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Friendship Helped Seal Leonard's Big Role in Tape
by Robert Philpot
Houston Chronicle
November 23, 2001
Twelve years ago, Robert Sean Leonard made a strong impression in Dead Poets Society, in which he played a doomed student at a New England prep school. The movie won a screenwriting Oscar and earned Leonard some media attention, but on a more personal level, it began a longtime friendship between Leonard and Ethan Hawke, his co-star in the film.
Robert Sean Leonard comes face to face with an incident from his past in Tape.
Throughout the '90s, Hawke's movie stardom grew, while Leonard took another route, taking smaller roles in movies and making his biggest impact on the stage. But now their friendship has resulted in their collaboration on Tape, a small-scale movie that combines the versatility of film with the intimacy of the theater. Set entirely in a seedy motel room, Tape has only three actors: Hawke, Leonard and Hawke's wife, Uma Thurman. Hawke and Leonard are onscreen virtually the whole movie, as old high-school friends who have gone separate ways and now find themselves reopening not-quite-healed wounds.
"Ethan called me and said, 'I found a play that's really cool, I want you to read it, I'd love to do it with you and Uma, and maybe get Rick Linklater to direct it on digital video,'" Leonard says during a phone interview. "And I said, 'Let me read it.' I mean, I would have said yes, anyway, but I read it and loved it."
The movie is based on a play by Stephen Belber, which Austin's Linklater -- who uses Hawke frequently in his films -- took on because he was looking for a small-scale project after working on his animated film, Waking Life, for more than two years. Even though he uses only one set, Linklater manages to avoid making the movie look merely like a photographed stage play, using the mobility of a single hand-held camera to move about the room and shoot his actors from a variety of angles. But by not "opening it up" and adding exterior locations, he has also kept the play's sense of claustrophobia. Leonard believes it was wise to keep things small.
"It's part of the reason Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night works," Leonard says. "When you're dealing with real time on one set, there's no escape."
The 32-year-old actor has appeared in one other theatrical film this year, the Sylvester Stallone racing drama Driven, in which Leonard played the weaselly manager/brother of a hot racing rookie. He also had a small role in the TV movie A Glimpse of Hell.
But his biggest success this year has been on the stage; he won a Tony Award for playing poet A.E. Housman in Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love, and he's currently playing Professor Harold Hill in a revival of Meredith Willson's The Music Man, taking over for Craig Bierko, who originated the role in the revival. The musical, set in 1912, is about a con artist who comes to a small Iowa town and falls for a librarian/piano teacher. Although the show is steeped in Americana, Leonard wasn't certain how well it would play after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York.
"I remember at the time thinking, 'God, we're either in the best show we could possibly be in right now, or the worst,' " Leonard says. "But I think it's the best. It's a great story. ... It's really a gorgeous play. It's about American innocence and naivete, and the manipulation of that, and the eventual manipulation of the manipulator by innocence and love. And innocence and love win the day. I think it's a beautiful story for right now, and I don't find it a difficult story to tell."
Leonard has remained busy in movies since Dead Poets Society, working with Paul Newman (Mr. and Mrs. Bridge), Kenneth Branagh (Much Ado About Nothing), Martin Scorsese (The Age of Innocence) and others. He also will reteam with Hawke on Chelsea Walls, an ensemble piece that is also Hawke's feature-directing debut. Leonard is not bothered, however, that he is still best-known for his role in Dead Poets Society.
"I've seen so many people pick up unhappiness along the way by trying to control something they can't control," he says. "You can't control your fame and your marketability in Hollywood, as a filmmaker or an actor. You can't control it. You can try, and have a PR person that works 24 hours a day, and spend all your day running around getting photo shoots done and trying to go to openings and premieres. But I really don't believe that works. There's just no method to the madness. I'd much rather read a good book and enjoy my life and go food shopping and see my family than go to a photo shoot."
