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Aug. 18, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show
53:40
The Reagan Era | Dennis Quaid
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Republicans and Democrats need each other.
That's what we're... That's what we don't admit.
Because we keep each other from going too far one way or the other.
You know, the fringe is taking over.
I myself, I'm an independent.
I mean, I've voted both ways all my life.
So I'm not a registered Republican.
But once the judicial system was used, This week on the Sunday Special, Dennis Quaid joins us ahead of the premiere of the upcoming biopic, Reagan, coming to theaters nationwide Friday, August 30th.
for us.
This week on the Sunday Special, Dennis Quaid joins us ahead of the premiere of the upcoming
biopic, Reagan, coming to theaters nationwide Friday, August 30th.
Quaid is quite the renaissance man.
He's a two-time Golden Globe nominated actor, musician, self-proclaimed golf addict, and
After over 40 years in Hollywood, Quaid recently moved to Nashville, where he founded his own production company, Bonnydale Films.
Quaid is known for his roles in Breaking Away, The Right Stuff, Big Easy, and The Parent Trap, but his career has spanned nearly every genre of film.
From dramas to thrillers, rom-coms, and action roles.
In today's episode, Quaid discusses how he prepared to portray Ronald Reagan, including his visit to the Reagan Ranch, and his observations about Reagan's psyche.
Quaid also reflects on the parallels between our current political moment and President Reagan's era, offers a few predictions about the future of Hollywood, and shares a few of his favorite all-time films.
You don't want to miss Dennis Quaid in Reagan, coming out in theaters nationwide August 30th.
From Hollywood to the Oval Office, Quaid brings one of our country's greatest presidents back to life on the silver screen.
Welcome back to another episode of the Sunday Special.
And it's quite the Thank you so much for stopping by.
Thank you, Ben.
Thanks for having me.
Absolutely.
So let's let's jump right into it about the film.
So obviously, it's the first biopic of Reagan, which is in and of itself totally insane.
He's one of the most historic presidents in American history.
He left office when I was four years old.
I'm now 40.
So why don't we start with what do you think took so long?
Why didn't Hollywood do this earlier?
He was a Hollywood guy.
You would imagine pretty good Hollywood story.
What took Hollywood so long to make this film?
Yeah, no kidding.
That's a really good question, and I don't know if I can really answer it, but I do know that this script, Mark Joseph, who is the producer who really championed this thing, he's had this script since 2008.
I think that's when it began.
And then it was a question of financing and everything.
And I don't think the studios really wanted to make it.
There wasn't much interest around for it.
So he basically independent financing, which I'm really glad that we had, to tell you the truth, because we had control over the story.
And I was first asked to do it in, it was 2017 that Mark came to me.
It took me a while to say yes, to tell you the truth, because Reagan was my favorite president.
I mean, I lived through all this.
I voted for Jimmy Carter in 76.
That was my first time I could vote.
But then I voted for Reagan in 80, and I went back home there in California.
My roommate said, who'd you vote for?
I said, Reagan.
He said, you're kicked out of the hippies.
So I turned in my card, and that was it.
So, you get the script, and you're thinking about it.
What were sort of the considerations as to why you at first didn't want to do it?
Obviously, you said your favorite president, but were there career considerations also, given the fact that Hollywood is pretty famously not super receptive to warmth toward even mildly right of center ideas?
Well, as far as all the politics of it.
No, that didn't really come into my thinking about it.
A shiver of fear went up my spine when they asked me to do it, because Reagan's like Muhammad Ali.
Everybody in the world knows what he looks like, walks like, talks like.
Everybody's got a story.
They all have an opinion.
I mean, negative or positive about him, but at the same time, he looms large.
In anybody's life that's over like 45, you know, 50 years old.
And so that, I didn't want to do an impersonation.
I guess I was a little afraid of being judged.
I didn't really think I really looked like him or could get there.
And so it took me a while, but mainly it was about Putting all the exterior stuff aside, for me, acting is about what makes people tick.
And you have the public persona, but you have to be able to get behind that as an actor in order to...
Uh, make someone come alive and not just be an impression.
So, uh, let's talk about that.
That took a while.
So I didn't say yes and I didn't say no.
So how do you get into Ronald Reagan's head?
Obviously, you have writings by Ronald Reagan, you have biographies of Ronald Reagan.
Right.
How do you go about doing the research into playing a real life, gigantic figure like that?
Well, before I said yes, I read a couple of biographies about him.
Besides having lived through all of, everything he lived through, you know?
But then I went, I got invited to the Reagan ranch, which was the Western White House back then.
It's, uh, Reagan bought it after he was governor of California.
And, uh, it's not open to the public.
A group of friends bought it after his death and, um, kept it exactly as it was when he and Nancy were there.
I mean, their clothes are in the closet still.
Expect him to come back, you know, anytime.
But I went up the worst road in California, five miles of it to the top of that mountain, and came out through the gate.
And that's when I made up my mind, basically, because I felt like I got him.
I could feel him there at that place.
And it was very obvious that Reagan was actually a very humble man.
He really did do all the work around there.
You can feel that.
And the house itself, the Western White House from back then, it's maybe 1,100 square feet.
And, you know, very modest.
The bed was a king-size bed, but it was two single beds that were zip-tied together.
You know, it was, you could just feel both of them, he and Nancy, in that place.
And that's, that's, Where I made up my mind to do it.
it. One of the things that's fascinating when you read biographies of Reagan is that pretty
much everybody who knew him, maybe except for Nancy, talks about him having this sort
of inner reserve, how he would be in the room with you and obviously he would interact with
you, but there was a part of him that he sort of kept behind a wall. What do you think that
was? That's the thing between the impersonation and getting to the person, about what makes
them tick.
I've played several real people in my life, and I feel like I have a responsibility to those people, whether it be Doc Holliday, who's not even alive anymore, or Jimmy Morris in The Rookie, to do it from their point of view.
You know, because that's the way we live our lives from our point of view.
And there was that thing of Reagan, I heard from everyone that knew him, that there's this impenetrable space that he always had.
You know, this is the great communicator.
You're quite jovial of a person.
But there was this place that you couldn't get past as well, a very private place.
And I think that was always there with him from childhood, really.
And I think it had something to do with people, you know, a lot of people coming at him, you know, being so public.
He had to have that even in a crowd to be able to have his privacy, in a sense.
And I think that also was kind of a place where he, you know, that was really where he would go in prayer or meditation or whatever you want to call it, but, you know, that place was reserved.
And I think He really needed something like, a place like that because, you know, the world was, you know, always coming to his door.
And that goes all the way back to his childhood.
I mean, obviously, he had an incredibly rough childhood.
His father was not around when he was, wasn't good.
He grew up not wealthy at all.
He's a true American legend in terms of his success story and in terms of the trajectory, but you carry that with you, I'd imagine, that sort of damage you carry with you your whole life.
Right.
I mean, having an alcoholic father like that, you know, that you're having to take care of, he dragged him Dragged him, he was passed out on the porch a couple of times, had to drag him inside.
That kind of puts a protective coat on you, I think, as a child, because you feel, in a way, responsible for the parents, in a sense.
And his mother certainly had a big effect on him.
His mother, like my mom, really, was the rock in his life.
In some ways I could really relate with Reagan, because my dad was an alcoholic.
You know, there's certain degrees of it that are around, but he was an alcoholic, and my mom was kind of that rock for me as well.
So, as you say, you don't want to do an impersonation, but you're saying some of the most iconic lines in the history of American politics and American life.
So, how do you do that balance?
How do you be Reagan without being a Saturday Night Live performer who's just doing a weak version of the Reagan act, kind of?
Right.
Yeah, that was the fear that Saturday Night Fear comes up.
But like I said, that had to get down to playing the emotions of the scenes and what they were, and really getting down to the person.
That's the person that has insecurities like all of us have.
Degrees of self-esteem and the way to find a way into that like I'm an actor myself and Reagan as an actor.
I don't think he ever got to the place that he wanted to be as an actor thinking kind of felt not a failure, but he just never really got there, you know, whether it's because Jack Warner.
Uh, never gave him the parts, but, you know, John Wayne really had his slot.
So he was kind of relegated to B-movies.
And he was also married to Jane Wyman.
When his career was really going down at the end, hers was, you know, sky-high.
She won an Academy Award, you know.
And, um...
You know, say what you want, but I think, you know, that kind of does something to your own sense of self, self-esteem, or whatever.
I related it in my life.
I was married to Meg Ryan, you know?
And, you know, my career was kind of going like that, and hers was, you know, going like that.
And you wanted to say, well, I'm above all that and stuff.
But you're a human being, you know?
You question yourself.
And, but, Also out of that, his career going down, he became vice president and then president of the Screen Actors Guild, which is a job you don't really aspire to when you're starting out as an actor.
But it's amazing how God works.
I think that's where Reagan found his purpose.
And, you know, he becomes president of the Screen Actors Guild.
He's fighting the communists from within while protecting the actors who may be ideologically diverse inside the Screen Actors Guild, which is not an easy balance.
No, it's not.
In fact, a little tidbit, you know, we have great health insurance actors in the Screen Actors Guild.
I mean, like the best.
It was Reagan who got us that.
Fought for it for nine years, and he got it.
And he did fight communists.
You know, it was kind of like People took that as a wives' tale or something, a communist infiltrating, you know, the unions and everything.
But, you know, when the Soviet Union fell, you know, all those papers came flooding out.
Lo and behold, they actually were trying to take over the unions in Hollywood.
And Reagan takes charge of that.
And then, of course, he runs for governor of California.
But before he does that, he goes on this GE tour where he's going all over the United States and he's talking about politics.
Frequently, like every week, doing these speeches, and really getting himself familiar with the material.
I think one of the great rips that his critics have is they pretend that he was an idiot, or that he was uneducated, or he didn't know anything about politics, that he was a dilettante.
He read widely and broadly.
He educated himself.
He really did.
He really did.
GE, that's a great point.
This is not something he had to do, but he took it upon himself to go around to every factory, every GE factory, and go out on the floor and talk to all the workers, you know, on their lunch breaks or, you know, coming or leaving at the end of the day, and talk to them.
And that was the beginnings of his political base, was right there.
He also got out into the country.
And really found out what was on their minds, what were the issues, you know, in their lives.
And that, I think, just about more than anything else, had a lot to do with him becoming president.
I know my dad was one of those people, in fact.
You know, my dad was an electrician.
And I remember we were going to Galveston.
It was like 1964.
And the speech was on the radio.
It was during an election year.
He was out for Goldwater, I think.
And it's a very famous speech.
My dad was pounding the dashboard and, you know, Go Ronnie and stuff like that.
And that was my first inklings of him as a is a political figure.
Before, he was just a guy on TV who sold Baraxos soap.
What's fascinating about Reagan is that he really is a combination of all of these different, really diverse factors.
He's somebody who spends time in Hollywood, which of course is a very left-wing place politically, so he knows how to talk to people on that side.
And he was a Democrat back then, by the way.
He was.
He was.
And then he shifts to the right, but still knows how to speak that language.
He's somebody who becomes very hard on communism, but at the same time is almost Innocent about the nature of human beings and how human beings can operate.
And very famously during his presidency, he wrote, probably his worst speech actually during his presidency, there's a part where he writes about how maybe one day a child from the Soviet Union and a child from America will get together and they'll play in the park.
And it's this very sort of innocent take.
And a lot of his foreign policy team was like, this is, you shouldn't be saying.
Oh, that was the couple who met the very nice couple who happened to be Soviets and we got
together and it was, yeah.
Exactly.
It's a very, it's a very nice statement.
Yeah, that one.
He's this very strange combination of somebody who's incredibly hard-nosed in the use of
American power and the threat of use of American power.
I mean, he builds up the military.
He walks away at Reykjavik.
He, he, he says no to the Soviets, but at the same time, he holds out the prospect that
nobody had ever said no to the Soviets.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
And so that, that's, that's what makes him such a sort of mystery and a fascinating character
is all these internal contradictions.
Right.
And, you know, I think when he was elected president, he was, you know, called a warmonger.
He was definitely going to get us into a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union.
You know, there was.
But it took a it took a cold warrior like that to win the Cold War.
You know, before that, we'd We'd had Carter, who was, you know, this is not against Carter, but he was what he did in the Middle East with, you know, peace with Egypt and Israel.
I mean, that was quite an accomplishment and everything.
But with the Soviets, you know, we had given away the B-1 bomber.
We had appeased them.
America is sort of like that speech that Reagan, you were talking about Reagan, that innocence that we just want to be friends with everybody.
That's a natural thing for us to do.
We don't see why it couldn't be that way and appeal with reason.
You know, the people in the Soviet Union and Iran, you go through it, most of the world didn't grow up like we did.
It's a very brutal world out there, and a very brutal reality.
When America is like that, I think they sort of laugh at us a little bit, or they take advantage of it, for sure, because they see it as weakness.
So when you look at Reagan, obviously you've identified as a political independent for a long time in Hollywood.
This election, you said that you plan on supporting President Trump in the election.
What are the sort of similarities that you see between President Trump Well, I think it's more the circumstances of the world right now.
I mean, if you go back to 1980, 1979, we had the hostages, which nobody talks about.
We have hostages right now in the Middle East.
I don't know why nobody talks about them.
But that, you know, the economy was...
Was in a bad place at the time with gas, oil, you know, being a big thing.
Inflation was high.
And a lot of the very same circumstances, I think.
In fact, Carter had even made his famous malaise speech that, you know, America was in.
And, you know, Reagan came along and said, no, we're not a nation in decline.
We are going up.
We're in a shiny city on a hill, and we're going to get back to that.
And people believed in me, inspired people.
And that's why I won the presidency, I think.
One of the things that's amazing about Reagan is that you look at his first term, and he has a rough first couple of years.
In the economy, obviously, he's trying to quash inflation, and that means that he has to radically increase the interest rates using sort of Volcker's plans.
And by 1982, you know, his popularity is waning a little bit, and then he sort of kind of roars back in 83, 84.
He wins this enormous victory in 1984.
And you look at the way that America is now, And one of the things that you wonder is, no matter how successful any president is, is there a possibility of anything like that sort of American unity again?
And it feels like sort of not.
And maybe that can just be chalked up to the fact that it used to be that Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill would battle it out, and then they actually kind of liked each other and would have conversations.
Yeah, they would get together, like, after five o'clock.
That's what they said.
We're going to be enemies until after, like, five o'clock.
And there were just a couple of Irishmen having a beer.
Tip O'Dea would be at the White House.
At least they had a conversation with each other, back and forth.
Also, Reagan was elected in 1980.
The Iran hostages were freed like 20 minutes after he took office, because Iran knew that he wasn't going to take anything from them.
But it was also, especially in the economy, you know, interest rates were 20% at one time.
I remember that because I was trying to buy a house.
And I think he really won on, um, are you better off than you were four years ago?
And you know, that was, uh, That question is very similar to what it is now.
And it took a couple of years for, I think, changes to happen.
You see progress in something.
It's not going to change overnight as far as, you know, inflation and the economic policy that was put into effect.
And then I think he had an extended honeymoon period because of the assassination attempt, which we've just done as well.
But once things got going, I think you saw a lot of like Activists from the 60s who had grown up and were now on Wall Street, you know, they, uh, I guess the Reagan Democrats, you could call them, the, that, uh, you know, things started to change.
We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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Have you felt a lot of blowback from, sort of, your social circle?
I know that you don't live in Hollywood anymore, but, you know, coming out and saying that you're planning on voting for President Trump is not necessarily the most popular sentiment in Hollywood, for sure.
Well, I have my friends, you know.
I have my friends and, you know, our relationship is quite solid with that.
And, I don't know, there's got to be a conversation, you know.
A lot of actors have been told, like, you know, shut up in Hollywood.
Just don't say anything because, you know, it's going to affect you.
You're getting a job or this and why is it okay for, you know, say Michael Douglas to go on, you know, talk shows and talk about Biden and, you know, and yet you can't be, you can't be for Trump.
That's not a way America works.
We've got to have a conversation about this.
It used to be even back in Reagan's day, you would have, Liberal Republicans, you had conservative Democrats, so the lines weren't so blurred as they, today it's just black and white.
And we've got to get, more than anything, we've got to get back to being able to interact with each other.
Republicans and Democrats need each other.
That's what we don't admit.
Because we keep each other from going too far one way or the other.
You know, the fringe is taking over.
I myself, I'm an independent.
I mean, I've voted both ways all my life.
So I'm not a registered Republican.
But what I saw with, I wasn't going to vote for Trump either
because I thought things needed to really settle down in this country.
And there were a lot of other candidates that I thought would be good.
But once the judicial system was used on him, on him. Yeah, that's...
To me, that was messing with our Constitution, and that's not America.
And that's what got me back the other way, that I'm definitely voting for him, because I believe in America, and I believe in the Constitution.
So, one of the things that you mentioned very early on here is that this film was independently funded, that it didn't come through the Hollywood studio system.
Do you think that that's going to be the future of where Hollywood goes?
That you're going to see a lot more independently funded films, whether it is through people like Mark, whether it is through Angel Studios, or through all of the, through your production house, that sort of the studio system has been essentially broken because the theater model has largely been broken, and somehow so has the streaming model.
Yeah, by COVID, and even before COVID, they were having trouble with that.
When I first came to L.A., back in those days, each studio, say five, would be producing at least 40 movies a year.
That's a lot of movies.
That's like 200 studio movies that are coming out, and they would be at all places on the spectrum.
Of genres.
And today, I think, you know, that might be eight, maybe.
And those have all got to be big tent poles, because the only way to make money for them is to spend $200 million, you know?
And so that's really changed.
But more than that, I think that Hollywood has sort of lost its Relevancy with an audience, to a certain extent.
Very similar to what was going on in the late 60s, that they kind of lost track of their audience and who they were.
It took a film like Bonnie and Clyde, That French New Wave thing that set off a whole new thing in the 70s, you know, to a new golden age.
But it was a different kind of filmmaking that hit the audience and actually hit a nerve to what was going on underneath the surface in the country.
You know, you started having anti-heroes and the rebel hero came back and all that.
We're in a very similar place now that I think Hollywood has lost contact with its audience.
But now that void can be filled from anywhere because you can finance a movie from different places and there's different centers going on now.
What Taylor Sheridan is doing in In Texas, and what's going on in Georgia, there's a whole, if I was a young actor today
I wouldn't go to L.A.
I would go to Atlanta, because they're casting the smaller roles there.
They're not going to fly people from L.A.
And that's where I'd start.
But that's the start of an industry there, because people are going to wind up living there and moving there, and they're doing quite well.
On a sort of narrative level, it's sort of fascinating, just the history of Hollywood, how it went from heroes to anti-heroes in the 70s, and then it was kind of stuck in anti-hero land until now.
I mean, you have superheroes, but those are the only kind of heroes that you can depict on screen.
That's one of the things that makes Reagan different, is that Reagan's an actual heroic figure that can be put on screen.
And that feels almost like a throwback, just because you have a biopic where the person isn't being treated like crap.
Where the person isn't being treated as some sort of evil person under the sun.
With the rise of the boops!
Right, exactly.
Or it's J. Edgar Hoover, and secretly it's about how he cross-dresses, and the real sultry stuff is the stuff.
It's a different sort of throwback feel to biopics of, say, the 30s, 40s, and 50s.
Yeah, very much so.
It reflects Reagan.
It reflects the eras in which, you know, he lived and thrived.
Well, for instance, the love story of he and Nancy is very central to the movie.
Reagan probably wouldn't have been president if it wasn't for Nancy.
It was just the strength of their relationship, which is very rare.
So there are a lot of amazing scenes in the film.
Which one of them was sort of your favorite when you think of the most interesting and fun to film?
Which one comes to mind?
The debate between he and Mondale, which I thought was just, it was a piece of theater to begin with.
You know, they'd already had, he and Mondale had the first debate where Reagan had been, you know, kind of loose on the facts and whatever.
He just didn't perform well in the first debate.
So they were talking about he was too old and this and that.
I think he was, what, 74 at the time or something?
And so the second debate, he did the famous, you know, he was asked the question.
It was a great setup.
And he said, I will not, for political purposes, take advantage of my opponent's youth and inexperience, which was fantastic.
And even Mondale laughs, OK?
He knows he's lost the election with that.
But Reagan did something even better is that he said that and then he, I call it the Jack Benny, he reached over and took his water and took a sip of it just to like... Let it breathe.
You let it breathe.
And it was beautiful.
So, you know, let's talk about sort of your journey, both in terms of life and in terms of acting, because, you know, on a personal level, I first saw you in film with Breaking Away.
So I grew up on what would now be considered older movies.
My parents and I would go over to Eddie Brand's Saturday Matinee, which was like the big kind of video rental place in North Hollywood, and we picked up all these movies.
So you started VHS.
Of course.
Or beta.
No, no, no.
VHS.
I'm not of the beta generation.
But yes, VHS.
And wore out the tape on Breaking Away.
So how did you actually break into the industry?
What got you interested in acting in the first place?
Well, my dad was a frustrated actor of things.
And my brother got into it first.
And, you know, he did the last detail.
We were both... I was in high school drama and stuff like that.
He did the last detail.
And it kind of made me go, wow, you can actually do that, you know?
You could actually go there and get a job doing that.
And I really fell in love with acting in college.
There was a particular teacher that was also my brother's teacher, Cecil Pickett was his name.
And he taught, the great thing about him, it was exactly what I said, you know, it was about what makes people tick, you know?
And what's on the outside, the way they walk, the way they, Talk, mannerisms, what causes that?
What's the psychological reason that they do that that leads you to the inside of somebody and
So I went out there when I was 2021 almost and
You know sit my picture around every agent got rejected. So I I just started calling up casting directors
There'd be this thing in the back of the Hollywood Reporter, Films in the Future, and it would list the producer and the director and stuff, and the casting director.
So I just started calling them up, and I got turned down.
eight of ten times, but two of them would see me, then went in to see them, and then I'd stare at my shoes
for the first couple of interviews until I got used to talking.
And then one of them got me an agent, and then I got a job a couple of months after that.
But Breaking Away was really the first movie that made things a lot easier for me,
and that really, I think, connected with audiences.
I really love that movie.
It was such a great experience to do it.
Peter Yates is written by, you know, a first generation Czech and directed by an Englishman.
And I think that's what gave the movie its charm because it was, you know, they saw America Better than we did, I think, in that middle part of America.
And it really had a charm to it.
And it still holds up.
I saw it about four months ago.
It really still holds up.
Oh, it's great.
I mean, the script is terrific.
You're great in it, but everybody's great in it.
I mean, really, all the way top to bottom.
And it is such a pro-America film.
It really is a pro-America film.
It really is.
Peter Yates, who directed it, he directed Bullet.
Right.
He taught all four of us guys film acting, you know.
He was very fatherly and mentorish with us, and I mean, all throughout.
And I remember the night of the opening, you know, of it.
It was kind of like the first film of the 80s, too, I think, in a way of, you know, youth.
Going to the theater, and there was a line around the block, and You know, audiences smell movies, or they used to, because that was back in the day.
We didn't have any social media.
Just be an advertisement in the newspaper.
There was, you know, no television ads or anything like that.
I don't know how that happened, but it was kind of magic the way it used to happen, how an audience could smell a good movie.
We'll get to more on that in a moment.
First, my days are incredibly full.
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So, you know, you started off doing acting in college, and you mentioned there the difference between stage acting and film acting.
I have unfortunately, for the audience, cameoed in a couple of movies that we've made, and I'm a terrible actor.
Oh, really?
Absolutely.
I've got to see this.
You should not.
For your own sake, and for mine, please do not.
I mean, you can watch the movies, but you should fast forward the scenes that I'm in.
And the question that I have after acting, after my vast and extensive acting experience, which of course is similar to your own, what do you...
How do you bring it every take?
I mean, like, that's a hard thing to do.
And how do you maintain a character across an entire span, like in Regan, you're spanning decades.
How do you extend that?
Especially because, you know, for those who have never had the experience of being in a film or watching a film get made, it's all filmed out of sequence.
It's not as though you're filming it chronologically through time.
How do you maintain a character through that when you have to be at point C in a character development in this scene, and then the next day you have to be at point A in that same character's development?
In the afternoon.
Well, I mean, for one thing, you have the luxury of take two, which we don't have here.
Or do we?
But it's, I don't know, the first time the camera came in on me, I remember in the first film, it was just quite intimidating.
But it's about just really learning to just be.
be in the scene. You know, I do all of the research I can and character development with
Reagan. I had a couple of wound up having a couple of years really before we even started filming,
which was great. But the like the voice, you know, in the early part of his life,
like you see him at the in Hollywood at the House of Un-American Activities. You know,
his voice is way up there and it's very, very talks a lot faster. And it's, you know,
I believe our system can take it, you know, that that that's a long way from, you know,
getting to the later years where he speaks a little slower, but it was her.
So it's just all those nuances and, you know, little things like he had a crooked smile, which had something to do with maybe, you know, nerve damage from childhood or whatever, or, you know, the psychology to it.
He kind of, either knowingly, it may have been unknowingly, because they taught you how to walk in Hollywood, you know, when you became an actor in the studio system then, you had to have a certain walk.
And his was very similar to John Wayne in a way.
And so, little things like that, you know, that all add up.
And then you just have to, in the end, just trust it and just go dive in.
So in terms of acting methodologies, obviously we talked about method acting.
My favorite sort of method acting story is the old story from Marathon Man where Olivier is with Hoffman and Hoffman Yeah.
Is acting like his character for the entire time.
Improvising, yeah.
Well, coming out of character, he just is living in the character.
Yeah.
And then Olivia looks at him and says, it's called acting, young man.
Yeah.
It's like too much work.
So how do you address a part?
I mean, obviously, there are people like Daniel Day-Lewis who live in the forest with a bow and arrow for three months to prepare for The Last of the Mohicans or whatever.
Does he still?
He might.
I don't know.
Yeah, I know he doesn't want to work.
He says he doesn't want to work, but anymore, you know, it really kind of comes down to that's kind of like, I guess, when you get asked these questions and stuff like that, you kind of give responses like that and try to put it into a method or a way of work.
But I find that Most people I work with, and myself too, it's just, you come to work, and you've been hired because they think you're right for the part.
And you do your work to do it, and then you just do it.
I guess I used to think a lot about, when I was younger, I used to angst about Technique and this and that and the other, but I think it's part of just like learning it, then forgetting it, and then you just go do it.
Like you do your show every day, you know what I mean?
Sure, you do your show differently than when you first started doing your show, when you got out of the business, right?
You don't angst about as much stuff as you used to, because it's become very natural to you.
It's a really great job to have.
It's great work if you can get it, being an actor, because it beats working for a living.
So you entered Hollywood, as you say, really, really young.
I mean, 20 years old, and you're already starting to get movies, and you're breaking away.
And then, I mean, you talk openly about this, you get sucked into sort of the celebrity culture.
Back in the 70s?
addiction, you overcome that addiction, what is it like being a young star in Hollywood
and how hard is it to resist?
Back in the 70s, man it was fun.
It was really fun.
That's what, you know, like cocaine back then was like, you know, in movie budgets and stuff.
And, you know, there was this, I remember there was a cover story in People magazine about cocaine, about how it wasn't addictive and, you know, it was a party drug and, you know, harmless.
Then John Belushi died and that really changed everything for everybody.
But my personal experience was that, you know, it was fun.
That it was fun with problems, but then it was just problems.
And, you know, affected my sleep.
I think it affected my work.
I really do think so.
And, you know, it affects your life.
When your life kind of becomes unmanageable about it.
That's when it's, you have to do something.
But I had one of those white light experiences.
I had a band at that time, and we were The Eclectics.
The night we got our record deal at the Palace Theatre over on Vine Street, we got a record deal performing that night, and we broke up in the dressing room right after.
Because of me.
Because, you know, I was just a little out of control, I think, you know?
I just wasn't reliable.
And I had a white light experience and I put myself in rehab the next day.
And I was lucky I got it the first time.
Although it was like about, it was about three years of like grinding my teeth.
And you know, what it does to your nervous system, you know, pretty much grinds those synapses down.
And, uh, But to stay away from it, it was kind of like grinding my teeth and, you know, meetings and stuff, meetings every day.
And because they say, you know, it's a spiritual problem is really what it is.
You're trying to fill a hole there, that it's a spiritual hole, really.
And that's what drugs are, you know?
They make you feel like everything's great, but you take away the drug and that's gone.
But it's a spiritual problem, and so that's when I've read the Bible like about five times in my life over different periods and started getting back into that.
Before that, you know, I'd rather go back.
As far as my history on that is, I grew up Baptist, Southern Baptist, you know, and I became disillusioned with churchianity.
I think around 12, 13, which I think a lot of teenagers start to question their life anyway.
And I read a book called Siddhartha, Herman Hess, which really turned me towards Eastern philosophy because it's a very new thing in Eastern religion.
Buddhism, Hinduism, I read the Dhammapada, I read the Bhagavad Gita, I read the Koran, as well as the Bible.
But after rehab, I went back, and this is after about three years, and I read the Bible again, and really what stood out were the red words of Jesus to me.
That's what started, for the first time for me, a personal relationship with God, which continued to nurture and grow and ebb and flow.
But, you know, that was the thing that I think that really got me through it.
So, now you've left L.A.
You don't live in L.A.
anymore.
You moved over to Tennessee.
Yeah.
How's that transition been for you?
I love it.
I just love it there.
You know, I grew up in Texas, and so it feels like home at the same time.
In fact, my grandfather was 10 miles from Tennessee as an infant, and they went to Texas in a covered wagon in 1902.
So, I have a lot of cousins there to begin with.
And, of course, music, It's always been a part of my life.
I have great friends there, and I just love the way of life.
I didn't even know about the music.
So you're a guitarist, or what?
I play guitar.
I've always played guitar and piano.
I mean, I did Great Balls of Fire, Jerry Lee Lewis.
That's another great thing about being an actor, is you get to go in to all these doors that say authorized personnel only.
Yeah, Jerry Lee Lewis was like one of my teachers, one of my piano teachers.
You get to do a lot of really fun things when you're an actor.
So, what are your favorite... I mean, you have a huge IMDb, obviously.
What are the favorite films that you've been in?
For me?
Reagan is now... actually, it's taken over as number one from The Right Stuff, which was my favorite movie before I did Reagan.
And I have a different standard for myself.
It's about the experience that I had when I was making it.
Like, the right stuff came out.
I mean, it didn't do well at all, actually.
You know, it's become a classic, but at the time it didn't do well at all.
But it was about the time of, you know, I grew up in Houston, Space City.
Gordo Cooper was my favorite astronaut.
Wound up, he lived three miles from me in L.A.
I got my pilot's license on that.
Chuck Yeager was on the set every day.
You know, that's a, like, fantastic time.
But I would say the right stuff, Reagan, breaking away, frequency, the rookie, far from heaven.
You know, I have some I'm not so proud of, but those, you know, I have a good little family of... there.
I've been around long enough to have a few good ones.
The Parent Trap.
The Parent Trap gave me a new whole second career.
You know, my sisters grew up on that film.
I've watched it more than once.
All my producers in the back are cheering right now.
I just showed it to my kids like two weeks ago, maybe.
We were on vacation and my daughter and her cousins wanted to watch it.
You're right.
I tell them, I say, I used to be your babysitter.
Because your parents have put it on, you'd watched it 40 times while they were in the other room doing what they wanted to do.
Exactly.
How would you deal with failure?
Obviously we all deal with failure and I think that's the side of American success that people don't often see, is all the failures that lead to the successes or that are the after effects of a success.
How do you deal with, you know, you put an enormous amount of sweat and toil into a movie and it doesn't end up being what you want it to be or it fails in It's very disappointing, man.
It goes right to your self-esteem and everything failure does, you know.
People don't like to talk about it or whatever.
But, you know, it's failure, actually, that if you survive it, you know, you get up off the floor, it actually can make you better, I think.
Everybody's got to have failure in their life, and it's about sticking with something, I think.
I think that's half of the thing about even wanting to be an actor.
I mean, you're kind of set up for failure just to try to become an actor.
There's 40,000 actors in the Screen Actors Guild on, you know, Only 1% are working on any given day.
You've just got to figure you're going to be one of those 1%.
And no matter what, you've got to have a tough skin to a certain extent, too.
But also acknowledge what was wrong with something.
So you talked a little bit earlier about the fact that Hollywood needs to tell some different types of stories.
Obviously, Reagan is the beginning, I think, of a lot of that.
It's a huge movie.
It's sprawling.
It's awesome.
People who don't know Reagan's legacy are going to learn more about Reagan than probably they would through any other medium.
The movie will reach more people than anybody will ever read a Reagan biography.
Yeah, for sure.
And that's very important.
First off, the movie's meant to entertain.
That's what it's supposed to be, you know.
And for those who are like your age, you know, you get a glimpse into what this country used to be like.
And for those like my age, you're reminded what this country was and what it still can be, too.
It was a great time.
as a nation for us and we went through to the very similar times to push through and become a nation that believed in itself again.
That's what I would like to see, you know, is for the American people who have great faith in, we start believing in ourselves again and in each other.
So, what are some of the trunk projects that you've always thought would make great movies?
Things that you wish somebody had made, but they've never made before?
Because I know that anybody who even watches a lot of movies, they've thought, man, I wish they'd make a movie about X, Y, or Z. Oh, right.
Well, I have one right now that I really want to do about the Lakota Sioux, or Crazy Horse.
That story has never been told from the native point of view.
And I have a book now that is the oral history of Crazy Horse's family, as told to this writer.
And the history goes back to the mid-1700s.
There were three Crazy Horses.
The first one was actually there when Lewis and Clark came through.
The second was the father of Crazy Horse in the intertribal wars and stuff.
Then Crazy Horse, and then his great-nephew was killed in World War I, and the family is there today.
And it's a very interesting story told from their point of view.
Okay, final question for you.
I gotta find out, what are your, like, top five movies?
Not the ones that you're in, necessarily.
It can be, but it doesn't have to be.
Right.
You have to go to a desert island to bring five movies.
What are they?
Well, Lawrence of Arabia.
It's a masterpiece.
Godfather 1 and 2, that's one movie.
Yes.
Okay.
I cheat the same way when asked this question.
Yeah, you have to.
Man, you get me started on Scorsese.
The Wizard of Oz is a beautiful film, you know what it means.
I really love that movie Lion.
Yeah, it was small, but it was huge in my mind.
And The Notebook.
It took me a long time to watch that movie, but it gets me every time.
I can't believe it.
Well, the movie is wonderful.
You're wonderful in it.
And thank you so much for taking the time to stop by.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you, Ben.
I really had a good time, man.
Thank you.
That's awesome.
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