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Michael Douglas makes being bad look good
Jay Stone
TORONTO - Michael Douglas has made a career out of playing sleazy, macho characters who somehow make sleazy, macho behaviour seem seductive. Dan Gallagher, for instance, the husband in Fatal Attraction, an adulterer who gets what's coming to him, maybe, but makes you feel sorry for him at the same time.
"I do love those parts where you have to earn the audience's respect," Douglas was saying the other day, sitting on a white leather couch in an exclusive lounge at the top of Toronto's Park Hyatt hotel, the city spread out below him.
He recalled how, in Fatal Attraction, there was a scene where Dan goes back to his apartment and rolls around in bed to make it look as if he slept there.
"And the audience laughed. It was like, 'They've forgiven me already, I can't believe it. They've already forgiven me.' I don't know how to explain it but I enjoy the challenge, the risk of it."
It's the same with Gordon Gekko, the "greed is good" guy in Wall Street, a role he is about to reprise in a 22-years-later sequel. Gekko has become an archetype of corporate excess, but even in 1987, he was a villain.
"I just couldn't believe the number of people who came up - usually drunk - saying, 'Aw man. You're the guy.' I was the bad guy. I don't think a lot has changed."
He does it again in Solitary Man, a black comedy about a 60-something car dealer named Ben Kalmen who is also an unreconstructed philanderer: he leaves his wife (Susan Sarandon) takes up with a new girlfriend (Mary-Louise Parker), sleeps with the girlfriend's teenage daughter (Imogen Potts), sleeps with a friend of his own daughter (Jenna Fisher) and becomes a role model to a university student (Jesse Eisenberg) and then comes on to the student's girlfriend.
And all the while, he makes it look good.
Part of it is Ben's hip, all-black wardrobe, and it's not surprising that off-screen Douglas is also dressed in black ("I'm one of those guys, I don't understand shopping," he says, so he buys his clothes from the wardrobe department of his movies.)
His long hair is white now, but there's an awful lot of it, and he looks fit and happy: a man a couple of weeks from his 65th birthday, married to one of the most beautiful women in the world, Catherine Zeta-Jones. He has had tragedy in his life lately - his 30-year-old son Cameron, from his first marriage, was arrested for drug dealing - but he is busy again, appearing in several high-profile films.
Solitary Man, which had its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, has a hint of Wall Street in it - Ben seems like the kind of guy who would have looked up to Gekko - and Douglas understands that he carries a familiar screen persona.
"If you're going to have your whole career - and it's not by choice - in contemporary roles, no historic roles, not science fiction roles, just contemporary roles, you're probably going to bump into yourself from time to time on projects."
(Asked if he wants to do science fiction or historical drama, he says, "I love the contemporary struggle and I haven't seen that many period pictures that interest me.")
Ben is by most measures a terrible man, but Douglas says, "I love the guy. He's such a goofball." He also understands the character's desire to reconnect with his family.
"My life has changed a lot from where career was the most important thing for a long time," he says. "In our business, you really can't balance the two. You really can't. You're travelling and you've got to go with your career; your family has to take second position. But I was blessed with this second chance, as far as a marriage and raising kids. And if you're going to do that in this point in your life, you'd better enjoy it. I'm going to be 65 with a nine year old and a six year old. It keeps you on your toes."
(As a fellow old guy, I check on the nap situation. He says he can fit one in after lunch when the kids are at school.)
He adds, "I haven't found much I want to do that's more joyful than waking up and picking up my kids from school and having a good marriage. The nice thing about being older is that you don't take things like that for granted."
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Still, he's working again, first on Wall Street 2, playing Gekko again ("People have fun with him so I'm going to try to have fun with him and not take him too seriously") and then - in a break from the macho roles - as Liberace in Steven Soderbergh's biopic about the flamboyant pianist. It's a role he's already thinking about. "Just live and breathe Liberace," he says. "Get campily comfortable and larger than life in that area. I'll spend the winter doing that with a piano, with stuff like that and not even deal with the script for the first three months."
Ben also has a larger-than-life quality, an older man who wanders through university bars looking for hints of sexual interest among the coeds. Douglas calls it, "that car dealer thing: 'I think I've got a sale.' " It took him back to his younger days.
"I always loved those guys in school who could take nine out of 10 rejections. If they scored once that was fine with them. The nine meant nothing. I was one of those guys, one rejection, I folded."
You don't believe it, but Douglas looks so good saying it - the guy really is seductive - that you sort of have to.
