Actor William Hurt never takes the easy way. When he could have been a silvery movie star with glistening teeth and a technicolor tan, he chose to slouch around as a pale loner with an understated technique and a penchant for playing emotional robots.
His latest role is no different. As the novelist suffering a writer’s block after his wife’s death in “Smoke” (which opened June 16), Hurt once again takes the road less traveled.
Ask him why he does that and he launches into a 10-minute treatise on the nature of mankind, the coagulated morality of the soul and why it’s so damned important to do good work.
A lot of people have become impatient with Hurt. He’s not good with the sound bite. He doesn’t coin phrases that can be minted on the nightly news into hard currency.
Watching him as the dim TV anchor in “Broadcast News” or the imperious surgeon in “The Doctor” or the gay prisoner in “Kiss of the Spider Woman” may be a treat, but it’s not nearly as much fun as listening to him.
“I never had enough confidence to choose acting as an occupation,” he says, looking bookish in wire-rimmed glasses and a striped shirt.
“I thought, `If I decide to be an actor it’ll never happen.’ So I never did. I just do it. It’s not something I decided to be, it’s something I do. I wake up and say, `Do I still want to do it?’ It’s like whittling wood. The more it becomes like that to me the more grateful I am for it.”
It’s not surprising to learn that Hurt, 45, was a theology student (at Tufts University), for the ponderous didactics are still with him. But the theater “kept pulling me back,” he says.
“The theater was at the foot of the hill, practically off campus,” he adds, in his curiously soft, non-theatrical voice.
“No one ever saw it. The theology building was on top. I kept suffering and suffering and suffering; had lots of self doubts. I remember this one moment when I thought, `I’m either going into the theology building or I’m going back to the theater (for good).’
“At the time I felt I didn’t deserve to be in theology. At the time I thought, `I can’t stand up and pretend I represent something, a lifestyle, that I would want anyone else to measure my beliefs against.”
Maybe his beliefs didn’t quite live up to Calvin, but Hurt is strictly Puritan when it comes to work. He longs for rehearsal to get things right, a luxury in filmmaking. “Stanislavski said it takes 45 days just to get the structure,” he says.
Hurt has starred in big-budget movies, but that didn’t mean he had the luxury of rehearsal.
“I looked around the room and said, `What do I really think is happening here?’ What I really thought was happening was a bunch of people running around looking like their tails were cut off to keep their jobs.
“Is that what the art is? That I can convince someone that my tail is being cut off shorter than his is, instead of doing the work?”
Yes, he still pores over Stanislavski and seeks the counsel of a former teacher when he’s pondering an especially difficult role. But Hurt isn’t a theater snob. He had that flushed out of him when he was 19.
“I remember in school when I realized that when I thought I was doing good, I was wrong. I met an Indian guy working on his third Ph.D., Deliep. We used to chat under the tree outside the theater. He was always off in the corner observing what was happening. I never understood why he hung out at the theater. He had a great mind. Finally I dared to ask him what he thought of my work–and I don’t ask a lot of people often.
“Over a period of six months I’d go to him and say, `That was good, wasn’t it?’ And he would just drop his head. And I was so enraged. How could he say that was not good? When I was about 18 or 19 he began to show me where my indulgence was. For some reason he was the first person I ever chose to point out to me where my indulgence was. And it was a horrible experience to have somebody criticizing you when you thought you were good. . . .
“I did `Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance’ and came off and said, `How was that?’ `It was passable,’ Deliep said. Thank God it was passable to Deliep.”
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Such a stern taskmaster might’ve discouraged other, less passionate suitors. But Hurt obviously adores what he does.
“When you love something it’s often very difficult,” he says. “Love is what gives you the courage to suffer what you don’t know. Learning is always embarrassing because you’ve got to admit you don’t know something and nobody likes to do that. We’re all competing.
“When winning has to be the most important thing, you know you’re wrong.”