The Only Tobin Bell Interview You'll Ever Need

Edie Falco?

Edie Falco, yes. She's so amazing on the new show Nurse Jackie, also. I remember the script supervisor telling me, "You know something, Tobin? I saw Edie Falco four years ago when I was doing the crummiest movie of the week for Universal. She was playing a nurse and she came on and had one line, and she just lit up the screen. That was four years ago, and I knew that she was a giant talent from that one line. And look where she is today!" It's pretty fascinating.

You've done something very similar from the little roles you've played in your career.

Well, yeah! It just goes to show you, it's not the amount that you speak at all. It's not about the number of lines that you have, it's about what you contribute to the story and how you go about doing that. Sometimes that's not verbal. In the first Saw, I laid on the floor covered in blood for three weeks! I think that's powerful. I think sometimes you dissipate power from the way you speak. You don't have to talk a lot in a piece of art in order to be critical to the story. That's background, too. I mean, I walked down the street with Robert De Niro and Sandra Bernhard for King of Comedy. If you look at background actors, they create giant reality in films. What would Dog Day Afternoon be without those crowds outside?

So you never ran into actors who issued commands like, "Background actors can't look me in the eye?"

Yes, I have -- but even more interesting is that actors have talked to me, actors I respected, and they said, "What did you do today?" And I'd say, "I went up and worked on Manhattan, the new Woody Allen film that's shooting." "You are? What are you doing?" "Well, I'm leaning up against a building as they go by." And they said, "You mean, you were doing extra work?" "Yeah." "Oh, well I could never do that. I really can do more than that. I'm better than that, and I'm waiting to be the main guy." I really understood where they were coming from, this place of ego, that they'd be minimizing their talent by doing something less than what they were capable of. I never viewed it that way, though. I viewed it as an opportunity to make $150 a day doing something that I cared a great deal about, where I could learn. They were gonna pay me to learn and reaffirm in me what I thought I could do?

Hey, I'd take $150 to walk around on the set of King of Comedy for a day.

Exactly! I was 180 degrees away from what they were talking about. Yeah, there were some demeaning times where you'd be herded into a room with hundreds of people and the principals were eating certain food and you were eating something else, but it didn't matter, you know? Just for those moments when you would get close to the principals and you'd see what they were doing, where you'd know these people aren't walking on water, they're just putting one foot in front of the other and saying their lines...it never seemed to me to be a deterrent in any way.

Did that help you once you finally started getting cast in films?

One of the first speaking roles I had was in a film called Svengali, with Peter O'Toole and Elizabeth Ashley. I was a waiter, and I had about three lines. And I was ready! I had been around people like that, and I knew they were just actors. All the work I had done, it was all there, and I felt like I knew all the mechanics. I didn't know everything, and boy did I learn a lot doing crap. I did a lot of pretty bad stuff...soap operas, you name it. But you learn just as much doing bad things as you do when you do good things. In fact, sometimes you learn more because you have to make it better.

You know, I really enjoyed talking to you.

Me too!

I'm just glad I didn't get asked, "What's it like to be the next icon of horror?" I never know how to answer that.

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