James Le Gros is one of the busiest actors in America, on stage and in movies, and he is nothing if not honest. "At my level of the pecking order, I have no choice but to keep working," he said when we met in London recently. "I have two young sons to feed and send to school and I am not one of those actors who gets a mega-salary, or anything like that. So while artistic consideration is, of course, desirable in my choice of roles, I often don't have that choice and I have to balance it with the economic necessities of my life."
Consequently, he is refreshingly up-front in dismissing many of the films in which he has acted as "a string of really bad movies", no matter how solid his own contribution might have been. So many of them make him cringe, he says. Like how many? "You want me to give you a body count? Movies that I look back on in horror? About half of them. But that's OK, that's all right. It's experimentation. I don't worry so much about how it's going to turn out any more. I don't get mired in that because I'm not cutting the film and it's not my job to photograph it and light it. For myself, I try a new approach with each thing, refining my process."
Dross apart, Le Gros has regularly chosen well, making his mark in such notable US indies as Drugstore Cowboy, Living In Oblivion, Gun Crazy, My New Gun, Singles, Safe and the current release, The Myth Of Fingerprints - and on stage in The Cherry Orchard, Galileo, The Curse Of The Starving Class, American Buffalo and The Slab Boys.
Off-screen, James Le Gros proves articulate, dry-humoured and handsome. Now 35, he was born in a small town in Minnesota. "A very cold place," he says. "Basically, there are just three seasons there - the season of it just was winter, the season of it's about to be winter, and then there's winter."
His initial interest in acting was not motivated by any lofty ideals. "I wanted to meet girls," he says. "Honestly. Then, as with anything, that kinda wore off. One doesn't want to make a complete fool of oneself for a lifetime, so I felt it was imperative to learn how to do this."
Starting out in theatre was an invaluable experience in that respect, he says. "If your feet haven't felt the boards, I don't think you're an actor. Movies have their own challenges as well, but I think it's important to have the total experience. One of my first professional jobs was doing improv theatre in the public school system in the States. Nothing on any movie I've done has come remotely close to being as difficult as that. It's very hard work, and children are a very honest audience. They don't hold back their opinions."
Le Gros made his film debut in 1984 in the cable movie The Ratings Game, a barbed satire on the television industry starring and directed by Danny DeVito, and then worked his way through all those unmentionable movies he dismissed earlier. The breakthrough movie for Le Gros was Gus Van Sant's 1989 Drugstore Cowboy, in which he vividly portrayed the drug-scoring best friend of the Matt Dillon character. "I hadn't been in that many good pictures up that point, so that was really good to do," he says, "but it didn't have an immediate impact in the US. It was a financial debacle for the company that released it, but they hated it and had no faith in it. Then it started getting these really good reviews and winning awards. It had no real impact, though, for the actors except for Matt."
One of James Le Gros's few ventures into big-budget Hollywood movies was in the vigorously stylish 1991 thriller, Point Break, which starred Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves, and in which Le Gros played one of the four bank robbers who dubbed themselves the Ex-Presidents and disguised themselves with masks of Nixon, Johnson, Carter and Reagan.
"Yeah, that was a good action movie, but you know, it was really boring to do," he says. "On a big movie like that you just spend so much time sitting around. Any movie with action is just so tedious. It takes so long to set up the shot. The movie star is late, the light isn't right, there's always something, and it's excruciating for actors.
"But it was fun in that we got to skydive and surf. Patrick Swayze had it in his contract that he had to do all that himself. Bless his heart, he tried but he wasn't too good at the surfing, but he did enough of it and he did all his own skydiving. The skydiving scared the hell out of me. The first two or three times it was just plain crazy. then it took on a different feel and got really exhilarating."
Coming up for Le Gros this year is another action blockbuster, Tony Scott's Enemy Of The People, with Gene Hackman, Will Smith and Edward Norton. "There will be a lot more sitting around on my ass during that," he says with a sigh. And he will be seen in another thriller, The Pass, with William Forsythe; as a stetson-wearing US Marshal in Jim McBride's Elmore Leonard adaptation, Pronto, with Peter Falk; in Miramax's Wishful Thinking with Drew Barrymore and Jennifer Beals; and with another indies regular Fairuza Balk in There's No Fish Food In Heaven.
Looking back on a career of almost 40 movies in 13 years, one of the most pleasurable experiences for James Le Gros was, he says, working on Tom DiCillo's hilarious satire on US independent film-making in Living In Oblivion, in which he played the arrogant, narcissistic leading actor, Chad Palomino, who's forever changing lines and offering his own directing suggestions. Played in a spot-on parody by Le Gros, the Palomino character clearly was based on Brad Pitt, the star of DiCillo's previous film, Johnny Suede. His performance earned Le Gros a nomination at the 1996 Independent Spirit Awards and encouraged Vincent Canby in The New York Times to hail "gravity and reserve that are rare in such a young actor".
In the same year he featured in the later stages of Todd Haynes's Safe, as a fellow patient of the Julianne Moore character at a New Mexico desert retreat for the chemically sensitive. "Todd just let me go on my own way with it, which is probably why I'm hired a lot of the time," he says. "With Todd, like Gus Van Sant, they're both painters. They have a very strong sense of composition and that's apparent in all their work. For example, on Safe, the way Todd would fill a frame and how he would place Julianne within that frame - often off to the side and kind of swallowed by the enormity of her environment. It's masterful. It's the same on Gus's new movie, Good Will Hunting, which I think is an outstanding movie."
Now playing at the IFC in Dublin, Brad Freundlich's The Myth Of Fingerprints reunites James Le Gros with Julianne Moore. In this picture, which reunites a dysfunctional American family for Thanksgiving, he has a supporting role as Moore's closest friend since childhood, who has changed his name to Cezanne. "I think there's a lesson to be learned there," says Le Gros. "Which is you can't change where you've been, but you can certainly change where you're going, and if you don't like who you are, reinvent yourself. "It was a pleasure to work with Julianne again. She was brilliant in Safe. I just marvel at her range. She does a character like that, or in The Myth Of Fingerprints, Boogie Nights or Vanya On 42nd Street - or even a silly film like Nine Months or the dinosaur picture (The Lost World), and she is different, very specific and completely engaging in all of them. I wish I had her talent on a bad day. She's done so well - considering how hard it is for women to get good parts. It's not, of course, that they can't do it, but they're just not asked. They're the handbag in this scene, the piece of luggage in another scene."
At the other end of the scale was the experience of working with Quentin Tarantino in the dire Destiny Turns On The Radio. "I believe that anyone can act in a realistic manner, in a natural way that makes you believe they're speaking spontaneously what they're saying," he says. "The hard part - the leap - is, do you want to watch them do it? Is it compelling? I don't think Mr Tarantino has bridged that gap, for example, but I would feel honoured to work with him as a director."
