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“Here’s the good news and the bad news. I’m
42,” says Anthony LaPaglia. The Australian-born actor, flipping an omelet
slice onto a piece of toast at a Brentwood coffee shop, is trying to explain
the basis for his startling performance in “Lantana,” which opens
in Los Angeles on Friday. “The bad news is, it’s not good to get
old in this business. But the good part is that, by the age of 42 you’ve
experienced enough life, enough failure, enough loss and frustration to understand
that guy.”
That “guy” is
Leon Zat, a Sydney detective seething with rage who cheats on his wife, yells
at his children, bullies witnesses, beats suspects and isn’t even all
that nice to his mistress. When a famed psychologist (Barbara Hershey) vanishes
into a tangle of lantana weeds, Leon’s missing person investigation draws
him into the overlapping private lives of three other couples whose marriages
are every bit as dysfunctional as his own.
Says LaPaglia, “At one
point Leon says ‘I’m numb. I can’t feel anything.’ So
he tries to jump start his life, he has an affair, he has these bouts of anger
because he doesn’t know where to put any of this stuff. There’s a
complexity in the writing that makes Leon a really great character.”
The Australian film industry
clearly agrees. LaPaglia earned that country’s Oscar equivalent last
month when the Australian Film Institute named him the year’s Best Film
Actor. In an unprecedented sweep, AFI also singled out “Lantana” as
best film and awarded trophies to LaPaglia’s castmates Vincent Colosimo
(supporting actor), Kerry Armstrong (actress) and Rachel Blake (supporting
actress). In America, LaPaglia is emerging as a darkhorse Oscar contender.
Commercially,
“Lantana” remains a top ten box office draw nine weeks after its
theatrical release in Australia. Word-of-mouth buzz there has turned the
psychological thriller into something of a pop culture phenomenon akin to the
stateside indie success story “Memento.”
“I’ve never been
in a situation where I couldn’t walk down the street,” says
LaPaglia. “Now, I get approached by people who are just so moved by the
film,” says LaPaglia. The reason is simple, he believes.
“‘Lantana’ caters to an audience that has been completely neglected.
There’s this huge population of people over 30 who want to go to the
movies if you give them something to see. ‘Lantana’ somehow
reflects their lives, it gives them characters they understand.”
Referring to the film’s deliberately ambiguous final scene leaving the
future Leon’s marriage unresolved, LaPaglia says, “The movie
respects the audience and lets you figure things out for yourself.”
Among the issues to puzzle
over: what exactly is Leon’s problem? His wife Sonja (Armstrong) is
beautiful, intelligent and sensitive, his dope-smoking teenage son only
moderately bratty. He has a job, his colleagues respect him. Yet Leon is
miserable. “You know what this guy‘s problem is?” offers
LaPaglia: “Most people live lives of unfulfilled ambitions. When
you’re 15, you’re gonna be a fireman or whatever your dream is.
Suddenly you’re 30 and not doing when you thought you’d be doing at
15, suddenly you’re 35 and you’ve got a bunch of obligations and
commitments you hadn’t conceived of before. Leon is all about waking up
one day at the age of 40 and going ‘How the hell did this become my
life?’”
--
“Lantana” offered
LaPaglia a welcome break from conventional moviemaking. For starters, the cast
performed a table reading in front of the entire crew so everyone involved in
the production would understand what the film was about. Two weeks of intensive
rehearsal followed. Said LaPaglia,
“Usually when you do a movie, you shake the other actor’s hand and
say ‘hi,’ and then somebody shouts ‘action.’
That’s rehearsal. It’s ridiculous.”
Once shooting began in Sydney
last fall, the usually garrulous LaPaglia turned taciturn. Director Ray
Lawrence, speaking by phone from Australia, said, “As much as Anthony
loves to chat, when he was on the set he didn’t want to talk unless he
was in character. I remember there was a scene in the film where Anthony has to
break down. We had a technical problem and I said we might have to do this
again. He said, I can cry again, but I can’t do that (ital) again.
He’d been dragging this (emotional baggage) around for six weeks for that
(moment of performance). That’s the kind of intensity he brought to the
role.”
In Lawrence, LaPaglia finally
found a director who appreciated his understated style. Says LaPaglia,
“Movie directors are always telling me ‘I can’t see what
you’re doing, can you do more?’ I’m always fighting them:
‘You can’t tell what I’m doing because you’re looking
through that stupid little black and white monitor. Believe me, you’ll
see it on the dailies.’” On “Lantana,” Lawrence called
LaPaglia’s bluff, and then some. “Ray would come up to me very
quietly after a scene and say ‘It’s too much, do
less.’” recalls LaPaglia. “At home my wife would say
‘How’d it go today?’ and I’d say, ‘I don’t
know, I just felt like I wandered around in front of a camera all day and didn’t
do anything.’ It really felt that way. Ray just stripped me, stripped me
bare.”
Lawrence says over the top
theatrics weren’t called for because he needed LaPaglia to come across as
an ordinary person audiences could relate to. “I hate ‘aspirational’
films -- you’re not rich enough, blonde enough, thin enough. I
deliberately wanted to confirm people’s flaws. Anthony has this sort of
emotional force field, so he doesn’t really need to physically do very
much at all. That’s the trick. He doesn’t lay it all out.
He’d prepared this performance for the audience and then gave it to them
in little bits.”
---
Growing up in Brisbane,
ADELAINE Australia, LaPaglia didn’t give much thought to show business.
At age 21, while working as a shoe salesman, he tried to impress a date by
taking her to the 17th century Restoration comedy “The Way of the
World.” By the time the play ended, LaPaglia had decided to become an
actor. “The whole audience was like a collective organism,” he
remembers. “It laughed at the same place, became quiet at the same place.
I wanted to be somebody on the stage who could control the behavior of 200
people.”
Soon afterwards, LaPaglia
failed an audition for the Australia’s top acting school, the National
Institute of Dramatic Arts. Plan B: he moved to New York, got a tattoo in New
Jersey that still decorates his left bicep and studied acting with a succession
of teachers. LaPaglia tried to find work in Los Angeles, taking classes with an
imperious Russian drama coach, who, he soon realized, was a “complete
fraud.” Back in New York, LaPaglia hit his stride with the late Kim
Stanley, who taught him the essence of Method acting. “She said
it’s this simple: if you believe what you’re doing, everybody
watching you will believe you. That’s it.”
LaPaglia adds,
“There’s no imaginary cup of coffee, no pretending you’re a
lemon, don’t imagine your dead dog. It’s just believing your
circumstances. For movies, the trick is blocking out the rest of the world so
you can create that magic in a split second of film.”
LaPaglia made his first
picture, the soon forgotten “Cold Steel,” in 1987. For the next several years, he played cops,
detectives or gangsters, consistently stealing scenes in movies of varying quality
and prominence. “When you think about it, what else is there but cops and
bad guys,” jokes LaPaglia. On television, LaPaglia impressed critics in
1996 when he portrayed moody defense lawyer in the Steven Bochco-produced ABC
series “Murder One” while his younger brother Jonathan starred
during the same timeslot on Fox’s “New York Undercover.”
In recent years, LaPaglia has
appeared in the period romance “House Of Mirth,” Woody
Allen’s “Sweet and Lowdown,” and Spike Lee’s
“Summer of Sam.” Sprinkled among LaPaglia’s four dozen movie
characters are priests, slimy CEO’s, Fidel Castro, a demented Santa
Claus, and an over-the-hill baseball player. “People say ‘character
actor’ like it’s a dirty word,” asserts LaPaglia. “You
know what? I’d rather be a character actor any day of the week. You get
to do more things and it’s far more interesting. In the American movies I
grew up watching, the leading men were always the stiffs.”
“Lantana,” filled
with twisted story arcs and thorny characters, turned out to be the kind of
filmmaking experience LaPaglia had nearly given up on. “Before
‘Lantana,’” he admits, “I was getting all my thrills
out of theater because I felt like it was the only place left where you
couldn’t fake it.”
LaPaglia won a best actor Tony for portraying Eddie Carbone in the 1998
revival of Arthur Miller’s drama “A View From the Bridge.”
“Most of the stuff I’m proudest of has happened on the stage, which
in Hollywood means absolutely nothing,” says LaPaglia, who lives most of
the year in New York with his wife of three years, Australian actress Gia
Carides. “I’d gotten a little bit jaded with film. Usually I get
hired for a movie and they expect very little. Doing ‘Lantana’ was
a lot more demanding. It reinstated my belief that movies can be a social and
political and sexual commentary on the world that we live in, that there are
people out there who really understand storytelling and cinema.”
LaPaglia has three films in
the can, including a role as Al Capone in “The Road to Perdition”
opposite Tom Hanks. He’s also producing a movie version of “A View
From the Bridge” with “Lantana” author Bovell on hand to
adapt Miller’s play.
Like “Lantana,”
“View” depicts the inchoate cravings of a flawed everyman. LaPaglia
recaps: “I’m a Brooklyn dock worker who’s secretly in love
with his niece,” “When she falls in love with someone else it
drives him insane and sets him on this relentless path of self destruction that
he cannot stop.”
It might not be
everybody’s idea of fun, but for LaPaglia, stories like
“View” and “Lantana” offer exactly what he’s
looking for: deeply divided souls filled with turmoil, angst, and heartache.
“It’s what I live for,” LaPaglia purrs, “It’s
what I studied acting for, which to make the most complex journey I can make in
the most complicated way I can make it. That’s what makes me happy.”