Rassegna stampa di James Spader

“CULTIVATE the appearance of contrition,” the character Jack Lawson, a lawyer, tells a white client accused of raping a black woman in “Race,” a new play opening on Broadway next Sunday. As uttered with don’t-waste-my-time iciness by the actor James Spader, the clipped and merciless directive telegraphs not only that this is dialogue by David Mamet, but also that it is set in the kind of up-for-grabs moral universe that Spader characters have been occupying in Hollywood for years.
The sexy sleazes he played in the mid-1980s, most notably the preppy Steff in “Pretty in Pink,” gave way to the twisted and perverse protagonists of “sex, lies, and videotape” (1989), “Crash” (1996) and his latest major film, “Secretary,” in 2002. Then came Alan Shore, the outrageously sardonic, ethically cynical lawyer on both “The Practice” and “Boston Legal” on ABC. In that role Mr. Spader’s instincts for dark, enigmatic characters grounded an entire performance, one that won him three Emmys.
His Jack Lawson is like Alan Shore on Paxil — calmer and focused but no less brazen. And if Lawson does not represent especially new ground in Mr. Spader’s oeuvre, this latest incarnation of a slick lawyer, who at first appears more ruthless than anyone else onstage, taps into his many discomfiting talents. After two decades of personifying the creepy id in our collective imagination, Mr. Spader is finally on intimate view as audiences come face to face with the snake in the room.
“I’m most drawn to characters who are compelling and repellant at the same time, very often right at the same moment, and who are frightening and funny all at once,” Mr. Spader said over tea recently near the theater district.

“Mamet writes these characters better than anyone,” he continued, in his measured and highly enunciated speaking style. “And after decades away from theater work I was excited by the central ideas in ‘Race,’ where each character is both a protagonist and an antagonist. There are no heroes in this story.”
Inhabiting a leading Mamet man who has never been portrayed by another actor is particularly exciting for Mr. Spader, whose career has reached something of a turning point. After “Boston Legal” ended last December, he found himself uncertain about what to do next. In February he will turn 50 — an age that is hard to fathom for those who remember him as the seductively handsome drug dealer Rip in “Less Than Zero.” His physique is no longer trim, and his eyesight has long been poor. But with “Race,” he is tackling the challenges that theater affords, and also imposing his exacting and sometimes unusual work habits on a new cast.
“We’re all amazed by how ferocious and smart James has been in thrusting himself into Mamet’s world,” said Kerry Washington, who tangles with Mr. Spader as the young black legal assistant in his firm. “He doesn’t take a single second of his behavior onstage for granted. If James doesn’t feel that it’s right for his character to get out of a chair at a particular moment, he’ll say, ‘We have to figure out how to get out of the chair in a way that’s honest.’ ”
Researching and rehearsing a role until he enters a zone of concentration is a Spader trademark, several colleagues say. Susan Sarandon, who played a working-class waitress in a torrid affair with the younger, wealthier Mr. Spader in “White Palace,” said that before shooting their first make-out scene, he proposed that they dance in his trailer so they could become better acquainted. Holly Hunter, his co-star in “Crash,” said Mr. Spader would “invite us all over to his place to prepare for ‘Crash’ by watching a mini-festival of movies” like “Vanishing Point,” the cult classic about explosive car chases.
Maggie Gyllenhaal, who played the socially awkward assistant to Mr. Spader’s character, the eccentric and mysterious Mr. Grey, in “Secretary,” said he immersed himself in the character almost beyond recognition. He was often as formal off-screen as Mr. Grey was on camera, said Ms. Gyllenhaal, who did not know his phone number, rarely if ever saw him off the set and was unsure if he had children. (He has two older sons with his former wife, Victoria Kheel, and a toddler with his girlfriend, Leslie Stefanson.)
“One day he was sitting on a couch and said really loudly, with a Mr. Grey tone, ‘Who should I speak to about having a very expensive box of chocolates put in my room?’ ” Ms. Gyllenhaal said. “And a couple of days later, I got a knock on the door of my trailer, which I shared with James, separated by a little wall. It was a production assistant who said, ‘James would like to see you.’ Now James was literally five feet from me, but this assistant was sent. So I went down my little steps, and up his little steps, and — in a very serious tone — he invited me in for a chocolate before we did an intense sexy scene together.
“What he was doing was open-hearted, supportive, loving,” she added, “but also pretty unusual.”
Mr. Spader said that he had no fixed approach to acting — “I’ve spent my life striving against any kind of ideology” — but added that he believes in exploring the nuances of his scripts and characters.
That “appreciation for detail and minutiae,” as Mr. Spader describes his affection for acting, helped secure his most sustained professional success so far, “Boston Legal,” which ran for five seasons. Its creator, David E. Kelley, said that Mr. Spader’s line readings, facial expressions, physical gestures and courtroom pauses were “perfect in their fine detail.”
The two men bonded over his character Alan Shore. “Every once in a while,” Mr. Kelley said, “James would call me and say, ‘Remember in the early shows when Alan would throw evidence away and blithely break the rules? I miss that guy a bit.’ And I would say yeah, I did too. Of course, we both had such a love for the character that we wanted to protect him.”
For Mr. Spader, characters who explore their macabre impulses — the car accident fetishist in “Crash,” the sadomasochistic spanker in “Secretary” — are enticing because he finds them different from himself.
“I don’t have much interest in spilling myself onto the screen or the stage or on television,” he said. “It’s fun to explore behavior that you can’t explore in your own life, so you fool around with it in acting.”
The son of two teachers, Mr. Spader grew up in a yachting town in Massachusetts and attended Phillips Academy in Andover. At 17 he dropped out, a decision that he would explain only by citing “dwindling attendance.” He moved to New York City, where his sister had an empty living room floor for him to crash on.
He picked up manual-labor jobs — as a meat-truck driver he once went back to Andover to party with his old friends — and began to pursue acting, which he had enjoyed since performing in plays in grammar school. He enrolled in an acting school named for Michael Chekhov, the Russian ÈmigrÈ actor whose technique emphasized movement, improvisation and imagination. Mr. Spader also performed in several pieces at the Actors Studio, though he declined an invitation to audition there.
Soon Hollywood was calling. Agents and actors had taken notice of him in New York, and his early, small performances demonstrated both sensitivity and pathos. His good looks, wavy dirty-blond hair and blue eyes also drew casting directors, and he landed roles as troubled teenagers.
His seemingly innocent face hardly proved an obstacle to Mr. Spader’s growing desire, in the late ’80s, to land more emotionally complex roles. He made his break-out performance as a sexual voyeur in Steven Soderbergh’s “sex, lies, and videotape,” for which Mr. Spader won the best actor award at the Cannes Film Festival. He became sought after to play men in romantically or sexually dysfunctional relationships in films like “Bad Influence” and “White Palace.”
“In our movie he had to play somebody who was very vulnerable and inhibited, and those aren’t at the top of the list of really attractive qualities,” Ms. Sarandon said.
After watching “sex, lies, and videotape,” the director Mike Nichols decided to cast Mr. Spader in “Wolf” (1994) as a young corporate climber who is turned into a werewolf. Janet Maslin, reviewing the film for The New York Times, credited Mr. Spader with “still turning the business of being despicable into a fine art.” Mr. Nichols said in an interview that he had been impressed by Mr. Spader’s “hunger to play parts that don’t allow you to coast.”
“He needs moments in a script to chew on,” he added. “He starts out in ‘Wolf’ as this slightly supercilious guy, but as the lupine characteristics began to encroach, he found actual human characteristics involving hearing and smelling and awareness that he made recognizable in the beast.”
Mr. Spader also seems not to have the actor’s gene for needing to be liked.
“I’m very selfish about my work,” he said. “I’ve always made the decisions, in terms of what I did in the business, without any real regard with how it was going to be received by others.”
While he had no formal audition for “Race” — Mr. Mamet (who is also directing) offered him the part over lunch — Mr. Spader said he was confident that he could “bring the art of great, unvarnished conversation to life, which is what ‘Race’ is about.” (Mr. Mamet, in trademark fashion, declined to be interviewed.) Just as exciting, Mr. Spader said, was unwinding another knotty character on a new proving ground, Broadway.
“When doing theater, you have to find great satisfaction in the small things,” he said. “There’s going to be a repetition and a redundancy night after night, but it’s the small variations in those moments — a word, a tone of voice, the smallest sense of enlightenment that can happen in an instant onstage — that will be the most rewarding.”
Da The New York Times, 29 Novembre, 2009