JM: Singular is hard. There's a lot of me in a play I did years ago here and then in New York for public TV called True West. That's not dissimilar to me on some levels. The Glass Menagerie is probably not wholly dissimilar to me on some levels. But I'm a much lighter figure than I would usually appear in work. I'm a much jokier figure all in all than in most of the work I would be asked to do or allowed to do, which has a tendency to be quite heavy and dark. So a lot of them would have been comedies from years ago, a play called Say Good Night, Grade, for example.
PT: I read something about you, that you had quit school in the first grade because you had lost an Easter egg contest, but you felt you should have won because you had decorated it more. To quit school and say you deserved to win and if they don't appreciate that, then 'I'm out of here,' takes a presence of self and almost hubris that at six or seven is incredible.
JM: My father thought so too. It didn't really play at home.
PT: Does that speak volumes about you?
JM: I don't know. A lot of people find me very arrogant or filled with hubris. I don't really, but I suppose I wouldn't. I thought I got fucked and I said something.
PT: That's your core, your basic reaction. As you get older, you might not get out of there, but you'd feel that way--but you'd have to control it.
JM: You don't put yourself in a position where you really care about whether you win or not, which is what that's about. The right attitude would be, do the one that you think is beautiful; it doesn't really matter if it gets judged that way or not.
Now I don't really get involved in pitting myself against other people.
PT: Is that why you don't go to the Oscar awards?
JM: Sort of. It's just not really for me, especially in a situation like In the Line of Fire, which was already released. It wouldn't have mattered businesswise. You do have to make some compromises with your life and what you do for a living. Had that been a little film that was just released, the Oscars would have been a big deal. Then you'd want them to do a campaign for you, which I simply can't abide. You want the film to make all the money that it can. But I don't really like to get involved in that.
PT: Would you feel the same way about a Tony?
JM: More so.
PT: More so?
JM: I did plays in New York for many years, and you'd have to be quite mad to suggest they weren't some of the better performances at that time, and the Tony Awards committee always felt they weren't. And that's fine. But I won't put myself in the position of saying they know more about it than I do. You'd really have to know a lot of about it, I'm afraid, to know more about it than I do. So to kowtow to that, to bow to the flag, is something I really can't do. And I don't want it done to me. I love a lot of actors, their work I don't feel in competition with it.
PT: At first blush one would not look at you as a romantic lead, and yet the force of your talent has allowed you to convert that. You were cast as Valmont.
JM: I hear a lot of jokes about bald people. But I don't want to start crying. We are people, we make distinctions. That's the purpose of a brain. It discriminates, healthy from unhealthy, safety from danger, dark from light, good food from bad food.
I don't think we can limit that. But we can try to never be in positions where people who could harm us have a great deal of power over us. Most people prefer to sit and moan the whole time.
When I came out of college, I was a good actor. I remember a rather hack director, saying to me, 'You know, you could be good if you got some vocal training.' What I did was, we had our own little theater, where he and people like him have no power over us. We started that theater on our own, without a penny, without government grants. You go on.
PT: Would you tackle Shakespeare like Mel Gibson tackled Hamlet? Or Pacino with Richard III.
JM: It's never been something that I've been dying to do, frankly. I've been asked many times to do Hamlet or Macbeth, both in England and America. But I don't find it all so fascinating. It's a bit actory for me.
PT: Were it not for money and perhaps the celebrity or fame, would you do film?
JM: Never. I do it for the money.
PT: And you kind of render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's?
JM: Absolutely. That's how you make your living. You don't make it doing theater. I've at least gotten to be involved in two or three really good films.
PT: Why do you prefer to do plays than movies? Control?
JM: It takes a Ion time to produce a movie. It's about all these other things than just the material itself, and that is a flaw of Hollywood. It's about who you have, which actor and this actress. Whereas theater is much more just about the material.
PT: You were described by Paul Newman, who directed you in Glass Menagerie, as somebody who's inventiveness is wonderful most often for the part but dangerous for other actors who have to play off you.
JM: That slightly assumes that they can't take care of themselves and that I'm constantly charging the net, hitting balls they can't return. That's actually not the case.
Half the plays I've done, I've done downstage with my back turned to the audience. I like other actors, I like to watch them. They amuse me. I don't think Paul Newman was talking about selfishness. He was talking about a style of attack that can put characters in a reactive mode, but that's just if they don't attack back
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