article archive
An Interview with Robert Sean Leonard
by Marcelline Block
Play by Play
March/April, 1997
I had the great pleasure of interviewing Robert Sean Leonard, best known for his roles in films such as Dead Poets Society, Much Ado About Nothing and The Age of Innocence. He is also a dedicated theater actor, and will be playing in The Glass Menagerie opening soon in Baltimore. It was exciting to meet such a talented actor who is also a very sincere person.
MARCY: Do you like having characters that are challenging to play?
ROBERT: Yeah, it just makes it fun... I mostly look for scripts that I really like and stories that are worth telling, stories I want to spend every night of my life telling. So when I go to the theater at 6:30 every day, I feel excited about giving this story again to people who may not know it.
MARCY: You have worked in both film and theater. Do you have a preference?
ROBERT: I have had great experiences in both, and I have had terrible experiences in both. Theatre has, for me, a better work structure. I like going to rehearsal at ten in the morning and sitting with the script and tearing it to pieces and finding new things and working till 6:00, then going home and making dinner, watching a Knicks game and then going to sleep. Movies are a little more frenetic and ever changing...You are usually working sixteen hours a day and your life tends to get put on hold when you are in a movie. Unless you are really rich, like Demi Moore, when you can bring your kids and have a trailer the size of a house.
MARCY: What was your favorite film to work on?
ROBERT: I have three: Dead Poets Society, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Age of Innocence. I worked only a week on The Age of Innocence, but it was a really nice week, and it was in Paris, so that was fun to do. To go out for a beer with Daniel Day Lewis in Paris was pretty fun. I get kind of excited about those things. And Winona [Ryder] was there too, but I have known her for a long time. And Dead Poets was like college. All night with friends... that was an amazing time. I was surprised at how well it did. I thought it was good, and very rarely movies that good do that well. Making it was beautiful. We were all on one floor of a hotel, our doors were always open, and we were always working on poetry or on our scenes, music was always playing... And Much Ado was just so fun. Everyone in it was a theater actor, and we worked on it as if it were a play and that we just happened to have cameras there, but it was really a play outside in a beautiful town.
MARCY: Would you like to do Shakespeare again?
ROBERT: Oh yeah...King Lear is my favorite. It's the greatest. It's everything. It's like a fireworks finale.
MARCY: What is it like to have friends who are actors? Do you ever feel in competition?
ROBERT: Sure... Much Ado and Reality Bites came out about the same time. A year after that, my friend Ethan [Hawke] and I were talking, and I was so jealous that he was in a cool movie. I would go to the theater to see Much Ado, and there would be four people in the audience, and Reality Bites would have this huge line of sixteen-year-old girls and the MTV crowd...I was so jealous. I do Shakespeare, and Chekhov and Shaw, but it must be so fun to do a movie that everybody likes, that is a big hit. And he said, 'I was so jealous that you were in a Shakespeare movie and I was in this stupid, trashy movie'... We were both equally jealous of each other, you know, for the opposite reasons.... I think actors are the most screwed up people in the world.
MARCY: Why?
ROBERT: Because they are so showered with praise and adoration. Actors are sort of our royalty. We don't have a king and queen, we love Hollywood so much. I think it's confusing to be liked so much; it's noise you have to tune out.... Trying to control what the public thinks of you is Pandora's box, and once you open it you go a little crazy... it's trying to control the wind.
MARCY: If you weren't an actor, what would you be?
ROBERT: I would probably be a teacher...I think I would teach history or English. I like bringing things to life for younger people.
MARCY: What actors have made the greatest impression on your work as an actor?
ROBERT: Well, when I was growing up in New York and New Jersey and seeing plays here, the actors then are still the actors now: Sam Waterston, Glenn Close, Chris Walken, James Woods, Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline. In movies, James Stewart. I remember The Breakfast Club very well. I was probably sixteen-years-old when it came out, which is twelve years ago, and it was the first time I had seen young people in a movie in a long time... I remember thinking, 'Wow, they are dealing with problems I am dealing with as a student and as a kid.'
