Based on your performance, it seemed like you had a lot of empathy for Doris Duke.
Well, I think she was a bit of a monster, but I thought she was really funny. I don't know that I could play anybody who I didn't like -- at least some aspect of them. I've certainly played people who, if you're going to examine them morally, were unsympathetic. I mean, I didn't really worry if she was going to be sympathetic or not. Part of the fun of her is that she says and does things that people who have any kind of empathy or social conditioning would feel uncomfortable saying and doing. But she was so isolated growing up, and she was so privileged and grew up with so much entitlement and at the same time, so little affection, so little love, so little companionship. You know, for the early part of her life, she just had a nanny and a tutor that she became close to, and she was gawky and tall. She was close to her dad, but then he died, and the mom really didn't like her. Everybody's got their family problems, but certainly that family, when I started reading about it, the money really exacerbates and accentuates any kind of eccentricity or any kind of addiction -- you know, things that would prove more difficult for ordinary, even middle-class people. You could indulge yourself -- in men, or places, or real estate.
And at the same time, she had this fear of being taken advantage of all the time. So she was really miserly with her staff and full of contradictions. And then this guy comes along that obviously loved working for celebrities, and had his own demons, and some kind of weird friendship -- and more -- developed between them.
The friendship that develops between them actually feels organic and makes a lot of sense, based on what we see of both of their lives.
Well, that's good!
And slowly, we see what a headstrong and vibrant personality she has, through her relationship with Bernard. It becomes clearer how difficult and isolating it would be to have that kind of a life.
You know, her one child died, and she didn't really have a family or people around her that stayed for that long because she went through lovers and husbands pretty quickly. She was very loyal, but he [Bernard] became the witness to her life, and she became the witness to his life, so what I like about the film is that we really tried to make what was important happen between the lines. She might be talking about her lover who's in bed but looking at Bernard. She's sharing the joke. She's sharing the journey with him all the time. And that's kind of what they found in each other.
I think that's, in my old age, something that I really appreciate: the people that are witnesses to your life, who know you. Because really, what does one life matter in the big scheme of things? It's only through those people who you touch that your life has some meaning. So something struck up between the two of them.
I was concerned that what she gives to him is less obvious than what he gives to her. But I thought, if you don't get a feeling that she has changed him somehow, that she has brought something to his life, then it just becomes this creepy kind of obsessive thing on his part.
Bernard seemed to come into a new way of seeing himself through Duke's appreciation of him.
Yeah. And at the same time, what I love about Ralph [Fiennes as Bernard] is that he has so much dignity, and he's somebody that you really believe could run that house, and at the same time, he's not a cliché. When he starts to get freer and freer, it's so sweet. He does it in such a sweet way, and yet he's so matinee-idol handsome that you can see why she would keep trying to make it something else -- especially during those times, when the definition of what you were wasn't quite so stringent. There weren't so many labels. You know, I had gay boyfriends in the '80s and the late '70s and it didn't seem like that big a deal, really.
Really?
No! People went back and forth all over the place. It wasn't seen to be such a major accomplishment one way or another.
So people didn't define themselves as clearly, sexually?
I don't know that it was asked of you to define yourself as clearly. It was a more generous kind of time sexually -- maybe that translated for some people as promiscuous. But it was also just a generous ... the drugs were more generous. Everything was more generous! What was going on was kind of an empowering thing, and so the antithesis of that is to make everybody kind of dig in and proclaim their limitations. There were so many stories of people who started out married and ended up becoming gay, and people who were gay getting married and having kids. It wasn't so tough on you. You didn't have to give a label. Now people give so many labels to everybody, which I guess is OK, but -- what does she [Doris Duke] say at one point? "You have to leave yourself open to the possibilities" or something. "Life is full of surprises!" Kind of giving him [Bernard] a hint that, you know, things he hadn't thought about could happen [between them]. But he just gets embarrassed.
We really had to go back and map out those pauses, to make sure that they were there, because so many times, that's where the interesting thing happens.
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