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Meet the other guy. Tall, thin, with advanced baldness and a sad down-turned
mouth, Richard Jenkins, 61, would seem to be the anti-Brad, the Sean-lite
and the meat-free Mickey in the prestigious (only Best Film carries more
weight) Best Actor category at tomorrow night's Oscar Awards ceremony. And
still, despite being the most obscure name in the bunch (more so than the
fifth nominee and stage veteran Frank Langella) there is a real chance that
the universal admiration and genuine adulation for his movie, a low-budget
US immigrant drama called The Visitor, might make Jenkins the wild
card winner.
“Anything's possible, but I don't think so, truthfully I don't,” Jenkins says,
comparing his role as an emotionally repressed aca- demic who befriends an
illegal Syrian immigrant with those of his fellow nominees. “It's Mickey
Rourke in The Wrestler, such a deep human performance,” he says.
“Right down the line, there's Sean [Penn] in Milk, and Frank in Frost/Nixon.
And Brad Pitt in Benjamin Button. I said to Brad at the Oscar
nominees' lunch, 'Great! I've got to be up against a guy that ages
backwards. What chance do I have?'”
Jenkins, a veteran character actor familiar to many as the dead yet still
sardonic patriarch Nathaniel Fisher in the TV series Six Feet Under,
says that his life has changed immeasurably since hearing those nominations
on the morning of January 22.
“I spent that weekend inside answering my phone and my e-mails,” he says. “I
still haven't caught up. You hear from people that you haven't spoken to in
a long time. I've received some beautiful bottles of wine and champagne from
people wishing me well. But I've yet to get my aeroplane.”
Nonetheless, the fashion houses were the first in line with offers of help for
the big night. “Calvin Klein were wonderful and offered me a tuxedo; my
wife's going to wear a dress of theirs. All the fashion people have
beautiful clothes, but at lot of them are made for, as my mom would say, the
younger folks; the jackets are short, the pants low-cut. When I put them on
I look like Jethro from The Beverly Hillbillies. So I chose a
beautiful fitted tuxedo from Calvin Klein.”
Since then, he says, it has been an adventure, a constant stream of interviews
and photocalls, made all the more extraordinary because The Visitor,
unlike the other contenders, wasn't released during the “traditional” Oscar
winter season, but in April 2008 (a mere seven weeks after last year's
ceremony).
“I think the movie connected with people, and that feeling just hung around
for a long time,” he says. “When they are still talking about it nearly a
year later you think, 'Wow, this really means something'. But then when
agents start telling you, 'You have a good chance this year', you have to
say, 'Shut up. Please'. The worst thing you can do is to start thinking that
it's going to happen because it never does. I've been doing this for 40
years and it's never happened.”
Jenkins admits, however, that the reality of the imminent awards experience
didn't fully hit him until the Oscar lunch earlier this month. “Everybody
was there. All the nominees. And a 12ft Oscar. That's when it all became
real.” During lunch, he says, they were given guidelines for their speeches.
“They said keep it short - and don't pull out a list. My God, don't pull out
a list.”
They were told also by the Academy president, Sid Ganis, that this year's
ceremony was going to be different and that they should get ready for a
surprise. “But they wouldn't tell us what and I'm in the dark just as much
as anyone,” he says, perhaps none too convincingly, even for a Best Actor
nominee.
Any rumours? “Nope. But after this interview I have to practise diving off a
20ft platform.” He chuckles at his joke, adding that the best thing about
the lunch was catching up with people he has come to know after four decades
inthe business. “It was a wonderful day. I've worked with Josh Brolin, Frank
Langella, Viola Davis . . . just seeing everybody was enough.”
His epic career began in DeKalb, Illinois, when, even as a child in junior
high school, all he could think about was acting. Then, interrupting
himself, he says that one of the great things to emerge from “this whole
Oscar deal” was an interview published in his hometown newspaper with his
retired high school acting coach. “She said my father [a dentist] had called
her and said that he was really worried about me becoming an actor. He
wanted to know what to do. She said: 'Don't discourage him, encourage him.'
And he did, my whole life as an actor, always. I never found out about that
one conversation until now.” Jenkins sighs heavily. “He was great. I wish he
was alive now.”
Jenkins continued through drama school in Illinois and repertory theatre in
Rhode Island, where he still lives. He tried Hollywood in 1975 and moved to
LA for ten months. But it wasn't him.
“I was incredibly alone and depressed. I had a meeting with an agent in a
creepy office and handed him my resumé from the theatre that had The
School for Wives, the Molière play that I was very proud of, on it. He
took one look and said, 'Look, I'm not going to judge you, or tell you how
to live your life, but as a piece of professional advice, I wouldn't put
porno movies on your resumé, OK?'”
He fled the scene, but over the years has made steady inroads into Tinseltown
and is one of the top character actors in the business; remember his
disinterested psychotherapist in There's Something About Mary? His
gay federal agent in Flirting with Disaster? Or his emotionally stern
father of Charlize Theron in North Country?
Typically, his profile rocketed when Six Feet Under emerged in 2001 as
a zeitgeist-tapping show, personifying the dark moribund spirit of America
after 9/11. “The power of television is amazing,” he says.
“I've done 50 movies, but so many people have seen Six Feet Under.
It really changed things for me. I was at a real funeral once and a woman
tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'Are they filming this?' Now that is the
power of television.”
It was after Six Feet Under, however, that Jenkins met Tom McCarthy,
the director of The Visitor, for the first time. The two, who shared
the same talent agent, had lunch in 2005. They spoke for a couple of hours
about possible projects. “Two years later I see him and he says, 'Here, I
wrote this part just for you',” Jenkins says, describing his first encounter
with the movie's uptight protagonist, Professor Walter Vale. “My first
thought was, 'What if I read it and I don't understand it? And he wrote it
for me? I'm in big trouble'.”
Thankfully, Walter clicked with Jenkins (“I was bowled over by it”) and, with
McCarthy's help, he created a delicate character, a loveless widower, who
slowly emerges back into life thanks to an unlikely friendship, forged on
the streets of New York, with a Syrian street drummer called Tarek (Haaz
Sleiman). Here, the movie's soft emotional centre is balanced by a tough
outer skin that looks unflinchingly at the modern American isolationism and
national security paranoia (Tarek is arrested and brutally processed by an
unforgiving bureaucracy).
It's hardly surprising then that the first question asked of Jenkins, after
the first public screening of the movie, at the Toronto Film Festival in
September 2007, was: Where are you going to put your Oscar? “I just said,
'Oh, be quiet!' Because it was embarrassing to me then. Now, I feel like
I've been on this amazing journey, and it's a very nice honour.”
Jenkins jokes that on his next movie, The Rum Diary, opposite Johnny
Depp, things will be different, thanks to his Oscar glow. “There will be no
water on the set, only champagne. And I must be carried from my trailer to
the set: I will not set foot on the ground at any time.”
In the meantime, he says, there are some Oscar niceties to resolve. He hasn't
written a speech, for instance. But if he does, and “when” he doesn't win,
he says that he will deliver it to his wife of nearly 40 years, the
choreographer Sharon Frederick, when they get home that night. And no, he
hasn't decided which party to attend. “I'll probably have a better handle on
it on the night, but they just push me here, and I go here, they push me
there, and I go there,” he says.
Most importantly, as an Academy member, has he voted yet? If so, who for?
“I've said it before and I'll say it again, I think it's very important that
we see every film before we vote for ourselves,” he says, tongue only half
in cheek.
And finally, what about his grown-up children, his daughter, Sarah, an
actress, and son, Andrew, an accountant? How are they dealing with his
success? “Well, my son works for PricewaterhouseCoopers, who count the
ballots for the nominations,” he drawls, deadpan. “So you see, he starts
working for PricewaterhouseCoopers and I finally get nominated. You do the
math.”
The Visitor is released on DVD on Monday
Oscars: Runners and Riders
Best Actress
Who should win Anne Hathaway for Rachel Getting Married. The
26-year-old turned in a hugely mature performance as a recovering
motor-mouth drug addict in this observational wedding drama. Veering wildly
from fragile to furious, it has the edge on Streep’s hamming in Doubt,
Jolie’s stoicism in Changeling, and even Winslet’s measured
torment in The Reader. The fifth nominee is Melissa Leo for Frozen
River. But only three people have seen that.
Who will win Winslet. They say this is Kate “five nominations and no
wins” Winslet’s year. And yet The Reader was vilified in the US by critics,
columnists and filmmakers for soft- pedalling The Holocaust, which left the
6,000 Academy members plenty of wiggle room before last Tuesday’s voting
deadline.
On the night Have a punt on Hathaway.
Best Actor
Who should win Richard Jenkins for The Visitor, a beautiful
performance in a soulful movie. The little-seen film and its character-actor
star Jenkins face the monumental task of derailing the Mickey Rourke awards
season express. The latter’s performance, in the over-rated Wrestler,
has already been deemed by the Golden Globes and Baftas to be superior to
Sean Penn’s Harvey Milk, Frank Langella’s Richard Nixon, and Brad Pitt’s
facial expressions in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
Who will win Mickey Rourke. Although so far he’s making an impressive
attempt at derailing his campaign, with acceptance speech expletives ,
rumours of leery trysts with his 21-year-old co-star Evan Rachel Wood and
extreme carousing.
On the night It’s all part of the Mickey Rourke charisma offensive.
Standing ovation, please!
Best Supporting Actor
Who should win Philip Seymour Hoffman for Doubt because he
carries the impossible burden of representing that film’s moral quagmire
within a single character. He is a priest in mid-1960s New York. But is he a
paedophile, or is he a leftist reformer? It takes everything that Hoffman
has in the tank (from oleaginous to arrogant to plangent and back again) to
pull it off. He makes his fellow nominees look second-rate.
Who will win Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight. Because, in
Hollywood at least, you never bet against the dead guy. It’s called the
Peter Finch Effect, after the British actor who died in 1977 while
campaigning for his Best Actor slot in Network. He played a network
news anchor who, much like Ledger’s Joker, was, “Mad as hell, and not going
to take it anymore”. Naturally, he won.
On the night If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.
Best Supporting Actress
Who should win Amy Adams for Doubt. Adams, a previous Oscar
nominee for Junebug in 2005, here successfully injects some
much-needed inner steel into a soft-spoken vessel of prelapsarian purity
called Sister James. Her only real competition, strangely, is from her
co-star Viola Davis who, though on screen for a single scene only, is also
up for a Best Supporting Oscar.
Who will win Viola Davis. Academy voters love the short-but-powerful
performance angle. They gave Judi Dench a Best Supporting Oscar for eight
minutes in Shakespeare in Love, and Anthony Hopkins a Best Actor
award for 16 minutes as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs.
And true, Davis more than matches Meryl Streep, word for word, grimace for
grimace. But, well, it’s one scene.
On the night I’d like to thank the Academy for believing in the
possibility of the rest of my performance.
Best Director
Who should win Danny Boyle for Slumdog Millionaire. There are
only two choices here. The first, David Fincher for Benjamin Button,
represents a triumph for the industry, for the judicious use of special
effects, and for the power of ingeniously directed multimillion-dollar
studio productions. The second, Boyle for Slumdog, is about
directorial passion against the odds, the location, the budget, and the
market. Boyle’s effort seems bolder, a greater achievement.
Who will win Danny Boyle. The Slumdog rollercoaster is
unstoppable. And its message — that anyone can make it, that rags can become
riches — is very, very, “Yes we can!”
On the night The OBE is already in the post, Sir Danny of Mumbai.
Best Film
Who should win Slumdog Millionaire. This is the year of the
Slumdog. And not even riots in India can kill the mood.
Who will win The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Hey,
Holllywood is progressive, but not that progressive. The Academy has a noble
tradition of recognising, and awarding, foreign directors, but then, in Best
Film, snubbing their movies for local boys. Polanksi, for instance, received
a directing Oscar for The Pianist in 2003, but Best Film went to the
hideous Chicago. Similarly in 2006, Ang Lee snagged Best Director for Brokeback
Mountain, but Best Film went to Crash.
On the night I want to dedicate this award to all the IT specialists
and computer graduates who made this dream a digital reality!
