As pratfalls go, it’s a doozy. William H. Macy, 57-year-old character actor extraordinaire and sometime leading man, is riding a Harley through a suburban street. He’s wearing leathers and goggles, he turns to the camera and smiles, momentarily flashing his chipmunk grin. And then it happens. Bang! He rides straight into a low-hanging “For Sale” sign that clatters him clean off his bike. It’s the first big laugh of the smash hit comedy Wild Hogs and it’s very, well, William H. Macy.

The movie, a City Slickers reboot about four fiftysomething men who tackle their midlife crises via a haphazard cross-country biking trip, makes optimum use of Macy’s comic potential. Here, playing a fastidious software engineer opposite John Travolta, Tim Allen and Martin Lawrence, he glides effortlessly through the type of nervy, shifty, bug-eyed performance that made him famous in Fargo, Boogie Nightsand Magnolia. And yet, thanks to Macy’s own midlife crisis, it’s the type of throw-away comedy performance that is featuring less and less in his oeuvre.

“Just after 50 I took stock of my own life,” explains Macy, seated in an obscenely swanky Parisian hotel. The actor in person, incidentally, in black suit and slickly tossed hair, is far more conventionally handsome. “I looked at my career and said, ‘Is this it? Is this the guy that did Fargo? And now it’s a steady slide to the grave?’ ” He regrouped with his long-time partner, the Desperate Housewives star Felicity Huffman, and refocused on his career. A former writer and director of TV movies, he began to initiate his own projects, including a forthcoming romantic drama starring Salma Hayek called Keep Coming Back as well as a comedy about the movie business called The Deal. His own roles started getting bigger and tougher. He took the quasi-romantic lead in the Vegas-set gambling drama The Cooler, and then blew away all expectations when he became the white-collar bigot Edmond Burke in David Mamet’s shockingly visceral Edmond.

The movie, from a Mamet stageplay, describes in graphic detail the descent into homicidal mania of Macy’s neurotic protagonist. It is littered with racial epithets and extreme violence, and was, as a result, virtually impossible to fund. Still, Macy ploughed ahead, on a tiny budget, into the arms of controversy.

BACKGROUND

• Wild Hogs

• These hogs are bores

• Hell's Angels to Dads Army: How Harleys lost their street cred

Midlife crisis averted

William H. Macy used to fear he’d be famous only for Fargo. Suddenly he’s busier than ever, he tells Kevin Maher

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

“When Edmond first came out in the US there was outrage with Mamet for writing this stuff,” he explains. “So I start doing press. I’ve spent the whole film screaming the word ‘nigger’, and I go out there and start saying ‘The N-word’, and I feel like a complete buffoon. So I say to this audience, which has a lot of black people in it, ‘I’m sorry guys, I can’t say ‘the N-word’. The word is ‘nigger.’ And you could just feel the relief. Eventually, it became one of the most astoundingly frank discussions about race that I’ve ever been a party to. And it was Edmond and David Mamet that opened it up.” Macy credits Mamet with a guiding hand in his entire career. They met in 1970, at Goddard College, Vermont, where Mamet was teaching drama. Macy had grown up in Maryland, the son of a decorated war hero, and had drifted into veterinary medicine only to drop out. He says that he chose to go to Goddard because the girls there didn’t wear bras. But a couple of classes with Mamet changed everything.

“He’s a rootin’ tootin’ genius, card carrying,” says Macy. “He gave me my aesthetic, my technique, and he gave me some huge breaks, putting me in House of Games, Oleanna and many plays.” As well as the roles, however, you sense that Macy has absorbed Mamet’s work ethic. Last year his criticisms of Lindsay Lohan for her slack behaviour while on the set of Bobby reached the press.

He is unrepentant. “Yes, I’m pretty outspoken on set about bad behaviour . . . When an actor becomes a movie star it’s very difficult to find someone to tell them their behaviour is boorish and they have to stop it.”

With some powerful roles coming up and seven movies on the way, Macy sits back to analyse the essence of his William H. Macy-ness. Could it be that on screen he represents the men we actually are rather than the Tinseltown models we’d like to be?

“Well, certainly,” he says, with a frown. “I think it’s a much better story if the indomitable warrior of the village gets the measles and then the milkman has to go out and slay the dragon.” He pauses and smiles. “Now that’s going to keep me interested. That’s a good story!”

Wild Hogs is released on Friday

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