Aidan Quinn admits that a part of him is neurotic. But the 34-year-old actor has spent most of his career trying not to be what he calls “a career junkie.”
He lives in New York, avoiding the power lunches of Hollywood, he says during a brief visit to Beverly Hills to talk about his movie “Blink,” opening Wednesday.
“If I lived here, it would appeal to the side of me that keeps saying: `Why didn’t I get that? Who’s at that meeting? Oh, I have to talk to that guy.’
“I know how to do that a little bit,” says the star of “An Early Frost,” “Avalon,” “Stakeout” and “The Mission.” “But if I do it three or four days in a row or more than a couple weeks, I get depressed. I don’t feel good.”
Quinn is one man who listens when internal whispers begin to nag. He was a teenager working as a roofer in Chicago when one of those inner voices came through clearly.
“I was sitting on a rooftop overlooking Michigan Avenue. I’d just returned from living for a year in Ireland. . . . I said, `I can’t do this.’ Some days, yeah. I was 19 years old. But these guys live like this every day. I said, `What am I going to do with the rest of my life?’ “
That night he called acting teacher Byrne Piven. After a 45-minute phone conversation, Quinn had landed a scholarship and a new life.
At first he did so well, he began to think it was easy. “I thought, `All you have to do is say the words as if you were in the situation, and people call you an actor.’ I didn’t consider myself an actor.”
Then he didn’t work for 2 1/2 years. During that time he took classes and workshops. When he was cast as the “new Brando” in “Reckless” with Daryl Hannah in 1982, the Hollywood rumble began.
“There was a tremendous amount of hype about `Reckless,’ ” he says, glancing down and shaking his head. “And I didn’t believe the hype. I was being offered a lot of big Hollywood roles on the strength of that hype that I was not interested in. It was the time of all those teenage, high school movies. But I turned them all down and went back to Chicago and did theater again. There was tremendous pressure for me not to do that.”
Quinn’s insistence on avoiding Hollywood’s seduction has worked against him. Less-talented actors have moved ahead in the box-office sweepstakes, capturing the flamboyant roles, while Quinn often plays the co-starring lead, as he did in “Benny & Joon.”
“You have to have an ego in this business,” he says. “But there’s no question that the squeaky wheel gets the oil. So there are times where it encourages selfishness.”
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Quinn says his wife, Elizabeth, helps keep him centered. And having a 4-year-old daughter has given him more insight.
“You are no longer the most important thing in your life,” he says. “Everything pales compared to your own children. Being at the birth of your child, everything else is put in perspective. It’s not that you give up ambition, but you make compromises.”