He's much honored for Forrest Gump and much anticipated in Apollo 13. Here Gary Sinise reminisces about slacker days gone by, sets the record straight on his relationship with John Malkovich, describes his small-screen kiss with Molly Ringwald, and--big surprise--praises Tom Hanks.
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Up until 1994, anyone who knew Gary Sinise--and there were not legions of these people--associated him with the Chicago theater group Steppenwolf, which he created at age 18 and guided to artistic and commercial success, spinning off stars like John Malkovich and Laurie Metcalf in the process. Despite his involvement in Steppenwolf's off-Broadway success with True West (which he directed and starred in with Malkovich), Orphans (which he directed) and Balm in Gilead (which he starred in), and the success, on Broadway, of The Grapes of Wrath (which he starred in), Sinise did not "happen" like the other Steppenwolf vets. His intense, but seamless, naturalistic style of acting was less easy to lionize than his friend Malkovich's showy mannerisms. Writ¬ers have described him as "America's answer to Gary Oldman" (do we want one?) and "a more volatile Gary Cooper" (an oxymoron). He acted in a few films, and, notably, starred in and directed Of Mice and Men, but he remained "that guy from Steppenwolf." Then in one big year he starred as the romantic lead in the top-rated TV miniseries The Stand and created his indelible character Lt. Dan in the preposterously successful Forrest Gump. With all this, he radiates none of the weird light of celebrity. But Hollywood knows it can use Sinise. and Sinise has had a good, long time to think about how to use Hollywood.
VIRGINIA CAMPBELL: You've just lived through a pretty amazing year.
GARY SINISE: The Stand came out in May of '94 and was seen by 60 million people a night for four nights, and then two months later Forrest Gump opened. So within a very short time, I went from being depressed about not getting any work to being in two of the most popular shows of the year.
Q: When you're depressed do you go, "Oh well, I'm depressed, but it's going to change"?
A: [Laughs] No, I just go, "Well, I'm depressed now."
Q: How was The Stand presented to you as a project?
A: I'd just done Of Mice and Men, and at the Cannes Film Festival in May it got a 15--not 10, not 5, a 15-minute standing ovation. We were just blown away. And I thought, boy, the studio's going to get behind this movie and we're off and running. But I didn't work again till March. Between May and March, I was auditioning and not getting work and I didn't have anything to direct and I was distraught. And along came The Stand.
Q: Were you the first choice for the role?
A: This is the first time I didn't have to audition or have an interview. Stephen King and Mick Garris had seen Of Mice and Men and called with the offer. The money was good, and I liked what it offered me as an actor, because I got to be chased by monsters and play a romantic character, which I'd never done.
Q: Have you ever read Stephen King?
A: No.
Q: Was your kiss with Molly Ringwald in The Stand your first screen kiss?
A: Yeah. Not her first. It's an odd thing to kiss somebody in front of a bunch of people.
Q: Well, that was a good one. What went into it?
A: Well, ah, lips and arms and faces and body--and some tension. We worked on it. What angle we wanted, how long we wanted it to be. Molly was relaxed about it. I was a little tense that day, maybe because it was so unusual for me. Most of my work is with guys.
Q: Dumb guys.
A: Dumb guys, smart guys, hoodlums, brothers, whatever. I knew the kiss was a big moment in the miniseries because they're two central characters who come together.
Q: An important thing for you to do as an actor, too.
A: The chance to play a romantic character who kisses somebody onscreen was one of the elements that made me want to do The Stand. The more you can do, the better, and I've been known as a character actor.
Q: What were you doing in that tiny cameo playing Sharon Stone's dad in The Quick and the Dead?
A: Gump wasn't out yet. No one had seen The Stand yet. Out of the blue I got a call and I went there for a few days, had a little fun, made a little money, which I needed, and got to spend some time talking to Gene Hackman.
Q: Are you more of a director or an actor?
A: Right now I lean more into acting. I started as an actor. I started directing because Steppenwolf needed another strong director. The plays [I directed] became respected and fairly popular-- True West, Orphans--and Hollywood people saw these things and then I was tempted to do films as a director.
Q: What was your first brush with Hollywood like?
A: Sam Cohn became my agent in 1984 and he was instrumental in introducing me to a lot of people. He introduced me to the playwright John Guare, whom he represented, and we went to Paramount with an idea, and suddenly we were going to do it, an original idea.
Q: What was it?
A: I'm tempted to dig it out and do it--it was ahead of its time--so I'm not going to tell you what it is. It was delivered to Dawn Steel when she was at Paramount and she promptly threw it into turnaround. [Laughs] And we were, like, so you don't get it, huh? It was so out there. Jim Carrey has perhaps made the world ready for this script [laughs]. I couldn't say I was shocked and hurt that they threw it into turnaround as fast as they did... [laughs]. What did they think they were going to get from me and John Guare? That's how the directing thing started and why my acting career was put on hold.
Q: And how did the acting get restarted?
A: After The Grapes of Wrath on Broadway, I decided that I was going to go with Of Mice and Men as a directing and acting project, and after that I didn't have anything to direct, so I said, I'm going to focus on acting.
Q: That turns out to have been an excellent decision.
A: I can honestly say that I've done everything I've wanted to do, always. Not without difficulty. But every time I wanted to do something, I just did it, from the age of 18 when I started my own theater with my friends. When I decided I wanted to act. I just bit the bullet. It's terribly difficult out here. There were plenty of times when I wasn't working.
Q: How did Miles From Home, the first film you directed, come about in 1988?
A: Fred Zollo, who was until that time a theater producer, and the writer, Chris Gerolmo, came to me with it, and I read it and thought this could be my first movie. And it was. Richard Gere had already had conversations about doing it.
Q: Richard Gere had not yet come back then, right?
A: It was the movie he did right before Internal Affairs, which is the movie he did right before Pretty Woman. Miles From Home is a really nice, little-seen Richard Gere performance.
Q: What kind of relationship did you have with Gere?
A: Good, very good. [Pause] I can't think of anybody that I should trash [laughs].
Q: Penelope Ann Miller was in the movie, too. I'll trash her, you don't have to. Actually, that's back when she was an ingenue and still good.
A: When she came to do her final audition, I had Kevin Anderson read with her, and they had a wonderful, very gentle communication with each other that works in the film.
Q: People seeing your movies might think you grew up on a dusty farm near Omaha. But Highland Park, Illinois, is an upper middle-class Chicago suburb.
A: [When I was a kid] we moved from the south side of Chicago to the [wealthier] north shore.
Q: You were in a rock band, right?
A: I had my first guitar in the fourth grade. I was always the leader of the band, the lead guitar.
Q: Did you do a lot of drugs?
A: I was a freshman in '69. We had a totally liberal school, let me say that. There was an area of our school called the Glass Hall, and it was where all the stoned kids would hang out all day long. It was very glassy in there, I did my share of all that. We used to go outside to the parking lot, find an open car, get in and smoke pot. I went out by myself one day and was smoking a joint and the door swings open, and it was the wrestling coach, who, earlier in his career had been kicked in the throat, so his voice [goes falsetto] was like this, and he said, "What the hell are you doin' in here?" And he grabs me by the hair and drags me out of the car, smoke trailing behind me, and drags me into the principal's office. And by this time, my heart is beating like crazy, but my head is way behind. A near fatal mistake.
Q: How did your parents handle all this?
A: That was a time when rebellion against authority was the order of the day. My parents had to buy it, because I was following my own path. Some bad things happened there, I've always been close to them, but I went through a time when it was just hard to communicate, I even fell into a Jesus freak thing.
Q: How long did that last?
A: A few weeks. There was this band of wild Jesus freaks living in a house and one of the guys in my band met them. I remember going to one of the meetings, and we were all standing around in a circle and trying to get Jesus to come into our hearts. We were standing there for along time and they were all saying, "Jesus come on in and take this lost soul," shouting and screaming. And I'm a kid, and finally the blood just drained out of my head into my feet and I couldn't stand up anymore, and they laid me down on a bed and thought I'd had a religious experience. Like, Jesus had come into me and knocked me out. When they all left the room, my buddy stayed, and I said. "Hey man, let's climb out the window." We ran away and that was the end of my Jesus days.
Q: Didn't you have a light-on-the-road-to-Damascus experience trying out for West Side Story as a teenager?
A: Yeah. When I was a sophomore, some of the guys in the band and I thought it would be fun to audition for the school play because it was about gangs. We'd seen the movie and thought it'd be fun to rumble onstage. We all stormed into the audition, this scary group of Glass Hall trolls, and we all got cast. I was a Shark, Pepe, and I had brown makeup on and a headband. Somebody asked me the other day about whether getting nominated for an Oscar was a high point for me. And it was, but I can think of 10 that have meant as much, and not the least was Pepe the Shark. I fell in love with theater during that play. The last night of the show, I was one of the guys who had to carry Tony off the stage, and I'd become best friends with the guy who played Tony--he became one of the founders of Steppenwolf, Jeff Perry--and I was carrying him along and all of a sudden I burst into tears and was sobbing because it was over. And the guy who played Chino grabbed me and every¬one was sobbing. It was a moment when I knew I was hooked for life.
Q: That was very young to find what you're going to do in life.
A: It's lucky. And it's fortunate the way things turned out. It's fluky that you'd get a group of people that would end up clicking the way Steppenwolf did. John Malkovich, Laurie Metcalf, Moira Harris, who's been my mate for 20 years...
Q: Were you all avid readers of Hermann Hesse, with dog-eared copies of Steppenwolf?
A: I still haven't read the book.
Q: You were influenced more by film¬makers than playwrights when you started your theater, weren't you?
A: In the late '60s and early '70s, movies were cooking. It's what turned me on to drama. It's when Al Pacino did The Panic in Needle Park, Scarecrow, Serpico, The Godfather, Dog Day Afternoon--these are monstrous, powerful performances. I'm fortunate on my current project, Truman, to be working with Frank Pierson, who wrote Dog Day Afternoon, and before it's over he's going to sign a copy of that screenplay for me. The '70s in the movies was a time where the gloves were off and the doors were open and you could do anything you wanted. It was the first time filmmakers could bite the heads off chickens if they wanted to and it would be in the movie.
Q: What's your attitude to your own era in Hollywood?
A: Well. I'm still drawn to the same kind of material they had then.
Q: But now isn't then.
A: No, but when a movie like in the Name of the Father can get made-- that could have been made in the '70s. Occasionally we can run to those films. Times have changed and blockbusterism has taken over, but drama is still drama. I've always been drawn to it, which is why I made Of Mice and Men.
Q: When you were making your film acting debut in the World War II pacifist drama A Midnight Clear, could you honestly tell your co-stars, Ethan Hawke, Kevin Dillon and Peter Berg, apart with their helmets on? Didn't they all seem like the same person?
A: [Clears his throat, smiles] Not to me. I was like the senior citizen on that picture and I had a great time. I had my family with me in Park City where we were filming, and the guys would come around and play Risk, the board game, all-night ses¬sions. It was a fun movie 10 make.
Q: How was it playing the villain in Jack the Bear'!
A: I had a great time making it. It was the first time I got a big trailer and I had a lot of downtime to sit and work on my Of Mice and Men project. My character was a Boo Radley type who actually turns out to be everything you feared, the psycho from across the street, and all I had to do was limp around and lurk and make an occasional utterance and go back to my trailer. After the theater where you work your butt off all the time, I wasn't about to complain about sitting around and getting paid for it.
Q: You can start complaining soon, though.
A: I don't foresee it. It's like a new career and it's fun.
Q: Did John Malkovich jump at the chance to do Of Mice and Men?
A: No. [Laughs] No, We're friends and everything, but he wanted to read the script and he liked it, and then it was a matter of making the deal, which we managed to do. We'd done Of Mice and Men together onstage in 1981. The film was quite different.
Q: When Malkovich got grabbed by Hollywood at the time of True West were you envious?
A: Well, I was there at the same time, you know. There were two of us in that play [laughs]. I had to remind myself at times there were two of us in that play. But first of all, that was and remains one of John's great performances. It was so unique. Every once in a while an actor gets that role. I'm Lt. Dan in Gump and John was Lee in True West. He made a mark on that part so distinctively and so loudly that he was hard to ignore. My knowing him and having worked with him for so long. I understood why people were so blown away by him. But at the same time you can't help, when there's two of you there ... Actors are always comparing their own careers to somebody else's. Why's this guy doing more movies than me? I read that Charlie Sheen interview in Movieline. If you're perfectly content with your own career you do it less, but when things aren't going so well, you do it more. So here we are, two guys going from Chicago to New York at the same time. I was the instrument of getting us there, because I put the deal together. So I couldn't help but feel, while I was happy things were happening for John, a little baffled at what was going on with me. His career was off and running and I went back 10 the theater in Chicago. So yeah, there were times when I'd go to Times Square and eat gyro sandwiches and play Asteroids after the show and he'd go out with Antonioni or Cassavetes [laughs]. I wasn't invited!
Q: This was when things were really happening for Steppenwolf, right? Plays going to New York and so on?
A: It was a happening lime for our theater, and a difficult time. I do remember one article a guy wrote about John for a magazine. John was emerging and this guy interviewed everyone, including me, and misinterpreted everyone and everything. He made the people at Steppenwolf all seem like jealous little, spoiled little untalented brats watching their king abandon them. It was a terrible article. He came to a rehearsal of Balm in Gilead. John and I had a disagreement about a section of the show during the rehearsal. I was the artistic director and had a big part in the play, and at one point we had a heated discussion--we'd had thousands of these kinds of discussions--about something creative, and this guy went and wrote that I threw a temper tantrum at John because John was a bigger star. When I read this I was shocked and horrified. This was happening at a time when things were already difficult--celebrity, movies, TV, everything we'd avoided for so long by stay¬ing in the basement of a Catholic school in Highland Park was now coming at us in this neg¬ative fashion. And this article was painting John as the king leaving the fold and us as a bunch of spoiled babies--that was a very telling thing at a very early time about, you know, journalists.
Q: How much have you thought about fame? Do you worry about what happens when people start wanting things from you and stop criticizing you?
A: When are they going to stop?
Q: After Gump did you get the big pay raise?
A: I have never lost a job because we couldn't make a deal.
Q: So you didn't talk yourself out of Batman Forever?
A: [Laughs] Nobody asked. Nobody asked.
Q: Are you going to direct a movie starring Tom Hanks now that you've finished working with him on Apollo 13?
A: We're working on something. It's in the very preliminary research stages.
Q: You must enjoy working with him a lot if you're pursuing another project with him after Gump and Apollo 13.
A: I'd say Tom's very grounded. He's a family man and he's worked his way to a level of success that only a few people get to. I think he recognizes that and enjoys the hell out of it. And he's as easy to work with as somebody I've worked with for 20 years. It's easy and fun and no bullshit.
Q: He's somebody you never hear any dish about.
A: What is there to say?
Q: Well, as we know, that doesn't stop anybody.
A: I'm sure there are some people who've had their run-ins with Tom who just choose not to speak.
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Virginia Campbell is one of the executive editors of Movieline.