Premiere Magazine April 1990 ACTOR Clancy Brown By Diana Shaw

 

When the topic turns to his latest part, Clancy Brown's daunting demeanor gives way to a sentimentality not at all reminiscent of his most notable roles. "It's like a little solo in the symphony," he says of Joey, the laconic loner he plays in Waiting for the Light, a poignant comedic drama starring Shirley MacLaine and Teri Garr. The film, set during the Cuban Missle Crisis, marks the American debut of Welsh writer and director Christopher Monger. Such lyricism would be scorned by many of the sinister screen characters the tall, gray-eyed actor has played. Among them are the delinquent juvenile of his first film, Bad Boys, and the vile villian of Shoot to Kill. "I like to play characters on an epic scale," he says. "It just happens that most characters drawn on that scale are villians. I would really like more opportunities to play characters like Joe, who, for me, represents the epic in everyday life."

Describing Brown warmly as "a big lumber-jack who astonishes you with lines of poetry," director Monger says he was impressed by the breadth of his ability. "I had only seen Clancy play brutes," Monger recalls, "but when he came in to read for Joe, I found him such a gentle kind of guy, right in tune with the part. I felt that I had just met Joe."

At lunch in West Hollywood, Brown credits the filmmakers who have cast him against his better-known diabolical type- most recently, Monger and Katherine Bigelow, who directed Blue Steel. "Until now, the films where I've played nice guys haven't done as well as the others," says Brown. "If all directors played it safe, I'd be playing criminals for the rest of my career."

One of the scenes in Monger's script that attracted Brown to the film - a scene that was ultimately cut - showed Joe to be illiterate. Although he doesn't feel that losing the scene detracted from the film, Brown was sorry not to be able to address onscreen an issue he consideres critical. "Illiteracy is one of my soapboxes," he says. The son of an Ohio newspaperman, he says he admires good writing, especially good screenwriting. "Blue Steel was written in a powerfully provocative manner," he recalls. "The script [which Bigelow cowrote with her former partner Eric Red] was written to move, in short, terse sentences. I was right into it before I knew it."

Brown admits that he's occasionally been seduced by a script but betrayed by the final product. "The Bride was like that. Great script. Awful film," he says. Brown, however, got good reviews for his part in the movie.

The actor made his way to Los Angeles from his hometown of Urbana, Ohio (pop 11,500), by way of the drama program at Northwestern University, outside of Chicag. He'd waited until his senior year to decide to try to make it as an actor. "It was that time when the curtains are closing on your youth, and you have to think what you're going to do with the rest of your life. I knew I wanted to act, but I was also smart enough to know that I could easily starve."

Then he read German writer Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, a collection of stirring missives advising those inspired by a passion to pursue it at all costs. "That book set me right on center," Brown recalls. "I knew I couldn't live with myself if I didn't try to do it."

He didn't have to try for long. He was still in Chicago tending bar when the producers of Bad Boys came to town to cast the hooligans. "They passed on me the first time through: 'You're too old, you're too big, you can't do it,'" Brown, now 31, says mockingly. A seventeen-year-old got the part, he says, only to be pulled from the picture by his fundamentalist parents, who objected to an implied rape in the film. "I guess the producers were sick of looking, so they gave it to me," Brown says, then adds with a grin: "Please don't give the fundamentalists credit for my career."

From there, he says, he rode the coattails of fellow "bad boy" Sean Penn into a career of his own. "Sean was said to be this hot young actor, and everyone figured if this hot young actor is in this movie, then everyone else in it must be a hot young actor. No one stopped to say, 'Naw, this one's a bartender from Chicago.'"

But Brown's film career doesn't give him the unmitigated satisfaction he sought when he set out from school hell-bent on pursuing his passion: "It's been hard to let go of my idealistic image of being an artist." Playing in films, he says, can be more limiting that acting onstage, where he feels he has more control over his characters. "You can move though a play with continuity, developing a character as you go along. On film, each bit you do is just part of a picture that someone else will put together after you're through."

But he does enjoy performing for the camera, he says, when he can fully engage in a scene or an exchange with another actor. "Sometimes I'm able to snatch the magic from those situations, to come out of somthing feeling the way I would if I were playing Mercutio."

main articles