a King of Queens face and a Murder, She Wrote face, a Seinfeld face and a Chicago Hope face, a Matlock and a Baywatch and a Walker, Texas Ranger face. Eventually it became a Malcolm in the Middle face: For 151 episodes Cranston was Hal, the hapless, slightly unhinged sitcom dad, a role that rescued him from the character actor trenches and yet, for all the slapstick brio he brought to it, failed to win him the adulation that was showered on some of his costars.

To the delight of critics and cable habitués, Cranston’s face now belongs to Walter White, the narco-geek antihero of Breaking Bad, which in March began its third season on Sunday nights at 10. A quietly desperate high school chemistry teacher who has been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, White vows to do something ballsy for once in his life, to leave more than medical bills to his pregnant wife and disabled son. With the help of a former student, he transforms himself into Albuquerque’s premier manufacturer of crystal meth. “All of a sudden he’s feeling things he hasn’t felt since he was a teenager,” says Cranston, who imbues the part with equal measures of repulsion and exhilaration. “He’s on this ride, and I don’t know that he wants to get off.”

The metamorphosis is not just existential. Paunchy at the outset of the series (we see him stripped to tighty-whities), with a timid mustache and a pouf of russet hair, Cranston dropped 16 pounds to mimic the ravages of chemotherapy. Then he shaved his head, revealing a pasty scalp knotted with veins. This season he is rocking a goatee as dense and sturdy as a beaver pelt. The effect has been at once haunting and humanizing—a character, a man, mutating before our eyes, a feat that helped earn Cranston the Emmy for Best Actor in a Drama for each of the first two seasons. “When I hear comments like ‘Wait, the guy in Breaking Bad is the same guy from Malcolm in the Middle?’ that’s about the best compliment I could ever receive,” he says, sipping black coffee from a Styrofoam cup at one of the BatCade’s picnic tables. “It’s the part of my life. The character of my career.”

*****

As fantastical as it was that AMC was willing to gamble on a chemically enhanced morality play in the suburban desert, it was even more surprising that the channel put its money on Cranston: This was the actor, after all, who, as Hal, allowed himself to be variously slathered in blue paint, blanketed in yak hair, and swarmed by tens of thousands of randy bees. If Malcolm was all you knew him from, Cranston might appear more goofus than badass. Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, though, had a different image of Cranston, an impression left by a 1998 episode of The X-Files. As co-executive producer on that show, Gilligan was struggling to find a guest star who could portray an anti-Semitic conspiracy nut dying from a demon force in his eardrum while holding Agent Mulder at gunpoint for nearly an hour—and still be someone worth rooting for. That would be Cranston. “Bryan just nailed it,” says Gilligan, who had Cranston in mind for Breaking Bad as he was writing the pilot. When AMC executives balked at his choice, Gilligan dusted off the old X-Files disc. “They flipped,” Gilligan says. “He’s just so fundamentally sympathetic.”

Dressed in faded jeans and a navy blue hoodie, his hair inching back to normal, Cranston at the BatCade looks more like the Little League dad that he is, having coached his teenage daughter, Taylor, from the time she was in T-ball. Born in the San Fernando Valley—and raised on the soothing patter of Vin Scully—Cranston played ball himself as a kid but at Canoga Park High was too distracted by adolescence to get beyond the JV team. Not until his 40th birthday, when his mother-in-law sent him to a Dodger fantasy camp in Vero Beach, did he feel the itch again to compete.

“I’ve always loved the game more than I was good at it,” says Cranston, who joined an adult hardball league upon his return, only to shred his shoulder while throwing from shortstop and endure rotator cuff surgery. He is hoping for a comeback, but with a Hollywood schedule—he was just in London shooting scenes for the Civil War-era sci-fi feature John Carter of Mars—it has been tough finding time to work out the kinks.

“Damn,” says Cranston, back at the plate, waving 33 inches of scandium alloy at air.

“It really sneaks up on you,” I say.

“Ah,” he says, drilling one up the middle.

“There you go,” I say.

“Talk about life lessons,” says Cranston, before buying another 25 pitches with a $3 token. “I remember very clearly my daughter crying because she was once called out at home plate—and she was safe, she really was—and she goes, ‘It’s not fair, it’s not fair,’ and I go, ‘You’re right, it’s not.’ But that’s just the way it goes. It’s not fair. You move on. You play your best. You do your best. And hope that, you know…”

He smiles, aware that baseball is one endless metaphor, and hands me the bat.

High Fives With DJ Lance Rock

By Ed Leibowitz — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Photograph courtesy of Nickelodeon

At the Skirball Cultural Center this brisk Sunday morning, the organizers of Milk+Bookies’ Storytime Celebration have assembled a star-studded lineup: Actors Rainn Wilson and Jennifer Garner, Lost cocreator J.J. Abrams, and Foo Fighters front man Dave Grohl take the stage to encourage parents to donate books to needy children. But the biggest celebrity in attendance (that is, if you ask the under-five set) is a gangly six-foot man in a bright orange tracksuit, faux-fur conical cap, and chunky mid-’80s hip-hop glasses: Lance Robertson, aka DJ Lance Rock, who is the host of Nick Jr.’s smash cable series Yo Gabba Gabba!

“Big fan, man,” says Wilson, delighted. “How are you?” he asks, extending a hand. “Rainn.”

“My name’s Lance,” Robertson says in a clear, ebullient voice that has charmed preschoolers from here to Tel Aviv. A toddler hides behind his mother’s leg, amazed at the sight of his TV pal, who can bring to life a boom box full of creatures with names like Toodee and Muno with the magic words “Yo Gabba Gabba!”

“Hey, what’s your name?” Robertson asks the boy. “Hey, will you give me a high five? You going to leave me hanging?” When the child hesitates, Robertson is reassuring: “It’s OK. I can be shy sometimes, too. I’ll get a high five next time.”

As Yo Gabba Gabba! enters its third season this month, the 45-year-old Robertson has become a late-blooming phenomenon. The kids’ show, created by Southern California rockers Christian Jacobs of the Aquabats and Scott Schultz of Majestic, covers such familiar toddler territory as friendship, nutrition, and bugs. But it also speaks to many adults whose hipster days may not be behind them. Indie rock mainstays Weezer, MGMT, and the Shins have appeared as DJ Lance’s Super Music Friends, after whose performances the host unfailingly observes, “Listening and dancing to music is awesome!” Guest stars have included Jack Black and Elijah Wood, and upcoming episodes feature potty-mouthed comedian Sarah Silverman (who drops in on Gabbaland as a mime instructor) and irascible celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain (who makes a house call as a kindly doctor). Last Halloween paparazzi snapped photos of Brad Pitt trick-or-treating with his kids in a DJ Lance getup. “That was really cool,” Robertson says. “To his kids he’s just a parent.”

The son of a career army sergeant, Robertson was raised in St. Louis and grew up listening to his father’s blues albums and his mother’s Miles Davis and Fifth Dimension LPs. At 29 he came to L.A. to seek a broader audience for his own music (he plays keyboards and writes songs). He DJ’ed around town and eventually landed a job as a clerk at Amoeba Music. With his band, the Ray Makers, he cut a couple of CDs. “We were very electronic,” he says. “Kind of melodic but a little more rhythmic and a little more funky, too—and a little psychedelic. There were all these different textures. We thought we would have a bigger forum, but unfortunately some people weren’t so open-minded.”

The Ray Makers played gigs with Majestic, and Schultz was struck by Robertson’s onstage charisma. The next year, when Schultz and Jacobs began developing a kids’ TV program with indie sensibilities—an antidote to the banal fare they were forced to watch with their own young children—they found themselves in need of a host. Schultz knew just the guy and took Jacobs on a fact-finding mission to Amoeba. One glimpse of the clerk with the outsize Afro and striped pants and Jacobs was sold. Originally the creators had in mind a Willy Wonka waistcoat for the host, but Robertson advocated for an orange tracksuit with Logan’s Run-meets-Tron overtones—a garment that’s on its way to achieving the iconic status of Captain Kangaroo’s red blazer or Mr. Rogers’s cardigan.

*****

The doors of the Skirball’s greenroom swing open into the reading area, and Robertson is greeted with thunderous cheers and squeals. The host grins at a room full of fans perched on blue beanbag chairs. He can’t see the parents and kids that well—Robertson is nearsighted, and his glasses lack lenses lest they reflect the television lights—but he can clearly feel the love. “Hello, friends,” he calls out. “You know what to say. Can you say it with me? Yoooo Gaaaabba Gaaaabba!”

Robertson is pleased that for now his core audience doesn’t regard him as a celebrity. “When I grew up thinking about Captain Kangaroo,” he says, “I didn’t think he was famous. I thought, ‘Oh, it’s Captain Kangaroo, and he’s talking to me.’” DJ Lance has never consented to an interview before and probably won’t be doing too many in the future. He doesn’t want to be considered larger than the show. “Mr. Rogers wasn’t out there doing interviews,” he says, “and you can see the legacy he has.”

Back in the greenroom Robertson meets Grohl and his family. He gives the Foo Fighter’s daughter Violet a high five, his long, delicate hands moving so fluidly, they could have been drawn by animators. He promises to bring along a Yo Gabba Gabba! gift for her when he sees her dad at the Coachella music festival, where DJ Lance will be performing in character as part of a three-day lineup that includes Jay-Z, Phoenix, the Specials, and Thom Yorke of Radiohead. Robertson’s calendar is packed: A Yo Gabba Gabba! live act is touring the United States and Canada. At the Silent Movie Theatre on Fairfax, Robertson and the Yo Gabba Gabba! animation producer will be curating a month of rare children’s television that’s heavy on Sid and Marty Krofft, who inspired the show’s look. Also in the works is the first Yo Gabba Gabba! feature film, which Up in the Air director Jason Reitman is developing with the show’s creators.

Before Robertson leaves, Superbad star Jonah Hill approaches, wearing two-day-old stubble and a blue Lacoste cardigan. His eyes are glinting.

“I watch your show with my nephew all the time,” Hill blurts out.

“Hey,” Robertson says with a smile. “That’s awesome!”

Robertson agrees to a picture. Hill hands his iPhone to his companion, then runs his fingers through his hair and sidles up to DJ Lance. “I’m going to be so cool, like, in an hour,” Hill says. “I swear to God!”

Belvedere With Chelsea Handler

By Sara Wilson — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Photograph by Williams + Hirakawa/Icon International

You might think that someone whose stand-up routine and nightly talk show are peppered with jokes about happy hours and margarita mixes would be in heaven at Nic’s martini bar in Beverly Hills. You might think that a comedian who called her second book Are You There,Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea would be thrilled by the Vodbox—the bar’s sleek, glass-walled tasting room, which is cooled to a nippy 28 degrees and crammed with enough distilled liquor to keep the Kremlin afloat. But if you imagined, as we did, that Chelsea Handler’s face would light up at the chance to try countless artisanal, quadruple diamond-filtered, and exotic fruit-infused vodkas, you’d be mistaken.

“Do you guys have Belvedere?” Handler asks. She sounds impatient and, in the frigid air, huskier than usual. Though Handler has the sunny, toned looks of a Texas cheerleader, her affect—perpetual ennui—can make her seem as chilly as the Vodbox. Belvedere, which is sponsoring the book tour for Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang, her third work of nonfiction, due out March 9, is (coincidentally) her drink of choice these days. She has gamely wrapped her five-foot-six-inch frame in a faux-leopard coat provided by the establishment. Handler, who recently posed for Playboy, typically opts for much less coverage than this getup, which obscures her formfitting sleeveless polka-dot top and boot-cut denims. In fact, all you can see are her blond mane, blue eyes, and flip-flop-clad feet, toenails painted the shade of Barbie’s Corvette. “I usually just stick with Belvedere,” she says, repeating her order. An attendant gives her a pour, and when the clear liquid disappears into her mouth, she bobs her head. “That’s the best one,” she says, her smile suddenly appearing too big for her face. “See?”

*****

To hear her tell it, Chelsea Handler has always known precisely what she’s wanted. At 35, it would seem that she’s gotten it. On TV, in her books, and in her live routines, Handler combines acid-laced observations about life’s annoyances (redheads, Heidi Montag) with unabashed vulgarity (she calls vaginas “pikachus” and devotes an entire chapter in her latest book to her childhood obsession with masturbation). Part smart aleck, part sexpot, Handler exploits the events of her life for comic effect, from lying her way through elementary school to sleeping her way through Los Angeles. Her first two books were best-sellers. Her talk show, Chelsea Lately, which airs weeknights at 11 on E!, has garnered some of the network’s highest ratings. She has toured the world performing to sold-out crowds.

“I really thought I was funny for a long time, and nobody else did,” says Handler, tucking a stray golden lock behind her ear. “There’s no guarantee people will actually respond to you. So to have that makes me really grateful.” But she’s aware that success comes at a price. As someone who has positioned herself as a scrappy everywoman—acerbic but approachable, a kind of hotter, funnier version of ourselves—she knows being on top threatens to detract from her appeal.

Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang reads like a dissertation on the travails of being nouveau riche. She riffs about her personal assistants and a helicopter ride to a weekend getaway in Laguna Beach with E! Network CEO and boyfriend Ted Harbert (the pair has since broken up). Handler says she considered adding a disclaimer to the book to reassure fans that, despite her cushier lifestyle, she’s still the same. “It’s like, ‘Who the fuck gets a helicopter?’” she says, voicing the likely reaction of some readers. “But,” she says, pausing for a beat, “I do."

At the Vodbox a barman has prevailed upon Handler to try some vodkas other than Belvedere, and she’s obliging—sort of. “Ew, no!” says Handler, furrowing her brow after taking a sip of Roberto Cavalli. “That reminds me of, what’s that shot you do when you’re, like, in college?”

Several more vodkas fare just as poorly. With Jean-Marc XO, her angular features harden. “I keep getting a black licorice taste.” The Jewel of Russia makes her squint. “I don’t like Russians,” she deadpans.

Dissatisfaction has long been Handler’s go-to position. As the youngest of six growing up in Livingston, New Jersey, she regularly demanded that her middle-class parents provide the things that other kids enjoyed in the well-to-do suburb where she lived—a Cabbage Patch doll or, say, a Mercedes-Benz. The first time she boarded an airplane, Handler asked her mother, “Who are these people in the front, and why are we passing them?” When her mother explained, “We don’t fly first-class, Chelsea,” the young Handler didn’t hesitate. “I was like, ‘Uh, speak for yourself.’”

Handler describes her Mormon mom and Jewish dad as loving but eternally absentminded—certainly not as together as she was. “I was always quizzing my parents: ‘Do you know where the school is? Do we have emergency numbers? You guys need to, like, own up.’” She knew from a young age that she wanted out. “I wasn’t gonna stay in New Jersey with those lunatics,” she says, feigning alarm. “I had to go and get the life that I needed.” At 19, she moved to L.A. and waited tables but was fired from every restaurant job. She was incapable of being deferential to customers. “When people didn’t have manners, I would just call them on it.” Auditions were equally frustrating. “You’re sitting in a room with 15 girls that look like you. How are you supposed to separate yourself if you can’t have a conversation and show who you are?” Then it hit her: What if she used her ability to sound off to differentiate herself from the pack? She gave up on acting and decided to try stand-up. “I had things I wanted to say.”

Handler has ditched the faux-fur jacket and settled into a more temperate banquette in the restaurant, a glass of Belvedere and soda on ice in her hand. Recounting that period of her life, she tells of how she made a tape of herself performing stand-up in her living room—in her waitress outfit. She sent it to the Hollywood Improv, where Eddie Murphy, Ellen DeGeneres, and Adam Sandler got their start, and the club’s manager gave her a chance—with a warning: “You’re really green, and you don’t know what you’re doing.” Fueled by an ego that she now acknowledges far exceeded her talents at the time, she thought success was imminent. “I was like, ‘I’m probably gonna get a [TV] show later this week.’” It took a little longer.

In 2002, she was cast in the Oxygen Network series Girls Behaving Badly (a crass all-female version of Candid Camera), and that same year scored her first book deal for My Horizontal Life. Not long after, Jay Leno made Handler a correspondent on The Tonight Show. A Comedy Central special followed, which generated interest from the E! Network. Today her show combines archly comic roundtable takedowns of celebrities in the news with sketches and traditional interviews. It also features Handler’s mustachioed sidekick, Chuy Bravo, whom she calls her “nugget” (yes, he’s a little person).

A waiter delivers oysters and a salmon crostini plate, and Handler digs in as she contemplates her career trajectory. “It was a long, long haul,” she says, then corrects herself. “I mean it is a long haul.” She shifts in her seat, her eyes dart across the room, and she lets out a laugh. “Hopefully this isn’t, like, my apex!”

Breakfast With Bill Paxton

By Mary Melton — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Photograph by Stuart Pettican

In a thunderstorm quaint Ojai radiates even more warmth than when the sun is shining. The actor Bill Paxton lives in the foothills that ring this valley community about an hour and a half north of Los Angeles. As the rain pours down outside the window, he prepares to fix his son an egg sandwich. Slender, with his hair closely cropped, Paxton pads around the kitchen in rag socks, a gray V-neck sweater, and Levi’s 501s. He scans the refrigerator until his blue eyes settle on the butter. More than two decades ago Paxton and his wife, Louise, bought this rustic home surrounded by a couple of acres of tangerine and avocado orchards. It provides them with a veneer of normalcy, given that he’s a movie and TV star who’s had to leave town every now and then to play major roles in Titanic and Twister and Apollo 13 and that little cable show Big Love. “To be honest with you, I keep a very low profile,” says Paxton, slicing off a pat of butter. “I’m not heavily scrutinized, I’m not dating a starlet, I’m left alone pretty much.”

All modesty aside, it’s a double life he’s leading, and in this regard he has a great deal in common with his character on HBO’s hit polygamy melodrama. Paxton stars as Bill Henrickson, a home-store retailer and aspiring casino mogul who has moved his three wives and eight children to a quiet suburb in hopes of blending in. With a cast that includes Jeanne Tripplehorn, Chloë Sevigny, and Ginnifer Goodwin (as his wives) and veterans Bruce Dern, Ellen Burstyn, Mary Kay Place, and Harry Dean Stanton, Big Love is arguably the best-acted hour on TV.

Paxton, who is 54, has driven home on this Saturday morning after spending the week filming in Santa Clarita. He has only a few more episodes left to shoot for Big Love’s fourth season, which began January 10. “We’re really burnt out,” he says of the cast. In this season’s story line, “there’s been so much Sturm und Drang. I think this guy would go home one night and blow his brains out.” He pantomimes the action, then pauses to reconsider. “That wouldn’t be too good in the afterlife, though,” he says as he lets out a twangy chuckle. There’s an everyman quality to Paxton. Whether he’s portraying a polygamist or a killer, you feel he could be your pal. “In retrospect, it might have been hard to break another actor into that role,” he says of his character on Big Love, “but I have always been the underdog. People root for me. Like in A Simple Plan…”

“I love that movie,” says his 15-year-old son James, sweet and gawky in a hoodie and braces. He’s sitting at the kitchen table waiting for the egg sandwich.

“This guy has murdered people,” Paxton continues as he drops the butter into the frying pan, swirls it around, and cracks an egg. “I blow this woman halfway across the room and then deny it, yet people worry about me, they sympathize with me. It’s crazy.”

James’s 12-year-old sister, Lydia, darts in and out of the kitchen as her dad cooks. She’s checking out an old-school Disney flick that’s airing in the next room.

So how does Paxton put himself in the mind-set of a polygamist? “I kind of use my own life,” he says. Barb, wife No. 1 on Big Love (played by Tripplehorn), reminds him of Louise. “We’ve been through it all,” he says. His real-life spouse is napping down the hall. “She knew me when I was struggling. She was a student. We met on a bus in London. I’ve seen her give birth. I was with her when her father died. Then we mixed our blood watching these two kids grow up.” When he’s doing a scene with his fictional teenage son, Ben, “It’s like I’m with James,” he says. As for Bill Henrickson’s affects—the high collars, the double-knotted Windsor tie, even the haircut—he says they’re homages to his own dad, circa 1963. Paxton had to dig deeper to access the religious fervor of his character. “I was raised Roman Catholic, because my mother was Catholic,” he says. “My father referred to himself as a pagan. My mom would drag us to church while my dad would be on a chaise longue naked, reading the latest Ian Fleming novel.”

Paxton grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, where his father ran the family’s lumber company and immersed Bill and his three siblings in the arts, schlepping them to movies and museums and turning Bill into an art collector like himself. “I said to him when I was 18 that I wanted to go to Hollywood,” Paxton recalls, “and he said, ‘Oof, I should have exposed you to more business.’” He got his start working in the art department on Roger Corman movie sets. Paxton met a young James Cameron and was a thug in 1984’s The Terminator, winning immortality as the first human being maimed by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s laconic android. During the next few years he met similarly grisly ends in Aliens and Predator 2. His breakout comedic role came in 1985, as the wacko brother in John Hughes’s Weird Science, while his 1992 performance as a small-town police chief in Carl Franklin’s brilliant noir One False Move earned him dramatic bona fides. A slew of solid roles (he’s made few missteps) followed until his first TV job, on Big Love.

Paxton has slipped the fried egg between two pieces of toast and persuaded James to wash down the meal with orange juice rather than soda pop. Unlike his father, Paxton isn’t hoping his children will follow his lead. “Basically actors are high-paid itinerant workers,” he says in a low whisper as James takes his plate to the table. When Paxton directed the golf film The Greatest Game Ever Played, James had a cameo but would hand notes to his dad telling him how nervous he was. Lydia is more flamboyant and dramatic, like Paxton’s mom, he says, but he doesn’t plan to steer her into the business.

Even if Paxton’s children catch the acting bug, the worsening climate for mass entertainment—fewer projects green-lighted, fewer made—might make it hard to have the kind of career he’s enjoyed. “I dunno where the business will be when they’re older,” says Paxton, his left brow cocked. “I ran into Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn—I did Tombstone with Kurt—and he said, ‘You know, Paxton, it’s the last days of disco. Me and Goldie are getting out.’ Meaning the system that we all knew coming up, that we were comfortable with, going from film to film, it’s gone.”

Lydia returns to the kitchen. “Can’t I make you an egg sandwich or something?” her dad asks. She gives in. He reaches for the butter and starts the routine all over again.

Breakfast in Silver Lake with Bryce Dallas Howard

By Ed Leibowitz — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 08:00:00 GMT

She has polished off her bowl of polenta with the candied pecans, brown sugar, and whipped mascarpone topping. The two jumbo-size croissants have likewise surrendered to an appetite as hearty as a French-Canadian lumberjack’s. Actress Bryce Dallas Howard has finished breakfast, but Silver Lake’s LaMill restaurant offers other comforts. The baroque yet rustic decor bears the stamp of Rubbish Interiors, a design store across the street that is owned by friends of hers. The café music mix was put together by her best friend from high school, who is also godmother to her two-year-old son, Theo, and resides at the house Howard shares with her husband, actor Seth Gabel. Little wonder then that Howard has admitted LaMill into her carefully circumscribed universe.

This morning Howard has dressed for a Nantucket regatta circa 1952—conservative blue-and-white-striped blouse, crisp blue jeans neither distressed nor designer faded, and tan slippers with tiny bows. Her red hair is caught in a neat ponytail. “There’s a vibe I send to the paparazzi,” says Howard, laughing over a half-finished cup of hot cocoa. “It says, ‘Trust me, I’m not worth your time. I really only leave the house to go to the grocery store or LaMill.’ ”

The eldest daughter of actor-director Ron Howard, she has starred in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village and Lady in the Water, done Shakespeare with Kenneth Branagh, and portrayed the new girlfriend of Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parker in SpiderMan 3 as well as the pregnant wife of Christian Bale’s John Connor in Terminator Salvation. With only five years in film she has established herself as the kind of protean actress who doesn’t so much inhabit roles as haunt them. This month the 28-year-old Howard takes the lead in The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, the first film in 20 years to be shot from a Tennessee Williams screenplay. Come summer she’ll play Victoria, the vampire who torments Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart in Eclipse, part three of the blockbuster Twilight saga. She might seem casual about her ability to maintain tabloid irrelevance in the face of such prominence, but it is a marvel of media engineering.

Howard had arrived the night before from Portland, where she’s a first-time producer on an untitled coming-of-age story written by Jason Lew, a college friend. Gus Van Sant, nominated for an Oscar last year for Milk, is directing. Although others showed interest, Howard and Lew went with Imagine Entertainment, which means that Ron Howard and Brian Grazer are coproducers. She had never worked alongside her father and is finding plenty to like about the experience. “It’s making me honestly yearn for more,” she says. “I just have so much respect for him, and he’s my mentor.” She has made inroads as a screenwriter and is in talks with a production company about a script she cowrote, The Originals, which she describes as The Big Chill meets The Breakfast Club.

Although her dad starred in Happy Days, and Henry Winkler is her godfather, Howard grew up less familiar with Richie Cunningham and the Fonz than most kids her age. “Our access to the TV was really restricted—highly restricted,” she says. “I never watched Happy Days, ever.” She didn’t sit through a full episode until after her Tonight Show debut at 23. Jay Leno gave her a DVD collection of the series. “He was like, ‘What’s your problem? You’ve got to see it,’ ” Howard says. “So I went home and watched it, and it was great.”

Howard traveled to locations when her father directed such films as Parenthood and Backdraft. Otherwise she grew up insulated from Hollywood. She did spend her first four years in L.A., but after a stranger handed her a script in day care, her childhood days in the motion picture capital were numbered. “My parents were just like ‘OK, we’re out of here.’ ” The Howards escaped to a Victorian home on a farm near Greenwich, Connecticut, where they brought up their four kids.

After high school Howard enrolled in New York University’s writing and drama program but dropped out to take stage parts. Shyamalan saw her in Shakespeare’s As You Like It and arranged a lunch. “Because I know he has children, I thought he was going to ask me what a lot of people ask—‘How did your parents raise you in the business?’ ” she says. Instead he offered her the lead in The Village.

She could relate to the film’s idyllic small town, its young people sealed off by their parents from the chaos of present-day America. “I feel like I was raised in a very protected environment,” she says. “And the thing that is amazing to me is that I still feel like I’m in that protected environment.”

There was no dating or partying when Howard came back to Hollywood in 2003. She was settled romantically, having met Gabel when she was 19. Her writing partner, Dane Charbeneau, is not only her husband’s best friend but recently married her sister Jocelyn. Her son Theo’s nanny is her sister Paige’s best friend from boarding school. “We’re all sticking together, in practically a very incestuous way,” Howard says, “and we’re creating our version of what life can be together.”

Those wanting to see Howard unhinged will have to make do with Teardrop Diamond. She stars as Fisher Willow, a volatile plantation heiress, and the opening scene has her swaying around a ballroom in a flapper dress, taking belts from the whiskey bottle that is her dance partner. It’s a remarkable performance, considering that she has never allowed herself a sip of alcohol and has no sense of what even a mild buzz might feel like. Alcoholism runs in her family; what others might consider an occasional glass of wine she regards as a slippery slope. “Seeing wonderful people say things that you know would embarrass them or do things that aren’t really what they want to do, and then you get sick afterward—is that pleasant, folks?” she asks. “I don’t have any desire to lose control.”

Howard was with Christian Bale when he suffered a meltdown on the set of Terminator Salvation; the four-minute recording of the rant would become the toast of talk radio and the Internet. In the coffee-scented serenity of LaMill, she offers some context about the scene they had been playing. “His character was losing his mind for the first time. His mother had lost her mind, and a theme throughout the movie is ‘Am I going crazy?’ It was intense,” she says. “I was screaming at him, and he was screaming at me, and then the screaming got misdirected.”

Ron Howard was a young star who not only avoided becoming a train wreck in later years but evolved artistically because he inoculated himself against the usual temptations that plague those loved by millions. That his daughter, now a major actress in her own right, has achieved this same immunity is arguably more fascinating than a snapshot of Britney Spears on the town with no underwear or a YouTube clip of Lindsay Lohan fleeing her crashed Mercedes. But who wants to blog about the well adjusted?

When Eclipse comes out, let the paparazzi elbow one another black and blue as they chase its young stars Pattinson and Stewart. The film’s villainess delights in the certainty that anything she says or does away from a movie set, now or in the future, would only bore tabloid readers and Web gossips to tears. “I guarantee you nothing’s going to change,” says Howard, a flush filling her cheeks, “because I have the least interesting life!”

Bryce Dallas Howard as Fisher and Chris Evans as Jimmy in Tennessee Williams’ THE LOSS OF A TEARDROP DIAMOND courtesy of Paladin

Emailing Viggo Mortensen

By Amy Wallace — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 08:00:00 GMT

Photograph by Rudy Waks/Corbis Outline

He has been nominated for an Oscar (for the 2007 mystery Eastern Promises) and was declared a bona fide sex symbol (after his turn in the 2005 crime drama A History of Violence). He’s starred in three of the biggest-grossing movies of all time (The Lord of the Rings trilogy in 2001, 2002, and 2003). But Viggo Mortensen has always been motivated more by collaboration than celebrity. His new film, The Road, is an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about survival in a postapocalyptic world of cannibalism and other unimaginable horrors. As “The Man,” Mortensen navigates this devastated landscape with his son (played by 11-year-old newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee). We exchanged e-mails with the actor, poet, publisher (of the L.A.-based Perceval Press), and polyglot (he speaks Danish and Spanish, among other languages) on the subjects of hope, endurance, and human nature.

Hi Viggo,
The Road is true to McCarthy’s novel in that the nature of the cataclysmic event that has ruined the planet is never explained. As you constructed your character of “The Man,” though, you must have filled in that blank for yourself. Was it a comet, or did humankind bring the end of the world upon itself?

It does not really matter, because the character cannot do anything about it. I think that numerous things happened—fires, floods, drought, earthquakes (which the book and movie refer to) as well as fighting that led to the destruction of the power grids. Once things went wrong, there was no more Internet, phone, TV, radio, so it was not possible to know what really had happened and was continuing to happen all over the place. As when we have had blackouts, big snowstorms, fires, floods like those following Hurricane Katrina, or even as a reaction to events like those of 11 September, 2001, in New York and Washington, D.C., many people tend to isolate. General ignorance and wild, paranoid speculation tend to take over.

You’ve had a lot of physically demanding roles, from sword fighting in the LOTR trilogy to horseback riding in Hidalgo to wrestling naked in Eastern Promises. But The Road seems to be in a class by itself. How much weight did you lose to play a man starving to death?

I am not exactly sure. Enough to be credible as the character. Maybe 30 pounds or so. It was a basic requirement of the story that I not look well fed, so I simply ate less. That was not the hardest part, though. Nor was the hardest part the physical endurance test Kodi and I took part in by working in the cold, wet environments. The hardest part for both of us was the emotional journey, being exposed on the inside.

How did you prepare yourself emotionally to imagine the end of the world?

I’ve always thought that the end of the world, the end of me, of anything, can happen at any time, just as the sun always goes down at some point each day. It is natural, and not something to fear so much as be aware of and, when possible and appropriate, struggle against.

This may sound odd, but The Road had unexpected echoes of WALL-E, last year’s animated movie about an Earth used up and left behind by humans. Though WALL-E was clearly aimed at a different audience, both movies highlight the tenacity of love and the importance of even small gestures of kindness. Did you see WALL-E?

Yes, I did. I get your point. Had not thought of that. Thanks!

Were there any other movies you thought about as you prepared for this role?

For inspiration with regard to my understanding of Kodi’s character and regarding the environment, I looked at some of Tarkovsky’s work—Ivan’s Childhood and Stalker, for example. I also had another look at Sokurov’s Mother and Son and Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc for the emotional truth of the performances and cinematography. I listened to certain music, looked at photographs, read certain kinds of poems. I also spoke with people who live in the street in different cities, when they were willing to speak with me.

Do you see The Road as a cautionary tale? As in: Here’s a glimpse of the price we could pay for ignoring global warming/nuclear proliferation/fill in the blank?

Let’s not look past the fact that in this country and around the world many places already look that way, owing to natural as well as human-generated destruction of the environment, and many people are living lives of desperation, barely surviving and understandably falling prey to their worst impulses out of fear and hopelessness. Many places and many people are ALREADY THERE. By the end of the story the characters come to understand, as we potentially do, the truth of what is written in the Talmud—words to which can be found in most any spiritual teaching text: “The highest wisdom is kindness.”

Did inhabiting this bleak world change your perspective on life?

Just as “The Boy” reminds “The Man” to follow the lessons he himself has tried to impart with regard to kindness, I was reminded many times in the telling of this story that this world and all of the life in it are precious. As my character says, “If I were God, I would have made the world just so.” In other words, even if I could, I would not trade this world or this life for any other.

Some people have described The Road as a horror movie. How do you react to that?

It does not really make sense to me. I do not think it will be in that section at the video store.

You agreed to do The Road at a time when you were worn out and ready for a break. Was there any way in which being exhausted was an advantage going into this extreme role? Did it make rawness more accessible?

Yes. Just as being a father gave me an initial way in, a shortcut if you will, to understanding the story and my character, being a bit tired to begin with gave me a start on that aspect of the role.

How much did you draw on your relationship with your own son, Henry, for inspiration?

He was always there with me in some way. I did not have to think about it. The wisdom of “The Boy,” and of Kodi, the instinct for kindness, are very present and always have been in my son.

You’ve said that you learned a lot about acting from Smit-McPhee. In the film’s production notes you’re quoted as saying, “I have never had a better acting partner, ever.” What is it about Smit-McPhee that leaves Al Pacino, Ed Harris, and Ian McKellen in the dust?

I did not say he was better than them, but rather that none of them was better than Kodi. He was every bit as alive to the potential of any scene and as technically equipped to make the most of every moment as Robert Duvall was in his fine work as “Ely” [also in The Road]. Kodi is an unusually mature and inventive actor and had moments of brilliance each and every day that most fine actors can only dream of having once in a great while. There is a purity, a degree of focus in his work, that allows his natural intelligence and goodness to make themselves evident.

More than once during the film, Smit-McPhee’s character asks you, “Are we the good guys?” The idea that there is a line that good people will not cross is something your character holds dear. Are you a Rousseau man (man is basically good) or do you side with Hobbes (man is naturally wicked)?

I am an optimist.

A while back you were quoted as saying that you were listening to a lot of conservative talk radio. How can monitoring that make you anything but a pessimist?

I sometimes feel sorry for them and their families, and for the people who might be swayed to choose contempt over compassion by the hateful and often deliberately misleading words of these reactionary pontificators. Sometimes I am upset over the influence their hate speech seems to have. However, as I say, I am an optimist and believe that historical facts and genuine, selfless courtesy eventually rise to the surface. I continue to listen to these poisonous blowhards now and then in order to be informed, to “know thine enemy,” as they say, know the potential enemy that lurks in myself, the enemy of kindness. It’s never over until it is over, and we can always do something good.

A theme of the film is the gift—and the burden—of memory. Your character’s flashbacks to a happier time of beauty and calm seem to both sustain and torture him. In one of those flashbacks, your wife, played by Charlize Theron, argues that mere survival isn’t enough for her. Living in utter fear and deprivation, she seems to feel, is not really living. Your character doesn’t agree. Do you?

I don’t, but I understand her point. By the way, I think that the movie makes slightly clearer than the book does that her point of view is the most logical, rational one in that world apparently devoid of hope. Charlize did a very good job showing us the sincerity and truth of her character’s position. When her character essentially asks mine how and why I plan to survive in a toxic environment populated by murderous rapists and cannibals, my character does not really have an answer. It is his instinct to survive and protect his son that drives him. While he may not know exactly how he or his son can manage to survive, he definitely knows why it is worth trying. The simplest way to say it, “sappy” as it sounds, is that he understands, as does his son, that the impulse to be loving is reason enough to live on.

Have you written any poetry lately? Anything you’d like to share?

Quite a bit, but all in Spanish. I am still fine-tuning them, and the translations I am making into English of them, so maybe I will wait a little longer to offer them.

How do you say “apocalypse” in Danish?

From the Bible, it is “åbenbaring,” but the more-or-less scientific term is “apokalypse.”

Tea Time with Carla Gugino

By Mike Kessler — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 08:00:00 GMT

Photograph by Don Flood/Corbis Outline

Which Carla Gugino will I get—the G-rated movie mom or the intimidatingly sexy woman I saw in a YouTube clip called “Carla Gugino in Her Underwear”? This is the question that hovers as I wait for Gugino to open the gate to her Hollywood Hills home, a two-story hacienda that’s concealed by a long stucco wall and a small forest of bamboo and bougainvillea. It’s a hot afternoon, with roofless tourist vans chugging up the road, birds chirping, and the din of traffic from below. I hear Gugino walk across her yard, shush a barking dog, and wiggle the latch on the turquoise gate before opening it. “Thanks for making yourself available on such short notice,” she says, stealing my line.

Dressed in a light green V-neck tee and white linen pants, this is definitely the more family-friendly Gugino who’s starred in Spy Kids and Race to Witch Mountain. Standing five feet seven inches in beaded sandals, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, she leads me and her Yorkie-poodle mix, Luna, into the kitchen, opens a Tupperware container of Moroccan mint tea, and begins preparing two glass mugs. “It’s from Urth Caffé,” she says. “It’s traveled the world with me.”

Even if you don’t know Gugino by name, you recognize her face—the curvy mouth, the ski ramp nose—as soon as you see it. She was a lesbian parole officer in Sin City, an ex-cop in Righteous Kill, with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, and a brainy academic opposite Ben Stiller in Night at the Museum. She may be best known as Amanda Daniels, the agent who’s too much woman for Vincent Chase in HBO’s Entourage.

Gugino appears as Elektra Luxx, a porn star on the cusp of an epiphany, in Women in Trouble, which comes out this month. The film is a dark comedy—and the first in a trilogy—written and directed by Sebastian Gutierrez, who is Gugino’s longtime partner. Gugino stars alongside nine other women whose lives cross paths during one particularly hectic day in L.A. Elektra has to decide how to handle an unexpected pregnancy and spends most of her time onscreen trapped in an elevator, stripped down to her undergarments with a perfect stranger. “The anatomically correct Elektra Luxx Vagina Deluxe retails for 89 bucks and comes in three different colors,” she tells her elevator mate, as a way to convey her popularity in the adult film business. “It is the number-one-selling celebrity vagina on the market.” Race to Witch Mountain this is not.

Rather than hang around some dodgy porn studio in the Valley, Gugino prepared for the role by watching documentaries and sampling “classy porn that was shot on film” in the ’70s. “I don’t find porn very sexy, and I find the porn world so depressing,” she says. “Once I got some insight into the mechanics of the making of porn, I was ready to play Elektra.”

Gutierrez, who wrote Snakes on a Plane, created the role of Elektra Luxx with Gugino in mind. But the two agreed that the film would be ill served by nudity or gratuitous skin-flick realism. “You can’t do that with a movie if you want to keep a certain level of lightness,” she says. The same might be said of their relationship—something Gugino learned when she was filming a steamy scene with Simon Baker in Judas Kiss. Gutierrez was directing, and almost as soon as the camera started rolling, “he yelled, ‘Cut, cut, cut!’” says Gugino. “I was like, ‘But we didn’t finish our lines.’ And Sebastian was like, ‘Yeah, yeah—we’ll make the scene work.’ So now we have a running joke: In any of the things we work on together, I’m either a lesbian or I don’t have sex onscreen.”

We’ve taken a seat at a wrought-iron table in the lush backyard. She and Gutierrez have lived here for the last six years. The place was built in 1927 by the Chandlers, the powerful family who founded the Los Angeles Times and helped shape the city. The house later served as the consulate for a Western European democracy. (Fearing attention from those tourist vans, Gugino asked us not to reveal too much.) “Alfred Hitchcock used to come to parties here,” she says. “We’ve always wanted to host a film noir party, with a fake corpse facedown at the bottom of the pool and everything. It’s such a hidden little piece of L.A. history.”

Gugino was born in Sarasota, Florida, one of three children of an orthodontist father and a homemaker mother. In 1988, at the age of 16, she moved into the L.A. home of her uncle and aunt (Carol Merrill, who was a model on Let’s Make a Deal) and got permission from the courts to work on set without a guardian, usually a requirement for child actors. New in town, with a last name that no one could pronounce (it’s Goo-jeen-o), she considered adopting her mother’s maiden name, Burgess, but “my Italian father would have died if I did that,” she says. The name didn’t deter casting directors, who picked her for TV roles in ALF, Who’s the Boss?, and Falcon Crest, to name a few. In 1993, she landed a starring movie role opposite Pauly Shore in Son in Law. She’s been busy in Hollywood ever since, landing 60-plus roles on TV and in movies, from Spin City and Chicago Hope to her own short-lived drama, Karen Sisco.

Of the many characters she’s portrayed, one of her favorites is Ari Gold’s nemesis in Entourage. “The show’s producers wanted someone smart and complex, not a one-note bitchy thing,” she says. “They wanted someone who is strong and sexy and doesn’t make apologies for herself. As a woman, you rarely get direction like that. Usually you’re asked to soften up or to be cold and take on the worst characteristics of men.” Gugino drew from a few female agents she knows, but, she says, “the role was written well enough that there wasn’t anything I wanted to change. It was spot-on.”

She looks at her phone and realizes she’s late for another meeting. Tomorrow Gugino will be on a plane to Vancouver, where she’s filming her latest project, Sucker Punch, a film by 300 director Zack Snyder. She stars as a psychiatrist in the 1960s—as well as a “Polish dominatrix-slash-choreographer-slash-madam. There’s singing and dancing, too,” she says, admitting that she felt somewhat “schizophrenic” researching the part. But, as Gugino says, in her line of work “you have to mix it up. I want to be able to do this for the rest of my life. I’m aware that there isn’t a big role that would change my career. And that’s fine. As long as it affords me a shot at the best parts.”