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Twilight Zone
by Sono Motoyama
Time Out New York
April 17, 1997
After his career-making turn as the doomed young thespian in 1989's Dead Poets Society, Robert Sean Leonard had his first real brush with fame: He was offered a Gap print ad. Uncertain about what to do, he called Poets director Peter Weir for advice. As Leonard tells it (mimicking Weir's Aussie accent), the director said, "What the hell's the gap? What do you mean—a chasm?" Leonard explained that it was a store, that a lot of famous people did the ads, that it was "a fame thing." Weir was baffled, finally losing patience. "Robert," he said, "I'm a busy man. Let me break this down for you: Are you a model?" Leonard said he was not. "Do you work for the Gap?" Leonard admitted he did not. "I think the case is closed."
Taking his cue from Weir, the actor kept his head down: Immediately after Poets, he returned to the theater, starring in a Philadelphia production of a play called Rocky and Diego. It's a decision the Ridgewood, NJ–raised Leonard doesn't regret. But tonight happens to be Oscar night, and while having lunch at a Baltimore restaurant, he's reminded of the whole fame thing once again.
"It's a very addictive feeling. You think, Of course, I'm celebrated. I knew when I was five I was special," says the 28-year-old son of a Spanish teacher and a nurse. "And the bottom line is that [the feeling's] so false that it's a dangerous drug to even taste, because you can really get addicted to it. I've seen it happen."
About seven years ago, Leonard and some New York pals (Ethan Hawke, among them) decided to form the Malaparte Theater Company. "We weren't working, and we would play basketball and go bowling," he recalls. "We thought, What are we doing?" The troupe (currently on hiatus) has since produced nine plays. But Leonard's continued devotion to theater has never kept him from making movies. After Poets, he appeared in a number of high-profile projects, including Merchant Ivory's Mr. and Mrs. Bridge and Martin Scorsese's Age of Innocence. In 1993, he starred in the disastrous WWII-era musical Swing Kids. "If you're going to do a film about Nazism, then you really have to know what you're doing," Leonard admits. "I don't think we did."
At least one good thing came out of Kids: Leonard spent time with fellow actor Kenneth Branagh, who happened to be casting Much Ado About Nothing. "I'd had all these ideas about playing Claudio," he recalls, "so I made it clear to him that I was interested. He leaned over at one point, and said, 'You're shameless, shameless.' The day he left, there was a script in my hotel mailbox, with a note saying, 'See you on the set.' "
The actor, who lives in Greenwich Village, has proven himself rather adept at cultivating his connections: This week, he stars in Christopher Reeve's directorial debut, the hourlong HBO movie In the Gloaming. Leonard first met Reeve back in 1993 at a reading of The Shadow Box, which was sponsored by the Creative Coalition after a Tucson production had been banned and a drama teacher fired. Reeve and Leonard played lovers—the relationship that had been at the center of the controversy.
In the Gloaming, a quiet family drama, Leonard is Danny, an AIDS patient who comes home to die (Glenn Close and David Straithairn are his parents; Bridget Fonda, his sister; and Whoopi Goldberg, his nurse). Speaking from his Westchester home, Reeve says he helped Leonard understand the invalid Danny by drawing on his own experiences. "There's a moment in the movie where I have a big close-up of Robert looking at the trees, looking at the gloaming for the first time," Reeve says, referring to the twilight hour that becomes a metaphor for death in the film. "That's what I used to do when I was in rehab—sit out on this veranda, and spend three hours looking at cloud formations. So I was trying to encourage Robert to be as still and simple and nonconfrontational as possible. I think he's extraordinary in the role."
Leonard recently finished work on an independent film, Prairie Fire, in which he plays a government agent caught in a Waco-like situation. Currently, though, he is appearing as Tom in a Baltimore production of The Glass Menagerie—and he couldn't be happier. "I'm doing what I want to do and making enough money to live really well," he says, "and yet I don't have to blow-dry my hair and go to L.A. and run around."
Still, even his father sometimes ribs him about his choices, saying, "Aw, you should have done Legends of the Fall." (Leonard says "it's a long story," but he had a good shot at the role that went to Henry Thomas. He chose instead to play Edgar in a San Diego production of King Lear.)
"I think my agents kind of see me as an oddity," muses the actor. "There's a quote from Glass Menagerie when Tom says, 'The boys in the warehouse used to smile at me as people smile at an oddly fashioned dog who trots across their path at some distance.' I think that's how they see me."
In the Gloaming airs April 20 at 9pm on HBO.
