You may not know their names, but you've seen their faces in all sorts of roles, from the strange dentist to the ruthless district attorney. Character actors Richard Schiff and Michael Mantell, who appear in the soon-to-be-released feature film Gun Shy with Liam Neeson and Sandra Bullock, have developed prolific careers based on their character-driven performances.
Schiff, who started his career as a theatre director in New York, has numerous film and television credits to his name. Among his more than 40 feature films are Forces of Nature, Deep Impact, Living Out Loud, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, City Hall, Seven, Hoffa, The Bodyguard, and Malcolm X. His television guest appearances include Ally McBeal, The Practice, NYPD Blue, ER, and Murphy Brown. He will soon appear in Antonio Banderas' directorial debut, Crazy in Alabama, with Melanie Griffith.
Michael Mantell started his film career in a number of John Sayles' films, including Matewan, Eight Men Out, City of Hope, and Brother From Another Planet, as well as Quiz Show, Little Man Tate, and The Night We Never Met. His extensive theatre credits include The Tenth Man on Broadway at the Lincoln Center Theater, and Off-Broadway appearances in Awake and Sing!, Incident at Vichy, and Ivanov. Mantell has also made notable television appearances on such series as The X-Files, Ally McBeal, Roseanne, Space: Above and Beyond, NYPD Blue, and Law & Order. He recently completed filming Lost Souls, directed by Spielberg cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, and is currently appearing in the Relentless Theatre Company's staging of Christopher Kyle's The Monogamist, which runs through June 19 at the Gascon Center Theatre.
Back Stage West recently sat down with these busy performers to discuss training, the theatre, and the finer points of being a character actor.
Richard Schiff: When I used to direct theatre quite a bit, I found that I was losing touch with the acting process. I was getting very frustrated with actors. I always prided myself that working with the actors was the way to bring the material to life. But when I started losing touch, I was talking to a couple of actors I found I kept rehiring. They all had one thing in common, the person they studied with: William Esper, who now works with Calista Flockhart. He's become famous now, but years ago he had just broken off with Sandy Meisner. So I went and talked to him about it, and I said, "I'm a director and I am interested in studying and learning about what it is that actors use to give the performance that suits the play." His response to me was, "Well, you're an interesting fellow, and if you want to be in my class you can be." I didn't know what that meant exactly, but I took his class.
Michael Mantell: Sounds good.
Richard: I understood why he had his actors not act at first, because he's literally breaking down any preconceptions of what acting is all about and then in the second year he starts to build it back up. The first year is simply opening up the instrument and becoming vulnerable to whatever happens-very difficult for me to do. If it wasn't for the fact that he called on people, I would have never gotten up to work, because I was petrified. The fact that I was so afraid made me think, I have to do this. He kept encouraging me, and I started doing plays after that. So that training was priceless for me because it changed what I did in my life and I stopped directing from that point on.
I found that training answered a lot of questions and provided the basis from which I was able to learn how to act. It didn't teach me how to act, but it gave me tools and a way of beginning. So 10 years later is when I started to say to myself, Now I'm beginning to figure this out.
Michael: So he tapped into something nobody else did, or made you like it?
Richard: I totally committed to it. Then I said, I get it now. It was the act of fully committing to it, because there's no turning back once you're fully committed. That was the problem I always had with actors as a director: to get them to fully commit to a moment. Because the next moment can't really happen unless you fully commit to the first one. When things happen onstage, for instance, a lot of people say, never try to repeat it. And I say, Bullshit, you can always repeat it. Don't try to repeat the moment; repeat the moment before the moment. If you fully do that moment truthfully, the next moment will have to happen. It might happen a little bit differently every night, but something is going to have to happen, because the moment before was totally fulfilled.
Michael: And that's how you're able to repeat it night after night, because there's this sort of chain of events that gets set in motion. If the next moment is missing, then it's not logical for the moment that's before it; then you've got to adjust something.
Richard: I think a mistake a lot of actors make is they get a laugh on a certain line, and they try to repeat that spontaneity that created the laugh. You say, I'm going to repeat that spontaneous moment. By definition you've lost any chance of spontaneity, so you have to focus on what made it spontaneous.
Michael: What's that classic line? The actor lost the laugh, and they say, "Well, you're not asking for a coffee, you're asking for a laugh."
My first teacher was Earl Hymen, who was a wonderful teacher. He said, "I'd like to see you study with Uta Hagen." I had no idea who she was and found out who she was, and then auditioned for her. I was very shy, went in, auditioned, mumbled something, and left. She told me on the spot she'd take me. I said, "Thank you, thank you, thank you." She wasn't just a great acting teacher, but just a great mentor, and once in a while would just give you an invigorating dose of cold water and wake you up. She would say, "You're reading bad novels, filling yourself full of this contemporary pop garbage." She really got me hungry for reading the plays.
Watching other actors is always edifying to me-to watch how they work. Hopefully each time you work you're confronting additional questions about yourself and your work as much as you're trying to put a character over. Working on this play [The Monogamist] has been wonderful, because I haven't been back to the theatre in four years, so all of a sudden things I can trust are there and certain things I gotta search for.
It's also wonderful to be rehearsing, as opposed to doing movies or television, where it's just about instant acting and everything is thrown at you at once. If you have something to work out you've got to do it very quickly, because things are moving along. So I always feel a pressure. It feels like I'm going back to my roots, which are off-Off Broadway and 99-seat theatre.
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Michael: I go up for a father, and I am a father, but I don't look like a father. They might cast somebody like Dan Lauria, a father figure, because you have to be a father figure, whatever that means. Especially with television, where it's sort of instantaneous, where you only have 18 minutes to establish that person, so it immediately has to ring true. I think of it as, What's your strength acting-wise-whether you're funny, in what context are you funny, if you feel that you can do a certain kind of work. Sometimes you find a connection with certain material.
Richard: I did a little independent movie called Medium Straight years ago. There was this casting director who came and saw this movie, and afterwards he said, "That was great, I have a part for you, I'm casting this TV show, come out and we'll get you sides." This was my first audition in L.A. I had a beard and a ponytail for the movie, and I came out to audition as a reporter or something. I went in and I did a very good reading. And the casting director said, "You know, those producers are idiots, they thought you were great, but we argued about the ponytail for a half an hour, so I'm sorry but you're not going to get the part."
So I said, "Just out of curiosity, the half hour that you spent discussing and arguing the ponytail, did anyone bring up the possibility that the ponytail could be cut?" He kind of turned, blanched, and said, "Well, no, it didn't." So that was my first taste of how silly it is out here. And I made a choice right then and there that I'm not going to partake in that. Although when I started to work was when I cut my ponytail. BSW