Aidan Quinn: The Mighty Quinn

The Playboys is up next.

"I had a lovely time," he says of the experience that took him back to his native Ireland. "I always go for a story. And I loved that character."

I tell him how wonderful I think Robin Wright was in it, and he agrees. "And Sean Penn was there, so I didn't have to worry about the press," he says. "Sean took all the headlines, all the attention. They left me alone. Completely."

"What do you think of Benny & Joon?'

"I think it was a sweet, fablelike movie," he says. "That was another one where I came in at the last minute."

Replacing... ?

"Woody Harrelson. Boy, I was in a frenzy, 'cause I actually worked more than Johnny Depp or Mary Stuart Masterson. And it was the straight man, he had to be the emotional center, the responsi¬ble one. We had a wonderful time--the three of us were just like kids. Johnny was amazing. I think he's incredibly talented."

By now, Quinn's got a small mound of butts on his tray. I'm beginning to feel guilty about the collection forming at my feet, so I pick them off the ground and put them on the tray. "I usually stick 'em in my pocket," he says.

"What bothered me about Benny & Joon," I tell him, "is that your character, Benny, never tells Joon that he loves her, never hugs her. She really needed a hug."

"It's funny you should say that. It drove me crazy, too. That was the director's choice. He felt it was stronger if we said it with our eyes, that Benny wasn't that type. I disagreed.

"I have a big family," he says, "and 'I love you' wasn't said a lot growing up. But once we reached a certain age--late teens--and went through some difficulties, we started to say it all the time. It's important."

Blink.

"Good popcorn movie," he says. I grimace. "You didn't like that one?"

"There was nothing to like. Although you and Madeleine Stowe were good in it, the story and dialogue were awful. Was it the money?"

"Well... no, it wasn't the money. It was an opportunity to play a character and work with director Michael Apted. We knew the script had some problems, and we worked on it a lot and it got a lot better. You know, you get older and a lot of dreams fade, because of your life and because of the way you are, or whatever, but it would be hard for me to not do a film in a decent role that Michael would want me to do. 'Cause it's important to me to work with someone I really like."

"Are you a big star?"

"No."

"Do you want to be?"

"No," he says. "And now you're gonna hear the same boring answer you hear from all actors in my kinda range: you would like to be a bigger name so you get better choices, so you get offered the better scripts first."

"You're a good actor, you get good parts, you're well known," I say, "but you're not famous like, say, Alec Baldwin. Is it your fault?"

"Yes, definitely," Quinn says. "A lot of it is my fault, because it doesn't interest me. And I break the rules all the time: I should be doing this one, and instead I do The Playboys. I don't care if one's going to be a commercial hit--this I don't like, and this I like. You do have to think careerwise sometimes in this business, but I think I think enough about my career. I make a tremendous amount of money, and I'm very well respected. I just don't get the consideration that big stars get as far as scripts go, or as far as input goes."

All that may change after his next three films hit the fans. The first one up is Kenneth Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, starring Branagh and De Niro. I tell Aidan that I've read the book and it's nice that the Frankensteins finally get to tell their side of the story. "Yeah, well it's certainly not everything that her book was," he says. "You couldn't do her book. But it takes more from her book then any other version has."

Does De Niro play the monster as sensitive?

"Yeah. I'll bet you he'll be incredible. I had some scenes with him. Now and then it's nice to do a supporting role--I get to work with great people, I get time off, and I don't have to worry about carrying the movie."

Then there's Legends of the Fall, directed by Ed Zwick and starring Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins, "a big, classic, epic kind of movie," according to Quinn. "Brad is actually hugely responsible for me being in it. He wanted me to do the movie really badly."

Is he a fan?

"Yeah, definitely. And I'm a fan of his. He does some work in this movie you've never seen come outta Brad. This movie was a serious journey for the actors who worked on it. With the exception of Anthony Hopkins, who has the amazing ability to be hysterically funny one second about the absurdities of acting, then a moment later would blow your socks off with a great performance the second the director said 'action.'

"I wonder if that title's gonna change," Quinn says about the third big film he has finished, The Stars Fell on Henrietta, due out next year. He co-stars with Robert Duvall. "It's a big production in a way, but a simple story. It's from Warner Bros, with Clint Eastwood producing. I play a poor sharecropper in Texas in the '30s."

"With a washboard stomach?"

"No, none of that," he says, laughing.

Well, I didn't think so. That would be a good career move.

"One of the things my representatives have convinced me of is that it's time for me to get my due as an actor," he says, as he gets up to dump our butts into an environmentally correct receptacle. "So, with these three movies coming out, I'm gonna be out there a little more."

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Stephen Saban interviewed Robert Altman for the October 1993 Movieline.

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