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Robert Sean Leonard Proves Why He's America's Answer to Ralph Fiennes
by Susan Pocharski
Cosmopolitan
1997
Robert Sean Leonard has been seizing the day ever since his scene-stealing debut as the prep student turned suicide statistic in 1989's Dead Poets Society.
"People still come up to me and say things like, 'I quit my job at IBM and started my own business after seeing that movie,'" says the 28-year-old New Jersey native. "But it's hard. It was my first film and it's like, where do you go from here?"
In Leonard's case: Broadway (he won raves in Arcadia) and Hollywood (starring opposite Kenneth Branagh in Much Ado About Nothing and Susan Sarandon in Safe Passage). This month, he plays a man with AIDS who returns home to spend his last days with his family in HBO's In the Gloaming, which marks the directorial debut of the now-quadriplegic Christopher Reeve.
"I find the fact that Chris doesn't sit at a window and mourn kind of amazing, because I'm afraid that's what I would do," Leonard says.
While the actor is also busy with the New York-based Malaparte Theater Company, which he co-founded with hoop-shooting pal Ethan Hawke, Leonard still finds time for the opposite sex. "They fascinate me," he says as he sits in his neighborhood Greenwich Village eatery. "What do women want from us? What are you looking for? Is it a rugged man's man who has that crack in him that only you know about?"
So what is Leonard looking for in a woman? "Mystery. You see someone laugh, you see someone tie their shoe, and suddenly, it takes your breath away for reasons totally beyond your comprehension. That's rare. That's the goal."
