Salon.com > Heath Ledger

Straight stars protest too much

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 16:24:00 +0000

Perhaps the most revolutionary thing a straight actor can do is play gay.

While gay actors like Zachary Quinto, Ian McKellen and Neil Patrick Harris are compelled to play heterosexual roles as a matter of course -- that's the bulk of what's out there -- straight actors get Oscars and praise for bravery.

The latest actors to join the fraternity of the courageous are Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, who respectively play Liberace and his lover in the HBO film "Behind the Candelabra." Damon told Entertainment Weekly that the film's revealing costumes embarrassed his wife: "I really wish she didn’t see that. That’s too much." As for the sex scene between Douglas and Damon, "The scene where I’m behind him and going at him, we did that in one take," said the younger actor.

"We do it. Cut. There’s a long pause. And then you just hear Steven [Soderbergh, the director] go, 'Well … I have no notes.'"

Michelle Williams: I’m still “a mess”

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 21:00:00 +0000

Wearing a high-collared, sleeveless dress in a print of brightly colored blocks, with her platinum blond hair in a pixie cut, Michelle Williams meets me at the door as if we were shooting a scene from "Mad Men" together. "Do you need a bottle of water?" she asks brightly. "We're trying to keep everybody hydrated today."

Throughout our conversation in a Manhattan rehearsal studio -- on what is indeed the hottest day of the year -- the 31-year-old Williams seems far more relaxed and confident than the last time I saw her, which was two years ago after the Cannes premiere of "Blue Valentine." And why shouldn't she be? Since that time, Williams has been twice nominated for best-actress Oscars -- for "Blue Valentine" and again for "My Week With Marilyn" -- and the death of Heath Ledger, her former boyfriend and the father of her child, is now four years in the past and no longer a hot topic for the tabloids.

Pick of the week: Michelle Williams in “Meek’s Cutoff”

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 01:01:00 +0000

"Meek's Cutoff" is one of those movies that you're going to make a decision about within the first minute. You're either in or you're out, and you'll know which. As an opening credit stitched in embroidery tells us -- and it really is embroidery, not some digital facsimile -- we're on the Oregon Trail, in 1845. Director Kelly Reichardt's opening shot lasts at least a minute, and shows us a group of nearly indistinguishable men and women in the middle distance, wearing the shabby clothes of 19th-century emigrants, as they get their cattle and wagons across a chest-deep river. (The striking, square-screen cinematography is by Chris Blauvelt.)

The great villains you least expected

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 12:01:00 +0000

Three-time Emmy winner Bryan Cranston is finally going bad. No, not "bad" as in Walter White, Cranston's meth-making chemistry teacher from "Breaking Bad." Like bad bad. Evil bad. Last week, the news broke that Cranston had snagged the role of Vilos Cohaagen, the greedy, murderous dictator of Mars in the "Total Recall" remake. Vilos was played in the original by Ronnie Cox, director Paul Verhoeven's go-to corporate slimeball.

Cranston seemed an unlikely casting choice for a villain; while actors like Cox can get away with playing a certain kind of corporate tough guy, Cranston has always struck me as too vulnerable to ever be amoral. Or maybe it's just that I will forever associate his face with the goofy dad in "Malcolm in the Middle."

“Blue Valentine”: An extraordinary and sexually frank romance

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 02:30:00 +0000

Having played every major film festival in the Western Hemisphere, become a talking point for the movie world's chattering class, and been gifted with a torrent of free publicity thanks to its (now rescinded) NC-17 rating, "Blue Valentine" is finally ready to face the public. Whether the public is genuinely interested in a sexually and emotionally frank film about a working-class American marriage that channels improv theater from one direction and European art cinema from another is an open question. (No matter what you may have read elsewhere, the NC-17 had little or nothing to do with oral sex. "Blue Valentine" features one intense sex scene with considerable nudity that raises the issue of marital rape, and as usual the MPAA freaked out about honest depictions of ambiguous adult sexuality. Somebody may go down on somebody else, but that's hardly the central issue.)

Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams: Cannes’ hottest couple

Fri, 21 May 2010 15:40:00 +0000

CANNES, France -- An intimate, gorgeous and wrenching portrait of a working-class marriage in what may be a state of terminal decay, "Blue Valentine" is not only the breakthrough American film at Cannes this year, but one of the best films here, period. It stars two hot young indie-oriented actors in Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, who are extraordinary as Dean and Cindy, a couple who live in rural eastern Pennsylvania with their 5-year-old daughter. "Blue Valentine" shines a spotlight on aspects of American life rarely seen in the movies, and it resulted from a lengthy and intensive period of preparation and discovery.

Director Derek Cianfrance has been working on the film on and off for 12 years, in between collecting unemployment, working odd jobs and making documentaries. Williams has been on board for six years and Gosling for four. To prepare for the roles, Cianfrance made the actors live together for several weeks in the movie couple's prefab home, buying groceries at the supermarket, baking a birthday cake for Frankie (Faith Wladyka), their fictional daughter, putting up a Christmas tree and wrapping presents. Gosling worked shifts for a moving company, one of Dean's jobs in the film. Williams gained a fair bit of weight to play her character, a nurse of about 30 in the movie's present tense.

The imaginarium of Terry Gilliam

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 02:30:00 +0000

Terry Gilliam has a reputation of being a little prickly and defensive, especially around film critics, who he feels have consistently misunderstood, misinterpreted and misrepresented his work. So I was somewhat surprised that the jovial fellow who met me on a recent morning in New York — assuming it was indeed Gilliam, and not some dubious doppelgänger or hired actor — turned out to be an utterly charming breakfast companion, with a mischievous-Santa twinkle in his eye and an infectious, Falstaffian laugh.

Gilliam was in town to promote yet another of his troubled projects with a tortuous production history. As he put it in our conversation, every film he makes becomes a film about the making of a film. The one-time Monty Python member has had collapses, aborted projects and problem-plagued productions before, from his underappreciated box-office bomb "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" to his failed efforts to adapt Alan Moore's "Watchmen" to an unproduced "Time Bandits 2" script to "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote," which was shut down after a week of filming in 1999. (Gilliam and Johnny Depp still hope to make that film.)