It took David Strathairn almost 25 years to become an overnight sensation. After more than two decades of quiet, quality work in more than 70 films, his life was changed by a telephone call. “It came out of the blue,” says Strathairn, a lean, pensive figure, whose face has long been better known than his name.
“I was sitting at home and the phone rang, and the conversation lasted about three minutes,” the actor recalls as he tucks into a slice of coffee cake at a Greenwich Village café.
The caller was George Clooney, asking Strathairn to star in his film about the communist witch-hunts of the 1950s. “George just laid it on the table. We’re going to do it in six weeks, we’re going to do it in black-and-white, and we’ll get back to you. I was stunned. And that was just the start of it.”
In Good Night, and Good Luck, Strathairn plays the American broadcaster Edward R Murrow, who risked his career by standing up to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Originally, Clooney, who had written the film and intended to direct it, was worried investors would only be interested if he took a starring role. He privately considered himself the wrong man to play Murrow, a stern, intense, highly principled journalist. When he raised the $7.5m he needed to finance the project, Clooney relegated himself to an unglamorous supporting role and telephoned Strathairn, who bears a striking physical resemblance to Murrow.
Strathairn’s magnetic performance as the American journalist, who made his reputation reporting from London during the worst of the Blitz, has earned him a string of accolades: a best-actor award at the Venice Film Festival, a Golden Globe nomination and now an Oscar nomination.
Yet the 57-year-old actor modestly bats away any suggestion that his performance, described by one American critic as “smouldering, steely-eyed”, and by another as “phenomenal”, is the key to the film’s success. He insists that Good Night, and Good Luck — the title was Murrow’s signing-off catch phrase — is an “ensemble piece”. He also seems endearingly dismayed by the attention he has begun to attract. Although he has appeared in many successful films — notably Silkwood, The Firm and LA Confidential — Strathairn invariably left promotional work to better-known stars, and declares himself a “babe in the woods” when it comes to giving interviews. He admitted last year: “I hate to talk about myself.”
Instead, we begin by talking about the increasingly politicised Clooney, who has been dismissed by right-wingers as “a beautiful airhead”. Strathairn grimaces.
“I’m continually, and quite sincerely, in awe of how George embraces and articulates his passion (for politics),” he says. “He has picked up the gauntlet that’s out there for all artists of any kind of clout or cachet. And he does it with such bonhomie and joy and frankness — and self-deprecation. You keep thinking: is this for real?”
Yes, says Strathairn, everything you’ve heard about Clooney is true. He really is the playboy, the drinker and the practical joker we read about in the tabloids. He is also a “master of timing and suspense”, according to one American critic, and he has produced a “marvellous and intoxicating” film, says another.
“George proved to be all and everything people accuse him of being,” Strathairn adds. “But he’s also a stand-and-deliver kind of guy. This was dangerous territory to tread, but he guided us through it with a very objective approach. He was a real motivating force.”
What seems to have impressed Strathairn most about Clooney was that he never attempted to turn Good Night, and Good Luck into a scathing polemic about right-wing fanaticism aimed at the Bush administration. Although Clooney has emerged as a passionate supporter of Democratic causes — and a fierce opponent of the war in Iraq — he appeared determined to strike a more subtle balance between Murrow’s concern for freedom of speech and America’s fears of communist infiltration.
Set in the early 1950s, the film describes how Murrow set out to discredit McCarthy once it became clear that the Republican senator was fabricating evidence of communist activity. The broadcaster braved the classic McCarthyite riposte: that, to criticise the senator, he must be a communist sympathiser. Several critics have drawn parallels to recent warnings from the Bush administration that opposition to the government’s security policies “helps the terrorists”. But the point is never laboured in the film.
“George could have chosen to be very polarising and indicting with this film,” says Strathairn. “But he wanted to create a platform for discussion, not an arena for combat.”
Strathairn applauds Clooney’s willingness to speak out on political issues, but keeps his own views close to his chest. “I’m not the kind of person who would ascend to the mountaintop and start screaming because I was put there by a moment like this,” he says. “Artists get vilified if you use these transitory moments to speak out. But that George has done it is an inspiration.”
Strathairn’s acting career started, of all places, in a Florida circus. Accompanying a friend to a school for trainee clowns, he turned out to fit the costume of a missing clown, and played a white-faced Siamese twin. “You could say I fitted the bill,” he says. The experience didn’t last long — he grew his hair long, and there was no market for a hippie clown. The circus showed him the door, and a versatile Hollywood career was born.
At college in Massachusetts, Strathairn ran into an ambitious young student named John Sayles, who would later become one of America’s most inventive film-makers. Strathairn appeared in Sayles’s first film, Return of the Secaucus 7, and became part of the director’s semi-permanent ensemble. Sayles’s later work included the cult science-fiction fantasy Brother from Another Planet — in which Strathairn played an extraterrestrial bounty hunter — and City of Hope, featuring Strathairn as a mentally disturbed vagrant. It is the latter film, Strathairn feels, that contains some of his most memorable work.
When he wasn’t doing movies, he was in the theatre. He performed on Broadway with Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen in Strindberg’s Dance of Death, and appeared in a double American production, in the mid-1990s, of Harold Pinter’s plays The Birthday Party and Mountain Language. Intriguingly, Pinter turns out to be another of Strathairn’s politically outspoken heroes. “He came and spent a week with us in the theatre,” Strathairn says. “That was very, very special.”
Renowned for the virulence of his anti-American views, Pinter recently devoted his Nobel prize acceptance speech to a harangue about the evils of US power. Strathairn politely acknowledges that Pinter’s rantings are “not as constructive as possible”, but he turns out to be surprisingly supportive of the cancer-stricken playwright’s antiwar views.
“I don’t doubt his sincerity at all, or his courage to say it,” he says. “I’m glad there is someone who is not cowed by being vilified. The artist is the canary in the mine for our culture. We certainly hope to create discussion. Pinter does it vehemently, and there’s a fist attached, but there’s a need to create platforms of debate.”
A platform such as the Oscars, I mischievously wonder? If Strathairn were to bag the best- actor prize, would he be tempted to shed his natural reticence and use his acceptance speech for a Pinter- or Clooney-like outburst?
The actor grins. “I would probably be mumbling and bumbling my way through, trying to say something pertinent and respectful,” he says. “You’ve got to pick your spots, I guess. If I had to, I would just reference Ed Murrow. That’s more than enough to ring any political bells.”
Quite where all this excitement is leading, Strathairn isn’t sure. For all his success in Good Night, he can still sit discreetly in a New York café without being recognised — although that may be due to the ragged salt-and-pepper beard he has grown since his clean-cut appearance as Murrow. He is also patently not the type to turn into a headline-grabbing public figure. When he’s not acting, he lives quietly in the New York State countryside with his wife, Logan Goodman, a nurse. They have two sons, aged 26 and 18.
Nor is Strathairn convinced that success playing Murrow will lead to more high-profile roles. “People, through no fault of their own, get pigeonholed,” he says. “You can only be what people perceive you to be, and I’m sure that at this stage of the game, I’m perceived as someone who can show up and do the job as a character actor, really, not the leading man.”
He thinks about that for a moment and frowns. “Frankly, I have a hard time making the distinction between the leading man and a character. But if it brings more roles like Good Night, and Good Luck, it would be great.”
Good Night, and Good Luck opens on February 17
