Ken Regan / HBO

Bernard Lafferty (Ralph Fiennes) and Doris Duke (Susan Sarandon)

Put up your Dukes!

Susan Sarandon dishes about playing feisty heiress Doris Duke on HBO, Ralph Fiennes' "matinee idol" looks and her old gay boyfriends.

By Heather Havrilesky

Read more: HBO, TV, Interviews, Arts & Entertainment, Heather Havrilesky, Arts & Entertainment TV Interviews

Feb. 7, 2008 | Over the course of 37 years on the big screen, Susan Sarandon has played the strong, unflappable matriarch and the outlandish loose cannon with equal enthusiasm and conviction. Although it's impossible to forget her Oscar-winning turn as Sister Helen Prejean in "Dead Man Walking," Sarandon may be most remarkable when she's playing devious, eccentric characters, from the rebellious housewife of "Thelma and Louise" to the playful muse of "Bull Durham." Maybe that's because she brings an intrepid air to even the flakiest character; she can be playing a woman who's fragile or unhinged or capricious, but when she fixes you with that penetrating gaze, a genuine but tenacious quality shines through.

With such a rich and successful movie career, it's hard to imagine why Sarandon would choose to appear in an HBO original movie about the curious relationship between billionaire Doris Duke and her trusted butler, Bernard Lafferty -- that is, until that first moment of "Bernard and Doris" (premieres 8 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 9, on HBO). Sarandon breezes into the frame, the embodiment of this careless, distracted aristocrat most of us have read about, and we're transfixed. Bringing both an unpredictable edge and a feeling of genuine warmth to Duke, Sarandon resists the temptation to fall into either hysteria or cartoonish frigidity -- two of the more typical choices for those portraying the unfathomably rich.

While Ralph Fiennes is convincing and sweet as Bernard (Sarandon helped to convince him to take the role), it's Sarandon who has us by the throat from start to finish. As Duke, she dances from self-involvement to longing to rage to sweetness with such flexibility that, if we hadn't seen such agility from her before, we might consider this the performance of a lifetime. Most of all, Sarandon transforms Doris Duke, the unknowable, seemingly aloof diva, into a sharp, fascinating, flawed human being.

When I spoke to her on the phone the afternoon after the State of the Union address, Sarandon (who supported John Edwards until he dropped out of the race) garrulously bounced from one topic to another, from her interest in the intimate connections between characters to her disbelief over the emptiness of President Bush's comments: "I can't even tell one from the other. It's all the same State of the Union ... It just translates to 'Blah blah blah.'"

I find the act of reaching out to another human being and making an effort to be intimate in any way such a courageous act that I've always been drawn to stories that are love stories of one kind or another. I just thought, here are two damaged, problematic, difficult people who, for some reason that is probably inexplicable, form this bond. Clearly she trusted him, and he was completely dedicated to her and couldn't live without her once she died. [Lafferty died three years after Duke at the age of 51.] They were so opposite and, at the same time, they found some common ground, and I just found that so interesting. I thought, here's a story that most people know the outside story, you know, all the glitz and glam, and it was different than anything that I've ever played, and I thought, well, let's tell the inner story instead.

And I have to say, it was all predicated on who was going to play Bernard, because I wasn't desperate to do that part without the right guy. Initially the script needed some work. It was just a kernel of an idea and somehow it ended up just coming together.

Ralph was at the top of the list, and he said yes immediately. He called me from Italy and said, "Are you really going to do this? The script isn't completely there." And I said, "I think it'll get there, and I trust [director] Bob [Balaban] and I've been with him on occasion when he's had to deal with script, and he's very good with it. And you know, if you do it, I'll do it." And then when we sat down, all of us, at a table, and I had my good friend Joe Aulisi doing wardrobe and my good friend Franckie Diago doing the sets, and they were both working with budgets of about $35, I thought, what have I gotten these people into?

But we had a lot of fun, and I'm fond of it. I'm a little nervous about sending it out to the world. When it was just ours and it wasn't out there for public consumption, I just kind of hoped that it would survive and be treated well. It was such a personal experience. It was like acting camp, everybody out in Long Island and moving very quickly, and people bringing in clothing, Donna Karan opening up her warehouse and making the wardrobe possible. It was a very different kind of filmmaking, which is always trying, but at the same time, kind of exhilarating.

Next page: "So little affection, so little love, so little companionship"