HOWZAT

Which of his demons did you identify with? “Well, most of us have difficulty going past a certain rung — if you want to be clichéd about it — on the ladder of life. Most people can only go so far up the ladder and they get to what I call a window of terror, and they can’t get past it to the next rung. So you eat too much, you smoke too much, you have too much sex, you go into rehab, clean up, lose the weight and start trying again to get back to that terror.

“Everybody has it. That’s why, with certain people, you think, why can’t they go further in their life? It is because they hit some unknown — to them — window of terror, which goes back to their childhood, and they can’t get past it. Nixon couldn’t get past a certain point. It got to be too good for him. He was terrified of it all. It wasn’t conscious. He rolled back to the bottom.”

It strikes me as interesting that this is the point he identified with most. One wonders what Langella feels he didn’t deserve. He continues: “Then he started climbing up again, which was where he was really comfortable, doing the ‘I’ll show him, I’ll show him.’ ”

So is this about your window of terror?

“My window is certainly not for publication. I will keep it shut,” he says, chuckling. But you do have one? “Of course. Everybody does. Have I got over it? Ninety-five per cent yes.”

Would an Oscar nomination help you?

“Come off it. You misunderstand me. The winning of any award should not be a way to help you out of some inner conflict.”

I’m not suggesting you need it for therapy, more the other way round, that if you accept that you are deserving of accolades, that’s when you get them. “I suppose you are right. It reminds me of this story. I don’t think it’s apocryphal. A scientist won the Nobel prize and he said, ‘Thank you for this, but like everything else in my life, it’s a substitute for love.’ I think that’s a very profound statement. What he meant was that everybody’s real desire is to love and be loved. There are two things in life: work and love. And first let’s accept that most people don’t work at the thing they love, they work to earn a living. I’ve loved my work since I was nine. Never deviated from it. I think you can heal yourself with these two things — with work you feel good about and love.”

You get the impression that Langella might have had to do a lot of self-healing. When he talks about love he embraces extremes of vulnerability and stoicism. In a way, he is stripping himself bare — saying what he needs most is being loved and needing to love, and in another way he’s saying nothing at all.

“People struggle with unconditional love. People put prices on things. That is why marriages break up.”

Some people want to be loved more and others want to love: which is he?

“I think the best of all possible worlds would be an ability to love unconditionally and not to say to someone, if you loved me you’d be more this or more that. Being deserving of love from someone and being unconditionally able to love someone is what we all need. But a lot of people do this thing to each other where they say, that’s the person I love and there are qualities I don’t like about her and I wish she was different, but I love her and I’m not going to make life miserable for me, or her, by either trying to change her or recondition her, and I don’t want it done back to me,” he says, very sure of that.

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