Actors used to crave comparison with Marlon Brando, but Robert Duvall would prefer not being mentioned in the same breath with his former “Godfather” co-star, at least regarding their attitudes toward acting.
“He’s a tremendous talent, obviously,” Duvall says. “And he’s gotten fat and old and who cares. If he wants to lose weight and get it back together, he can get it back together. There’s nothing wrong with acting for a living, and I disagree with him on that. I think it’s fun and I enjoy it.”
So while Brando lumbers through the occasional role, Duvall is at his most active since his pale, haunting visage announced his arrival as Boo Radley in 1962’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Over the past year or so, the 65-year-old actor has portrayed a maniacal cuckold in “The Scarlet Letter,” a prickly patriarch in “Something To Talk About,” a Southerner who learns his mother was black in “A Family Thing” (which he also co-produced), and he now can be seen as the wise doctor in “Phenomenon.”
“It’s my time more than ever,” he says in a downtown Chicago hotel suite. “Everybody says it’s hard to find plum roles. I’ve been offered plum roles right and left.”
Duvall has a no-nonsense quality about him in person. He answers questions directly and good-naturedly but forgoes the kind of banter that is the bread and butter for a professional charmer like “Phenomenon” co-star John Travolta.
On screen, he projects that sense of being grounded while holding something in reserve. As fellow veteran Oscar winners feasting on colorful supporting roles, he and Gene Hackman are at similar stages in their careers, yet Hackman has attained a warm/fuzzy quotient that makes even his scoundrels somewhat appealing.
Duvall can play lovable, as in “Phenomenon,” but often he remains beyond the reach of audience hugs, whether portraying an edgy fictional creation or true-life heavies like former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in the 1992 HBO movie “Stalin” or Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in the upcoming Turner cable movie “The Capture of Adolf Eichmann.” Few actors are associated with as dark a line of dialogue as his “Apocalypse Now” colonel’s proclamation: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
Duvall says that beyond seeking out intriguing characters, he follows no formula in choosing roles. “Wherever the work goes, I’ll go if it’s an interesting part and a nice project,” he says. “I can do different roles, and I think one of the things I’m able to do is to solve the emotional problems of a given character. A lot of actors don’t do it.”
Citing Spencer Tracy as an influence, he says his own approach to acting remains unchanged: “Try to stay very simple, talk and listen, keep it on that level.” But he adds that he’s gotten better at it. “I like to think of it as more offhand now. Because life is offhand, I think acting should be very offhand, relaxed, even in big, intense emotional scenes.”
Still, Duvall is not known for being relaxed when it comes to taking direction. He sums up his attitude toward directors thusly: “If it’s good direction, you take it. If it’s not good direction, I don’t like to hear it.”
Duvall established his reputation as perhaps the premier American character actor in some of the landmark films of the 1970s: Robert Altman’s “M*A*S*H”; Francis Ford Coppola’s first two “Godfather” movies, “The Conversation” and “Apocalypse Now”; and Sidney Lumet’s “Network.” He earned a best actor Oscar nomination for 1980’s “The Great Santini” and won the award three years later for his washed-up country singer in “Tender Mercies,” but that teen-flick-dominated decade was more of a dry period for him.
At one point he even did a MasterCard television commercial, explaining, “You can always use some cash.” In doing so, he learned a lesson about the endorsement biz.
“I went to buy some clothes, and they didn’t honor my MasterCard, so I paid for it with American Express and told that in an interview, and they canceled my commercial,” he recalls. “Plus the fact that I said the director wouldn’t last but a couple of hours in feature films.”
The decade ended with the role of which Duvall remains the proudest: aging cowboy Gus McCrae in the TV mini-series “Lonesome Dove.”
His 1990s films have been of variable quality, but he insists that the movies and roles today are as good as ever–the difference 20 years ago was that he was working with Coppola at his peak. (Duvall declined to reprise his role in 1990’s “Godfather III” after a dispute over money, which he argued was motivating the project anyway.)
He also professes admiration for the younger generation of actors, like Sandra Bullock, who appeared with him in 1993’s “Wrestling Ernest Hemingway.”
“I think that young actors today are like athletes,” he said. “They can watch TV, they can watch movies and learn. So I think the kids today are more sophisticated, more up on things than we were.”
They’re also making more money, which makes Duvall akin to those veteran ballplayers watching the youngsters cash in. “Somehow it’s going to affect things eventually, but as long as they can get it, I guess grab it,” he says. “I wouldn’t mind making a little more so I could finance my own projects.”
But, he adds, directing is not a priority; he previously directed the 1983 feature “Angelo, My Love.” Thrice divorced and now living on a horse farm in northern Virginia, Duvall says his main passions remain acting and dancing the tango.
He practices the latter four or five times a week and says he especially enjoyed filming “Eichmann” in Argentina because he could tango with the country’s great dancers.
“I do have a blessed life,” he says. “There are certain things that could be better in my life, but I have a good life.”
