Eighteen years removed from his turn as a flamboyant drag queen in “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,” and 12 years after his breakout performance in Christopher Nolan’s “Memento,” Pearce remains something of an enigma; he’s an English-born actor, living in Australia and working in Los Angeles. While he’s appeared in two of the last three best picture winners (“The Hurt Locker” and “The King’s Speech”) and earned an Emmy for his role as Monty Beragon opposite Kate Winslet in “Mildred Pierce,” he’s never quite earned the kind of movie star recognition he deserves from audiences or producers. His latest film, “Lockout,” a kind of screwball comedy disguised as a sci-fi thriller (think “Escape From New York” if the island of Manhattan were a high-tech prison in outer space), finds him playing the unlikely role of action star. It’s another strange twist in a uniquely eclectic career, but even drag queens have to flex their muscles from time to time.

A surprisingly slight man clad in jeans, a purple flannel shirt and a pristine pair of blue adidas gazelles, Pearce sat down with Salon at the Parker Meridien hotel to discuss his newest film, his disdain for the term “genre,” and his past as a teen bodybuilder.

“Lockout” seems like a bit of a departure from the kinds of movies you typically make. It’s your first blockbuster since “The Time Machine” in 2002. What attracted you to the project?

I think it was a number of things really. I’ve been asked to do action-oriented movies in the past and they just haven’t been right for me. They’ve felt a little serious or something — either the characters took themselves too seriously, or the film took itself too seriously — whereas this clearly doesn’t. Having said that, I’ve also been very aware in the past of action films that don’t take certain things seriously enough.

Can you give me an example?

I can’t think of [a title], because I don’t even store that kind of information. It’s one of those things we talk about here in America, where people can be very flippant about violence. A movie that gets a PG-13 rating can show someone running down a street killing 27 people. And there are no repercussions. In “Lockout,” my character has a cynical sense of humor, but it comes from a real place. And when you look at Joseph Gilgun’s character, who’s popping off hostages one by one, it’s not treated in a light-handed way. Even though there’s a heightened sense of reality to it, it has a more realistic view than some other action-oriented films.

It seems to walk a tightrope, or at least try to.

Yeah. It’s funny with genre films; I’ve never understood the way people talk about them. I’ve always thought you’re just diving into human psychology. It doesn’t matter whether it’s science fiction or action. Where do you even draw the line between genres? At the same time, I do think certain genres allow you to get away with certain behaviors. People can chew on their popcorn and go, “Ah well, it’s just a movie.” You can’t really say that about most of the films I do.

With the possible exceptions of “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” and “Memento” in flashes, I’m not sure I can remember a performance of yours in which you’re quite this funny or winning. Would you like to play more comedic roles?

Not necessarily. I don’t have an agenda and I don’t really have a view of my career if I’m not looking back at it. I just respond to what comes my way. As soon as I start to think about a plan, it suddenly feels very dishonest to me.

How do you choose your films? Is it a purely aesthetic decision?

Yeah, it’s just a response in the same way that you read books, and out of the five books you read, you go, “Wow, this one has really stuck with me.” Within that are various elements. Can I see myself as that character? Can I see myself doing something with that character that feels endless and timeless, and not boxed in? I look at screenplays and I go, “Yeah, it’s an interesting story, and I could step in there, but I feel like there’s something limited about it.” That’s what makes me say no to something. Or I’ll go, “Well the character’s fantastic, but the story’s lame, or doesn’t have enough in it, or whatever it happens to be.” Saying no to something can be just as affecting as saying yes to something. It just happens that I say no more often than I say yes.

So I’m assuming that you didn’t sign up for “Prometheus” because you wanted to make a science fiction film. 

Absolutely [not]. The character that I’m playing is fascinating. It didn’t even occur to me until I started doing all this press and people were like, “So, two science fiction movies. Is this your new thing?”

I know you can’t really get into the movie’s plot, but what was it like working with Ridley Scott?

It was amazing. It’s funny because every time I start to talk about my five minutes with Ridley Scott, I think about Russell Crowe working with him five times, and I go, “Really, what can I say?”

You have more insight than most.

(Laughter) I suppose I do. Ridley has a wonderful way of making you feel comfortable and making it feel like it’s a little, intimate story that you’re filming. You forget about the five 3-D cameras that are around and this massive world that this whole thing inhabits. He has a great regard for his actors and what he wants them to do; he’s a great communicator in that sense. Really, it was an absolute delight.

Do you remember the first time you saw “Alien”? It’s always been one of those movie-watching experiences that leaves a lasting impression on people.

I don’t remember the first time I saw it, but I’ve seen it a few times. And of course I watched it again prior to shooting “Prometheus.” I looked at it and realized it’s actually a horror movie. The fact that it’s set in space gives it the credibility and the integrity of there being strange creatures that can kill you. When you make a horror movie set in a house and some ooga-booga monster comes out from under the floorboards, you know it’s safe because it’s not actually real. I guess the realm of science fiction enables you to make a horror movie as effective as “Alien” because fuck knows what can come and get you out there in space. Listening to what Ridley has to say about science fiction, and why science fiction exists, I think he’d probably laugh at a movie like “Lockout.”

One of the things that’s so curious about your career is that you seem to move seamlessly from supporting to leading roles and back again. It sounds like that’s not necessarily by design. Do you think of yourself as a leading man, in as much as that label still means anything in post-recession Hollywood?

I don’t and I think it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to feel like you can carry something. I know that’s a contradiction because I’ve played leading roles, but I play a leading role in “Memento” who’s wracked with anxiety and confusion. Or I play a leading role in “Lockout” who’s kind of smart-alecky and cynical. I struggle with the idea of playing the guy that everybody wants to be. I feel like I play the guy that everyone knows they’ve got inside themselves and they fucking wish wasn’t there. If there’s a theme across the characters I play, that’s probably it.

You’ve described yourself as having a “mini nervous breakdown” a decade ago about your acting career. What precipitated that and how did you get past it?

I went through a period where I just wanted to punch everybody. Since then, I’ve had a lot of therapy and I’ve figured a lot of things out. I think what was underlying it all was the fact that I’d been [acting] since I was a kid. Here I was at 30, still doing what I was doing when I was 8, and still responding to it all in exactly the same way. I didn’t feel confident saying this career that I have was based on the decision of an adult.

[Another] prime thing was that I just didn’t feel confident about what I was capable of and what skills I had. I needed to take a year away, reassess and realize that I’ve got some skills, I have something to offer and I can see the validity in this.

In a profile for the Independent in the U.K., you were quoted as saying that “you need to have a level of emotional consistency when you raise a child, and I don’t know that I have that.” Do you think that’s a hazard of the career that you’ve chosen?

(Laughter) No, I think it’s just the moody bastard that I can be. Look, I’m probably far more stable now. Again, that probably goes hand in hand with the fluctuating person that I’ve been in the past. But having said that, I still don’t want children and my wife doesn’t want children. I still have those moments — they’re much less frequent and to a much lesser degree — where I’m filled with intense anger. I hate myself and I hate everything going on around me, but I know how to handle it now.

Few people, at least in this country, know about your teen bodybuilding career. 

Weird, right?

A little, yeah. How did that come about?

I was going to the gym when I was pretty young, just a kid with his mum. She would be doing aerobics or whatever, and I was doing general fitness stuff. It was a gym that was owned and run by a husband and wife team — she was a runner-up Miss Universe a couple of times, a Miss Australia winner. Her husband was one of the powers that be in the bodybuilders federation. Purely because it was that gym, they were saying to me, “You know, you should think about entering this competition.” I really had no interest in pursuing it. It was just a fluke.

A lot of actors use their visibility as a kind of platform for their political views. Is there any cause that you feel particularly passionate about?

There are a lot of things that I feel strongly about, but I really don’t feel like I’m the right person to blow his trumpet. I think that it affects how I’m viewed as an actor.

Maybe it’s a little lame to say that, because if I’ve got the chance to make a change, then shouldn’t I? At the same time, I don’t want to undermine [myself] by getting on my soapbox. But in answer to your question, animals. Animals, animals.

You’re English-born, but raised in Australia. How does it feel that a majority of your audience recognizes you for the work you’ve done in America?

Hollywood is pretty much the center of the filmmaking world. I know they make a lot of films in India, but I don’t speak Indian. I’m always trying to work more at home; there’s something very personal about that. Of course, I would like those films to be seen. It was great when “Animal Kingdom” had the effect that it did and “Priscilla” as well. But it’s always an honor to work here. When the Americans make a good film, it’s pretty special really.

My interview with McKay will air in full this Tuesday on my weekday AM760 morning radio show. You can click here to stream the full interview live when it airs on Tuesday, or find it archived on the show’s podcast page after it airs. Here is an edited transcript of our discussion, which includes a look at the role of politics in comedy and some specific hints from McKay about what Ron Burgundy may end up doing in the “Anchorman” sequel.

Why has it taken Ron Burgundy nine years to come back to the American stage?

Well, first off, we went and did some other movies; that was the initial delay. By the time we heard from enough fans and heard enough of the demand for a sequel, it had been a few years. We went to the studio and they kind of weren’t into it initially. They said the original one made pretty good money, but for what it made we’ll give you this and this, and it was a very low budget. We would have all been working for free to do it.

For the next couple of years we’d check in with them every now and then and go, are you sure you don’t want to do it? And finally they had said basically no three times and we had given up and thought all right, let’s go do another movie. We were playing with the idea of doing “Stepbrothers 2″ or another original movie. And just at the last second I said, go check in with them again and see if it’s just 100 percent dead. And, crazy luck, a movie had fallen through for them, their view on it had kind of changed and that was it.

Do you think Ron Burgundy has become even more relevant than he was back in 2004?

It’s crazy — “Anchorman” is a movie that certainly fit the time when it came out and every year it gets more and more relevant. Part of what inspired the movie was just how ridiculous the news had become. It was all ratings driven. The people were getting better and better looking. The weather women were getting outrageously beautiful. It was all about the voice and the hair.

Since we made the movie it’s gone even more so in that direction. We talk about all these anchormen on the air now and they’re all kind of Ron Burgundy-esque guys. So yes, sadly, the character has gotten more and more relevant as the news has gotten to be nothing more than a ratings-driven profit machine that is never going to examine any of the real power in this country. The ridiculousness of “Anchorman” got less and less observed.

Can you give us a hint about what you’re thinking of having Ron Burgundy do in “Anchorman 2”?

I don’t want to give away too much, but I’ll just give a couple pieces of ideas that we’ve kicked around. Keep in mind we’re still writing the story, but I’ll say one phrase for you: custody battle. I’ll give you that. I’ll give you one other one: bowling for dollars.

At the same time you have been working on an “Anchorman” sequel, you and Will Ferrell have been branching out. For instance, you guys got involved with an idea to do a Spanish-only movie called “Casa de Mi Padre.” How did that happen?

It basically came out of Ferrell was up for doing a low-budget, kind of crazy movie. The original idea was we were just going to do a really bad movie and make it very poorly and have a lot of the joke be how badly the movie was made. At one point Ferrell said, “I want to do an all-Spanish movie.” We all kind of laughed and kept kicking around ideas. But Ferrell kept coming back to this idea.

No big studio was interested, because once again it’s an all-Spanish movie. So we got this company NALA, who was incredible; they financed it and it’s made a nice bundle of money. It’s gotten some good reactions. It opens in Mexico in a few weeks and our goal is No. 1 in Mexico. I just think that would be awesome.

There seems to be a trend in Hollywood where the same things are done over and over again. And yet, you and Will Ferrell keep doing different things. How have you resisted the pressure to just do the same stuff?

A lot of it’s Will, because he’s such a unique star in the sense that a lot of guys who do well in movies, a lot of actors and actresses get successful and they desperately want to stay on top, so they repeat those formulas.

From a distance, if you squint your eyes, I’m sure a lot of listeners are like, what do you mean? It’s Will Ferrell, he does Will Ferrell movies. But if you really look at it he tries to do something different with each one, whether it’s an action cop movie like “The Other Guys” or doing “Talladega Nights” going into red state America or “Casa de Mi Padre” or “Stranger Than Fiction,” which is more of a drama. He’s really amazing with that, he’s driven by it, and so am I; we want to be challenged and excited. We actually feel like it’s harder to do the same formula over and over again, because people pick up on it and you get blasted. Whereas if you’re always doing something surprising or interesting or challenging people dig it, audiences want to see it.

As the creator of the website Funny or Die, how do you think the Internet is changing the kind of content we’re seeing on movies and television?

It’s amazing. I’m 43 and I’ll certainly look at a lot of stuff on the computer, having a website, but my daughter doesn’t watch TV. All she does is see stuff off of the computer, and all her friends are the same way. They don’t watch television; they’ll watch TV shows replayed on the computer, so there is a massive shift going on right now.

What that means is more and more movies and TV shows being done for a lower budget. Movies like “Paranormal Activity” that are made for a very low price because the production value and technology has gotten so good; most of the time that’s not what leads movies or TV choices. I mean, when you get to giant spectacles like “Avatar” and “The Avengers,”  yes, it’s going to be led by special effects. But 80 percent of the content is about the ideas, the actors, the writing and the ideas you’re expressing. So, I think there’s actually a good thing happening because of that.

You and Will Ferrell may be working on a movie about how difficult it is to get into college. You’re also a producer on an upcoming movie called “The Campaign” where Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis play candidates running against each other. Is this a deliberate effort to work on more politically themed films?

Here’s the thing: I don’t view politics as politics. I view them as choices that we’re making as a group, and when those choices get crazy you gotta comment on them and make fun. I have no political ax to grind, I just find it absurd that huge billion-dollar corporations can take over elections. I just find it insane that, for instance, we give tax breaks to people like myself making millions of dollars, while there’re no tax breaks for working people. That, to me, is not a political issue, that’s a life issue. And Will and I just don’t discern between the two.

If something’s crazy we want to comment on it. We know it’s funny, we know it can be tragic. But most of all we know it’s interesting and relevant. First and foremost when you’re doing comedy, you gotta be relevant and applicable to the times that you’re living in. When you try and just do comedy about who is dating who and lifestyle jokes, it gets tiring after a while. It’s hard to be funny in that realm.

Do you think there’s been a shift in the country that has made the sometimes risk-averse entertainment world a little more accepting of controversial political topics as fodder for comedy?

Yeah, I think there’s no question about it. Look, we lost our minds in the ‘80s and ‘90s; we really as a society just felt that everyone could only care about themselves. There was no responsibility to discuss what’s going on in your town, your state, your nation. And it was a blast, it was really fun, but it doesn’t work.

Today’s debates over unionization, community planning, civil rights and all these other successes that made our country great — these successes gave us the cushion to party and all become selfish morons in the ‘80s and ‘90s. So now we’re returning to those debates and we’re discussing things that used to be discussed.

In the ‘80s and ‘90s, when you had dinner with your family or people you met, you didn’t talk about the factory closing down the street or the pollution. But now, we are talking about these really important issues and I think it’s a really good thing. I don’t think it’s right-wing or left-wing, I think it’s just discussing what’s going on — and it’s good that we can now do that.

A British-educated democratic activist who had been tortured in prison during the 30-year dictatorship of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, Nasheed was the surprise winner of a 2008 election that followed a popular uprising against the regime. In addition to pursuing an ambitious agenda of liberalization and modernization within his entirely Islamic nation, Nasheed seized upon climate change as an international clarion call. And no wonder — the Maldives is an Indian Ocean archipelago of several hundred inhabited islands (and fewer than 350,000 people), with a median altitude of 1.5 meters above sea level. As Nasheed says in Jon Shenk’s extraordinarily compelling documentary film, “The Island President,” it is a nation without a single hill. Nasheed has traveled the world describing the Maldives as the Poland of global warming — meaning, of course, Poland in 1939. If his country cannot be saved from rising sea levels, he maintains, then there may be no saving Tokyo or Mumbai or New Orleans or New York.

Shenk got extraordinary access to the inner workings of Nasheed’s administration, attending cabinet meetings in Malé, the Maldivian capital, and traveling with Nasheed to address the British Parliament and the United Nations. We watch Nasheed and his advisors hatching the plan to make the Maldives the world’s first carbon-neutral nation — not because it will make any practical difference, but because it will stand as a moral example that might shame the big emitters into doing something. (“At least we will die knowing we did the right thing,” he says.) Most fascinating of all, we observe the backroom deal that Nasheed helped broker in Copenhagen, where he served as a critical emissary between his Western allies (notably the British and Australian prime ministers) and the Chinese and Indian delegations, which viewed any climate deal as an unfair limitation on their right to self-development.

“The Island President” had been playing at film festivals for more than a year, to widespread acclaim, when an unexpected political twist lent it a new urgency. In early February, Nasheed was forced to resign the presidency in what he says was a coup d’état staged by Gayoom and his supporters, including radical Islamists who opposed his reforms. As Nasheed wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed a day after his resignation, “Let the Maldives be a lesson for aspiring democrats everywhere: the dictator can be removed in a day, but it can take years to stamp out the lingering remnants of his dictatorship.”

I recently met with Nasheed and filmmaker Jon Shenk, at a private club in downtown Manhattan to discuss “The Island President,” climate change policy and the situation in the Maldives. If the public genuinely supported him, I asked the former president, couldn’t he have resisted the coup. “Yes, I could have remained in power,” he said. “We could have murdered the coup. I could have asked people to go out and start shooting at the police, and finish it. But that would be a very shortsighted way of looking at things.” One can perhaps accuse Nasheed of being too idealistic, or overly optimistic — I’m afraid he undervalues the power of know-nothingism, arrogance and stupidity in American politics, for example. But you can’t say he isn’t taking the long view. (He says that if and when new elections are held in the Maldives, he will definitely run again.)

Mr. President, early in the film there’s a scene where you observe that after you had taken power in 2008 you thought the fight was over, and then you realized it was only beginning. That’s even more prophetic now than it was then.

Mohamed Nasheed: Yes, it is. You know, the dictatorship is back again. We were complacent to think that it would be easy to get rid of a dictatorship. Of course it was not easy to win that election and bring Gayoom down in the first place. But now he is back again, and the fight has to continue. It is very important that democracy be restored in the Maldives, and we hope that friendly governments understand the necessity and the need for it. As we see it now, I’m afraid the government there is going to all sorts of places. Certainly it’s not going democratically, and we need to bring it back.

For people who might not have followed the confusing news reports out of your country, please update us on what’s been going on.

There was a coup, and they overthrew the elected government. The previous dictator, Gayoom, is back, and all his children are back in ministerial posts. All his associates are back in government. Also, what is worse — not only Gayoom is back, but this coup was instigated through Islamic radicalism as well. There is a section of that in the Maldives, and I’m afraid we now have three Islamic radicals in the cabinet. We beat them in three elections, and they were not able to get any position in government. Now, through the coup, they are back, and Gayoom is back. So there is no respect for what the people have said.

And how has the general public reacted to this?

Everyone is out on the streets. There are huge demonstrations going on. People don’t seem to be getting tired. They’re not relenting, and they want to go on and on and on. We hope for a peaceful solution, of course, to what is happening now. We wouldn’t want the country to deteriorate into violence. If we can act quickly, if we can do it now, we will be avoiding a whole bunch of difficulties in the future.

President Obama spent part of his childhood in the Indian Ocean region and has a long-standing personal and political interest in that part of the world. Has he or his administration reached out to you since the coup?

I’m afraid that the United States government was very quick to recognize the status quo. This is very, very sad. I was shocked to see that. I hoped that they would understand, and realign their policies. Now I’m trying to speak to the people of the United States, because of that. We respect the United States and its people so much. We’ve been trying to liberalize the country. We’ve been trying to make it into a more moderate country, and it is sad that our policies were not seen and not backed by the United States. They’re still talking about how they need time; they’re still talking to Gayoom. There’s a game we used to play when we were little: Finders Keepers. It doesn’t matter how you find it, you know! But that’s not how one would support a democracy. I would hope that President Obama would understand what is happening in the Maldives, and I would hope he would lay his weight on the bureaucrats and bring a better political solution to what is happening in our country.

I assume that the new government, the one headed by your former vice president, is not going to address the climate-change issue in the same way you did.

They can’t. You must have a high moral authority to address climate change. Every time you start speaking, you know, you can’t be answering back to the skeletons in your own closet. So it’s not going to be possible for them to articulate in the same manner as a democratic government. I don’t see it happening.

At numerous points in the film, you express personal misgivings about dealing with the compromises and the rhetoric of politics. It makes the film very dramatic, because you seem like such a plainspoken and pragmatic person in a realm of spin and empty words. How frustrating was it, actually being a head of state?

Well, you know, soon you realize this is how governments work. We were elected to show our differences, not to go along with the status quo or to go along with tradition. We were elected to change things, so we did change things. We brought in legislation for a proper tax system. We brought in legislation for social protection programs, including medical care for all. We wanted to liberalize the country, in tune with its older Islamic traditions. We wanted to bring out the women, to empower them. These were all things that we were facing, major challenges. We wanted to reform the judiciary, the military, the police. We could not address all these things, and yes, at times it was frustrating. But we were, I think, delivering on our pledges and that was why Gayoom came back. He knew he could do nothing in elections, so he had to topple me.

Jon, let’s bring you into the conversation. As an outsider who clearly spent a lot of time in the Maldives, did you see the writing on the wall, as far as what happened to Nasheed’s presidency?

Jon Shenk: Anybody visiting the capital or talking to people in government could see from the get-go that the shadow of 30 years of dictatorship loomed heavily over the country. You’re talking about 30 years of autocratic rule, where contracts were given to favored relatives and friends, monopolies were allowed and all that. We would go to cafés in the capital and sit with our Maldivian counterparts to talk about the logistics of filmmaking, and their answers would be given to us in whispers. We’d ask, “Why are you whispering?” and they would say, “Well, you never know who’s in the room. Gayoom’s people could be in the room.” That’s the kind of fear they had. I’d say, “But they’re not in power anymore,” and the answer was, “Oh, but they are. They’re still in the police, they run the opposition parties, they’re trying to undermine us at every stage. And if they do get the presidency back, we’ll be put in prison.”

So that kind of fear really did exist. When the coup happened, it was shocking, and I was worried about Nasheed and others who I’d been working with. But it wasn’t surprising. They really were trying to do an impossible thing in the Maldives, by creating this vision of a modern, liberal, democratic state on the shoulders of years and years of despotism. And by the way, think about what’s going on in Egypt and Tunisia and Libya today. That’s what they’re trying to do, and in some ways what we’re seeing here — two steps forward, one step back — could be a harbinger of what is to come in those countries.

Mr. President, you’ve mentioned the role that Islamic radicals now play in the government. Can you talk about the role that Islam has played historically in the Maldives?

M.N.: Whatever happens in the Middle East also happens in the Maldives, and whatever happens in the Maldives also happens in the Middle East. During the ’70s, Wahhabism and radical Islam, as soon as it started elsewhere, filtered into the Maldives. And then we saw Gayoom coming. He was educated at al-Azhar University [in Egypt], where he was a classmate of Hosni Mubarak. Gayoom came in the late ’70s, and that also fueled the Islamic rhetoric. When he discovered he could no longer control the radicals, he started arresting them and beating them up. That created an underground network of Islamic radicals, and for a long time they were the only organized group in town. The only organized dissent came from them, because [the democratic opposition] were all in jail.

So young people started joining the radical Islamic groups, and by the time we were able to articulate a movement, they were already entrenched. But we were able to beat them in elections, over and over again. We beat them in the presidential election and we beat them in the parliamentary elections. Out of 1,081 local council seats, they won 4, and only because we did not want to contest them there. I felt that they had to be in the game somewhere. My assumption and my feeling is, you know, if we were able to do the things we were working on, without the coup, we would have been able to liberalize the country and address Islamic radicalism through democratic means, without infringing on their human rights and so on. But unfortunately we were not allowed to do that.

So what is the ideology driving Gayoom and his supporters? Or is there any?

No, there’s no ideology behind it. I mean, the ideology is xenophobia and racism. All the rhetoric against Israel and the West, calling everyone a heathen. It’s really narrow-minded and intolerant and nationalistic. This is an island mentality as well, but it’s possible to change that. It’s not the people who have that mentality but the ruling elite, who want to suppress the people through that narrative, that rhetoric.

Jon, this movie has now gotten a lot of publicity that perhaps you did not expect. Is there a danger that the issue you set out to highlight — the importance of climate change, and of President Nasheed’s engagement with the issue — is now being overshadowed by the political context?

J.S.: When you asked earlier whether the new government would carry on the climate battle, the thing is that Waheed, the new president and former vice president, might pay lip service to that. But it totally ignores the important thing that has happened in the Maldives, where Nasheed and his people have been working for 20 years, in a grass-roots, Gandhian struggle for civil rights and good governance and freedom of speech, all that stuff that has happened in so many of the great democracies of the world. The fight against climate change is an extension of that, in President Nasheed’s mind. It’s a fight for human rights. It’s a fight for the right to exist in a healthy environment and to have the freedom that goes along with that. So they’re one and the same. The fact that the film might get a little more publicity because of this political struggle really is one and the same with the struggle on climate change. It sounds naïve, maybe, but you’re struggling for truth and justice. The climate debate is about that, and so is the fight for democracy. Thematically they are the same, and that’s why Nasheed took on the climate fight when he stepped into office. It was an extension of his life’s work.

M.N.: During the ’70s, democracy movements had human rights as a foundation to build on. I feel that now climate issues and human rights are equally important. You have to save the planet as much as save the people, and democracy can be built on that foundation. I would hope that Egyptians, or all the other democracy movements in the Middle East, would find climate change as a track that they have to address. They cannot come into government without understanding climate issues, and what is happening to the environment around them. If you get beaten up as a human being, that’s very bad. When the world gets battered, no one is physically crying, but the planet is. All democracy leaders, all people who want to fight for freedom and justice, must fight for climate as well. In that sense, Jon’s film is timely and necessary. It’s must viewing for anybody with any interest in democracy.

How long do we have to save the Maldives? If nothing is done, when will your country become uninhabitable?

I think the science here is very, very sorted out. We can’t be so silly as to question the science. We have a window of about seven years to start acting now, and if we can’t do that, then I think within the next 70 years or so we will have very serious issues, not just in the Maldives but everywhere. Issues about resources, about water, about migration. Climate migration — there will be a huge exodus of people from place to place. The Pentagon has come out and said that this is a huge national security threat. But elections are fought almost entirely on economic issues. Nobody talks about human rights.

Presumably we’re not going to hear either President Obama or Gov. Romney talking about this issue for the rest of the year. They may talk about gasoline prices, but not about the underlying issues.

No, but the thing is, we do everything that we do for our children. Why are you working? Why am I working? We would not have any policies for ourselves, but we should have policies for our children. I think democratic leaders have been so shortsighted in listening to their advisors: “Oh, no, no, there are huge oil companies who can do this and that. You can’t do this, Mr. President!” You can do it, and you have to do it. You might lose power, but you are saving your children. We can’t have our policies only go as far as their noses, and the next election.

I am sure a new age of politicians is coming, in the United States as well. I still believe that if President Obama would start articulating on climate issues, he would get more votes, not fewer. I am convinced of it. The people of this country — yes, you are worried about gasoline prices, that’s true. But you are also worried about what’s happening to the rest of the world, to your own planet. You can’t just assume people are so simple, and be so condescending toward them. If you listen to advisors, the only thing people care about, apparently, is what’s in their pocket. If that were true, I wouldn’t be in government. Our children understand all this better than we do. They are not going to vote for oil companies and the status quo. If political leaders think that they have a future by taking the safe side, I think they’re very wrong.

“The Island President” is now playing in New York and San Francisco. It opens April 6 in Los Angeles; April 18 in Waterville, Maine; April 20 in San Diego and Washington; and April 27 in Detroit and Minneapolis, with more cities to follow.

De Niro’s performance style was informed by the two dominant mid-20th-century approaches to acting. By the mid-1950s, anyone who wanted to be somebody came through the Actors Studio, led by Lee Strasberg, who honed an approach to acting that critics were referring to as “Method acting.” Today, we think of a Method actor as one that inhabits his character to the degree that the actor literally puts himself in the shoes of his character – even when he is not on camera. However, there was another acting technique during the era being taught by Stella Adler, where Marlon Brando studied and with whom De Niro enrolled.

Adler taught that the actor does not embody the character so much as he becomes the character onstage (or film) through the actions of the play (or script). Like most actors of the time, De Niro ended up studying both at Stella’s school and the Studio. The schism between Strasberg and Adler created the greatest polemic of 20th century acting, as De Niro recalled when he sat down to discuss his earliest days as an actor and his latest film.

You began studying acting as a teenager?

I went to the Dramatic Workshop when I was 16 for about a year and then I went to study with Stella Adler when I was about 18 until about 21. I studied there full-time as much as anyone at that point. I took script analysis, sight reading.  I remember working on “The Girl on the Via Flaminia” … and all the classics: scenes from Tennessee Williams, Clifford Odets, Chekhov.

Would you agree that Stella Adler’s genius was in script analysis?

I always gave her credit for script analysis and her approach towards acting. Just for the record, I wanted to do that. How she behaved, her affectation, that whole side of her … I never cared for personally. But she made a lot of sense as a teacher.  She had a very healthy approach toward acting and technique, although she was a little at odds with the Studio and Strasberg and all that, but then she had a great actor, Brando, with her.

You mentioned the schism between Strasberg and Stella Adler.  She focused less on the actor’s personal past and more on his creative imagination.

With Stella, imagination was important, research too, but the imagination. I remember her saying, “You just don’t make it neurotic, unless the character is neurotic,” but it’s not about you. It’s about what you get objectively looking at photographs, picking things out, script analysis. You look at photographs and you don’t “fictionalize” as she would say, what’s in that photo, but take what is really in that photo and the same applies to a script, more to a play in the traditional sense, but to a movie script as well. I started getting involved at the Actor’s Studio when I was 24, 25, 26 years old. Some friends were going there and I did a play there, so I started going to the Studio after I left Stella’s. At the Studio, it was different … everything was more in the moment.

When you say, “it’s not about you,” do you mean an actor has to get his ego out of the way?

There was a teacher who taught at Sarah Lawrence [College], and he said just go on instinct. And it kind of frees you because you get distracted with What’s my character? What’s my motivation? I felt there was something of value with that, especially with me. I thought about all these things before [I could even] move, whereas otherwise you can just go with it.

So you’re prone to overanalyzing a character?

Yes, especially as a young actor. You forget in life people don’t behave that way. They just do what they’re doing, there’s no thought behind it.

On “Inside the Actors Studio” you were asked to give young actors advice, and you said, “You have nothing to lose, so make it as personal as you can.” What did you mean by that?

What I meant was if you’re going for a reading and you got nothing to lose because so many things are stacked against you — there’s a lot of competition out there — so when you read, the only thing you have is your own uniqueness. So, you don’t need to be afraid to follow your instincts about what you think the character is doing. Just go with it, because if nothing else, the people watching you, the director, the casting people, whatever, will be impressed by what you’ve done and they’ll take notice. You have to try and be courageous. Don’t hold back … Just go with it. And sometimes it’s easier because you know where to go with the character, and sometimes it’s harder. But in general, just follow your instincts — even if you know you’re going to fail. If you don’t take that risk, you’re probably not going to make an impression.

That brings me to your latest role as Jonathan Flynn. How did you prepare for that character?

We had the writer, Nick Flynn, there all the time. I always feel it’s important to have the writer there as much as you can because they give you all their experience. He was so helpful with every detail that he knew about and used his instincts when he didn’t know for sure. I met the father. I went up to Boston. Nick had material his father had written on a novel, letters, and so on. Again, I followed my instincts, based on the writing, where they thought there was something I could add or take away or whatever.

How do you change up the failed alcoholic-writer cliché?

Well, he was an alcoholic . . . To me, it’s hard to be a writer and to have the discipline and the need to be in solitude with your own thoughts and express them on paper. I think the father was never able to resolve that. He did, but he couldn’t pull it together.  It takes a sort of discipline and a kind of professionalism whether you want to or not. I thought maybe the reason (he was) going to the alcohol is he wasn’t able to face the task of writing. He did it in spurts, sporadically; pieces of paper, there were things he had written. He did write most of a novel, but it never came together, as Nick says in the book.

With writing, great writing especially, you see how the material affects everything on a grander scale, so that this character … represents an attitude of the world, or this part of humanity, if you will. Stella gave me that sense when you’re reading these characters they represent more than just themselves but they are themselves in a very real way. That made an impression on me; she taught how acting applies to a bigger vision.

For new initiates, a brief history: The Punch Brothers were formed six years ago, when mandolin prodigy Chris Thile decided he’d reached the end of the creative line with Nickel Creek, the Grammy-winning acoustic trio he’d joined when he was eight years old. (That’s not a typo.) He recruited a group of similarly fresh-faced virtuosos — Leftover Salmon banjoist Noam Pikelny, Infamous Stringdusters guitarist Chris Eldridge, fiddler Gabe Witcher, and bassist Greg Garrison — to help him record a four-movement, 40-minute “folk-formal” suite titled “The Blind Leaving the Blind”; before they wrestled that beast to the ground, they released in 2006 Thile’s solo album, “How to Grow a Woman From the Ground.” (Garrison has since been replaced by Paul Kowert who, at age 25, is one of the few musicians in the world who can make the rest of the band feel old.)

When “The Blind Leaving the Blind,” which forms the bulk of the Punch Brothers’ debut, “Punch,” was finally released in 2008, it was greeted with rapturous hosannas by the press. The band’s sophomore effort, 2010’s “Antifogmatic,” was similarly praised; in his “slobbering rave” in Paste, Ed Helms, who plays a mean banjo when he’s not working his day job as Dunder Mifflin Scranton branch manager Andy Bernard on “The Office,” wrote that the band was so good, the only explanation was that they were “aliens, and they’re here to take over our world. … [T]heir music is an impossibly perfect mixture of down-home charm and staggering sophistication” that could “only be the result of complex algorithms running on an interplanetary mainframe.”

That makes what the band has achieved on “Who’s Feeling Young Now?” all the more remarkable. The album opens with “Movement and Location,” a propulsive masterpiece that sets the tone, both musically and thematically, for what’s to come. It begins with Thile chopping a rhythm line under a cascade of staccato eighth notes, courtesy of Pikelny and Witcher; when Eldridge and Kowert jump into the fray, it’s off to the contrapuntal races. Thile, whose natural inclination is to tell stories (oftentimes about romance), here veers toward the abstract: “Did he ever live,” he sings, a touch of echo added to his reedy tenor, “in those three and 20 years, for a thing but movement and location?”

That, of course, is a reference to baseball great Greg Maddux, who once summed up his career as one of the best pitchers ever to play the game by saying, “I try to do two things: locate my fastball and change speeds. That’s it. I try to keep it as simple as possible.” With the help of producer Jacquire King, who has worked with Tom Waits, Buddy Guy, Norah Jones and Kings of Leon, the Punch Brothers follow suit, in their own, inimitable way: The shape-shifting time signatures, technical virtuosity and exquisite craftsmanship are all in full effect, but the overriding quality of the dozen songs on “Who’s Feeling Young Now?” is that they pack a visceral punch that’s not dependent on the listener’s musical knowledge or sophistication. It’s hard to imagine another band doing an acoustic rendition of Radiohead’s hypnotic, effect-laden “Kid A” without making it sound gimmicky; in the Punch Brothers’ hands, it’s somehow as powerful and transporting as the original.

I first met the Punch Brothers in 2007, when they were still workshopping “The Blind Leaving the Blind.” Late last month, I sat down with them before the second of the two sold-out shows at the Somerville Theater near Boston that launched their current tour. They’ll be on the road for the next few months; if they’re coming to your town, I strongly recommend checking them out. I imagine that in time, folks who passed up a chance to see the band strut its stuff will feel a little like those New Yorkers who were offered tickets to see the Allmans at the Fillmore East 41 years ago and decided they had something better to do with their time.

What’s been different about the new record?

Chris Thile: We didn’t consciously attempt to make a more accessible record — but we did consciously go in wanting to make a more direct, concise statement. A clearer statement: Basically, making sure that every song started, in our collective mind, with an unassailable kind of motive, an unassailable cornerstone.

Musically or thematically?

Musically, speaking first and foremost. Sometimes that can be in the form of a musical hook that comes prepackaged with words and everything.

Like what?

Like “Patchwork Girlfriend.” [He sings: “Guess I need a little love from every square of my sweet little patchwork girlfriend / Of my sweet little patchwork girlfriend.”] That just seemed like it was working on all fronts, and that was a big difference. That each thing, each song had to get all five of us moving —

Gabe Witcher: Like, physically moving.

Thile: It couldn’t just appeal to us cerebrally, like, “What a cool idea!”

Was that not true on previous records?

Chris Eldridge: I think we learned from the last record. [Producer] Jon Brion — he did “Antifogmatic” — one of the lessons he really tried to instill in us is that as long as somebody is moving when they were listening to our music, they couldn’t accuse our music of being overly intellectual or too fancy. [Brion’s production credits include albums by Aimee Mann, Rufus Wainwright, Fiona Apple, Spoon and Kanye West.] He was just really trying to instill in us the kind of visceral hit that makes great music great.

Thile: The only problem, of course, is he got that message to us too late in the game.

Eldridge: He should have gotten a kind of pre-production credit on this album. He comes from that same school [as "Who’s Feeling Young Now" producer Jacquire King], who was constantly asking us to peel back one layer —

Noam Pikelny: — or defend choices. This was the first time we met a sixth person preceding recording where we established a trust between — we were playing these songs that were kind of half formed, or just seeds of songs, and [King] was completely frank with us. He would tell us, “I love what’s going on here but all of a sudden you’ve completely lost me. This was going great and now I have no idea what you guys are trying to do. You have to either be more eloquent in how you’re constructing this or you have to peel it back —”

Witcher: “— and focus in on two or three things that make this song this song, focus in on those and let those be the elements. Don’t get in the way of those ideas coming across.”

Is there a song on the album where you were getting in the way and Jacquire forced you to peel it back?

Thile: “Clara” got simplified. We kept kind of trying to come up with more — basically that song has an almost Baroque harmonic scheme. And I think as a result, we were kind of layering in, kind of like a Bach chorale or a Brandenburg concerto or something like that — but still at its core, that’s a song. That song is a song — a melody, and some nice harmony — and that’s what it needed to be. We kept trying to add stuff to it and it kept not being as enjoyable as just hearing that melody and playing those chords. And so what we ended up doing is adding to the core of the song, only a bass — basically all that song has is the harmony it started with, the melody and bass line. And then what we would add is, on those channels, you can almost just, instead of adding parts, you’re reinforcing existing parts. And we did a lot more of that on this record. Instead of adding to the core idea, if there’s like two or three core ideas, instead of adding a fourth and fifth idea, with the members of the band — which is sort of how “Antifogmatic” worked, you know, look at something “Don’t Need No,” or “You Are,” or “Me and Us,” or —

Pikelny: — or “Woman and the Bell.”

Thile: Absolutely. In those, each guy has a fairly significant idea expressed — and those fourth and fifth ideas are not actually imperative. They don’t have to be there. And it served to obscure the ones that do have to be where they were.

Pikelny: It’s probably a sign of the time — we had endless time when we were making “Antifogmatic” compared to the time we had available [to record "Who’s Feeling Young Now"].

Endless time in the studio?

Pikelny: Endless time in New York arranging it. We would spend weeks and weeks just on a single song.

When you recorded your first album, “Punch,” you weren’t all living in New York, right? And for “Antifogmatic,” you were?

Right — we were all in the same place, and there was this sense that if we didn’t all have our hands full, we weren’t giving the world all that we could give it.

Witcher: I think there’s also a large sense of “The Blind Leaving the Blind” being such a huge undertaking for everyone, that all of a sudden, if we weren’t that involved in trying to make music — you know, ["Antifogmatic" had] shorter songs but, like, things still being that intense for us as musicians trying to perform it, then we were, you know, copping out in a way.

Was there also a sense that, you had recorded this 42-minute, four-movement suite on your first album, and if you weren’t equally ambitious in whatever you did next, then you wouldn’t be pushing yourself?

Pikelny: Yeah. And Jacquire, his contribution as far as arranging the songs wasn’t just in the peeling back  —there were specific examples where he convinced us to be more bold in how quickly we could move through certain sections of tunes. We thought, like, ‘Oh, no, we have to do this multiple times before you can move on.’

Why?

We thought maybe we were trying to cram in too much information in too little time, and if you didn’t get a repeat, you couldn’t latch on to [a phrase], and by the time the next section came through, you’d just be foggy as to where it was going. But I think some of those things made the music more impactful. We had been a little conservative in our thinking how many times these ideas had to be repeated after they were introduced.

Thile: “Clara” went that way, too. It got skimmed down by 30 seconds — just things like, let’s get to the next verse, I’m ready for the next verse, let’s go straight to the bridge.

Witcher: That was actually a last minute studio recording: In the morning, not getting it right, then breaking for lunch, saying, ‘Why don’t we try this and this,’ getting back in there and going, ‘That works, now we’re there.’

Pikelny: I think back to “How To Grow A Woman From The Ground,” I still think that was one of our most successful records and it was something we did very, very quickly. We had, what, how many days? Three days. Three days to rehearse. And at that time we barely knew each other musically, but the language—

Thile: —whatever worked the fastest was what we had to do—

Pikelny: It was kind of a roots music. We all had the vocabulary to go through this material and create arrangements and create songs as a band would play them as if they had been on the road for a couple years within three days because it was so familiar to our backgrounds. And I think everything that has come since that record — “Blind Leaving the Blind” and “Antifogmatic” — I think that allowed us to approach playing our own original music with the same kind of confidence and abandon as we approached the music on “How to Grow.”

You mean you have identified a musical vocabulary as a band that you can inhabit without needing to—

Thile: Yeah, that can rival the kind of vocabulary that comes from growing up in a tradition. That’s a great point, that we have, the five of us, now, have a shared vocabulary enough to where we can actually arrive at things as intuitively as we arrived at, like, the “Brakeman’s Blues” [by Jimmie Rodgers] arrangement on “How To Grow A Woman From The Ground.”

Pikelny: That’s an element of it, but we also have the experience of “Blind Leaving the Blind,” and “Antifogmatic,” and all the shows we did in New York as residencies working on all these covers — just this language. We expanded our palette to something that was kind of beyond the kind of roots music we grew up with. So we worked through putting these songs together almost at a pace that was similar to the “How To Grow A Woman From The Ground” sessions. Of course, it was definitely it was more in depth; we didn’t do this record in three days. But there were certain songs, like “Movement and Location,” that were pretty much fully formed except for the lyrics, while Jacquire was there in an afternoon.

Was it a shorter timeframe because you’re all busy with other projects, or was it intentional?

Thile: It was almost as much a part of the process as anything. We can’t obsess about these arrangements; all we end up doing is obscuring our own point. And it’s not to say I’m not proud of “Antifogmatic” and “The Blind Leaving The Blind.” I’m proud of them. I feel like they’re very sort of tautly constructed — they’re just taut. They’re like — they’re fragile.

There’s not a lot of room to breathe.

I think we feel more comfortable in our skin as a band playing this new stuff. I think early on, we had to refer to stuff we’d been doing for decades for it to feel that natural and for us to have the authority. In the five and a half years that we’ve been together, we’ve put that together with this brain trust that now even with original music we’re playing — it like it’s been ours for decades.

Do you have plans for what is next?

I think we want to know what this feels like first. That’s my sense, at least. This process is only half done; now it’s time to see how the collaborator is—

This process meaning this album?

Yeah — I think the concept of audience as collaborator on this is significant. Their input on this is really important to us.

Has the audience collaborated on the previous two albums – or how the two albums existed in the world after they came out?

“Blind Leaving the Blind” was almost a conscious dismissal of the importance of the artist-audience relationship for me, almost as a knee-jerk reaction to my frustration in Nickel Creek, my feeling so beholden to the crowd, feeling like I had to play music that I hated or they would want their money back. Music that I wrote in the pea-soup fog of adolescence had to be performed to prevent massive disappointment in our audience. And I just got to my mid-20s, as this musician taking music more seriously than anything in his life, feeling like, ‘What am I doing? I’m playing music that I hate, that I wrote when I was 16. And I’m 25 now — I have big ideas!’

And I’m really — I’m proud of [“The Blind Leaving the Blind”] — but I was only thinking about what I wanted to hear, only thinking about what would be interesting to me. And when I thought about this ensemble — a bluegrass ensemble — I thought, ‘Why not write a really ambitious kind of folk-formal fusion that also takes into account the fact that folk music is never fully composed and then get guys who can really play.’

The idea was essentially a solo project, and we didn’t know enough about the Punch Brothers as an entity to know if that was really appropriate yet. That was our identity then, it was kind of this brainchild of mine that was made better by everyone’s participation and had a lot of potential as a more collaborative effort. So with that project, what I hadn’t really taken into consideration in a compositional process was how other people affect our own — the audience’s impact on the performance, how the environment would impact our own perception of what we were doing, and what we wanted to be doing.

It sounds like it took a while for you to be comfortable with the idea that caring how the audience reacts can be art of the creative process — that that doesn’t mean it’s not creative or you’re not being true to yourself.

That’s exactly right.