Though he has three movies coming out this year-Reindeer Games, Mission to Mars, and Impostor-Gary Sinise will be back at Steppenwolf in a month rehearsing for the lead in a new adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Actors often talk about their "one for them, one for you" agreement, alternating blockbuster films with smaller, independent-and more rewarding-films. Sinise seems to have a different trade-off: a year or two of movie-making for a play at his Chicago theatre.
Of course, that agreement seems to be more in jeopardy every year. For Sinise, like most successful film stars, is currently making that transition from supporting character work to cinematic lead. From his critically regarded roles as stand-up military guys (Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump, Ken Mattingly in Apollo 13), crooked cops (Kevin Dunne in Snake Eyes and Det. Jimmy Shaker in Ransom), violent lowlifes (Milo in Albino Alligator and Marshall in The Quick and the Dead), Sinise has moved into the leading man territory, first in the TV biopics Truman and George Wallace and now with a pair of sci-fi heroes, Jim McConnell in Mission to Mars and Spence Olham in Impostor.
If all these pairs of men have anything in common, it's perhaps that they're very American archetypes-the politician, the astronaut, the cop, the soldier, the criminal.
Coincidentally, Sinise also seems to work in pairs when it comes to directors. More than most actors, he seems to work with directors more than once, without necessarily tying his star to one auteur. Double shots have been offered him by Ron Howard, John Frankenheimer, and Brian DePalma. The reason may be that Sinise's work is deceptively understated in film. Howard has said that Sinise seems to offer one thing-but after working with him for a week or two, the layers peel back. Moreover, he is famously easy to work with, without the trappings and the ego that accompany most performers of his status.
As a director onstage and on the screen, Sinise is also known for his attraction to pairs-mostly pairs of brothers. From the breakout production of True West, which put Steppenwolf, Sinise, and John Malkovich on the map in the early '80s, to Orphans, which went from Steppenwolf to Broadway to London to film, to his directorial film debut, Miles From Home, to the more recent Of Mice and Men, in which he again paired with Malkovich, Sinise has demonstrated an affinity for fraternal relationships. It's therefore apt that, in discussing the early years of Steppenwolf, he insistently shares credits with its two co-founders, Terry Kinney and Jeff Perry.
And it's this relationship that Sinise returns to time and again (Kinney is directing the upcoming Cuckoo's Nest). For despite his expansion into film, Sinise makes it clear that his heart belongs to Steppenwolf, which has perhaps become the most important model for American regional theatre excellence.
Sinise recently sat down with Back Stage West in a burned-out Downtown L.A. building, where he was filming Impostor. The film, which co-stars Vincent D'Onofrio and Madeleine Stowe, centers on an engineer who creates the ultimate weapon in a battle against aliens, only to be suspected as an alien himself. He talked about the now legendary beginnings of Steppenwolf, the rise of the Chicago theatre scene, and about why he takes time away from the theatre for film projects.
Back Stage West: What was your first experience in the theatre?
Gary Sinise: When I was a freshman in high school at Glen Bard West in Glen Ellen, Ill., I went to see a production of West Side Story at the school. I hadn't done any plays or anything at that point. I'd played in a lot of rock bands and done a lot of sports stuff. But I went to see this play and I got really into the dancing and the gang thing. So a bunch of us, as freshmen, formed this group of guys and we went around in jeans jackets and acted like the Jets.
Then I moved from Glen Ellen to Highland Park and went to Highland Park High School. And as coincidence would have it, they were doing a production of West Side Story for their spring musical. I remember hanging out with some of these guys in the hallway one day and this little dynamo of a drama teacher walked by and looked at us and said, "I'm doing West Side Story and you guys look perfect for it. Why don't you come to auditions?" And I thought, West Side Story-you get to rumble onstage and run around and fight and stuff. That would be cool.
Then I went to the audition and I thought, like every other actor in high school, Wow, look at all these girls. They're looking at me. I'm up there auditioning and they're kind of laughing and stuff. And I thought, Hey, this is pretty cool.
So I got a part in the play as one of the Sharks, Pepe. After that point, I just couldn't get enough of it. I signed up for the drama classes and I went to the tech theatre classes and painted sets and worked with the lighting guys and did all the sound stuff. And I ended up, by the time I was a senior, one of the big drama guys in the school.
Then my teacher, Barbara Patterson, was working in a summer stock theatre in Beloit, Wisc., in between my junior year and senior year. And she said, "Do you want to come up there and apprentice? You'll make $30 a week and they give you a room and you just work on plays. We do eight plays in eight weeks."
So I became an apprentice at this theatre called the Court Theatre. I went up there and worked my ass off. The apprentices and the tech people would work 20-hour days, because you were constantly preparing one show and doing another one and running one. It was great experience for a 17-year-old kid. First time away from home for the summer, and I'm up there working in the theatre-professional theatre.
BSW: You founded Steppenwolf around that time, correct?
Sinise: What happened was, I had to go back to high school for an extra semester after my class graduated, because I didn't have enough credits to graduate. I was not real good in that area-gathering credits. And with a group of kids that were still going to high school, I went to this church that was designed by a friend of my father's and mother's, and I asked him if he could talk to the owners to get them to let us use it to do plays. So we started going at night and rehearsing plays, and that's where Steppenwolf was born.
BSW: In 1976, Steppenwolf reorganized and dedicated itself to the ensemble approach. How important was that decision and how did it come about?
Sinise: Originally, the company was just a bunch of high school kids. I called this buddy of mine, Jeff Perry, who was going to Illinois State University, and said that I'd gotten these high school kids together and we'd started this little company. I said, "What are you doing for the summer?" And he said, "Nothing." And I said, "Well, come up and do a play." And he said, "Great, I'm going to bring up a buddy of mine who I met down here who you're really going to like. He's our kind of actor." And that was Terry Kinney.
We ended up that summer doing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. And the three of us really banded together. I knew that this particular group wasn't going to last, because all the kids were in high school and they were all going to go off. Most of them weren't as serious about it as I was. But Jeff and Terry were. The three of us were just loving what we were doing together. And Jeff was my best friend from high school and Terry soon became my other best friend.
The three of us decided that when they got out of school and wrapped all that up, we would re-group and put it together. We were already kind of incorporated as a nonprofit group. We had a little bank account. By the time they got out of school, I think we had $500 in the bank. And Jeff threw in a $1,000 or something that he had in his savings and with that we started the company. It was the three of us, and we added Malkovich and Laurie Metcalf, and my future wife Moira Harris-we got married five years later-and Al Wilder, Nancy Evans, and H.E. Baccus. There were nine of us originally. This was the summer of '76.
We were able to build an 88-seat theatre in this little church basement. We were in there for four years and this little theatre was ours and nobody could touch it. We didn't make any money doing it, but we got to do the plays we wanted, we got to do the roles we wanted. We were able to find plays and roles that would really challenge us as actors. That was the most important thing-doing the kinds of things we wanted to do as actors, sort of gut-wrenching, visceral, emotional, contemporary stuff. And that's what we ended up doing. We tried to find plays with as many good roles as possible so we could get out there together and work together onstage.
Now it's different because we all live in different places; then we all lived together. We were just one big commune of acting mush, you know? In those days, we appointed an artistic director, H.E. Baccus, and he tried to lead us for three or four years-before he had a nervous breakdown and quit theatre altogether. I took over at that point as artistic director and ran the company for a while, five or six years. In that time, we moved to the city of Chicago from Highland Park.
BSW: For those not living in New York or Chicago, the PBS broadcast of True West in 1983 was our introduction to Steppenwolf. What did True West mean to the company?
Sinise: True West was a huge turning point in our theatre because it was the first play that we took to New York and the first time we got national attention. It really opened a lot of doors for us. Within the next couple of years, we took about another five plays to New York. The Tony people gave us an award for Regional Theatre Excellence in '85 and we were written up in Newsweek. Without that notoriety and the success of some of our actors, we might have had a much tougher road to our ultimate goal-to design and build our own theatre.
BSW: So many theatre companies have wished to emulate your example. So why are there so few Steppenwolfs?
Sinise: Partly, I think, we were a product of the time and the environment. Chicago was very ripe. Some time after True West went to New York, Chicago theatre starting gaining notoriety. Something like 50 theatres popped up all over the city. Actors were moving there as opposed to moving to New York and L.A. College kids were seeing it as another alternative.
Had Chicago theatre already been known for that kind of quality acting and stuff when we were starting out, it might have been more difficult. But we were isolated. Our actors weren't drawn to other places. They weren't tempted away by other media. If we had started out in New York and our actors had started doing movies early on, our theatre would not have lasted the way it did. But the fact that in the first four years we were in a suburb of Chicago where we were the only thing there, the work wasn't about anything else. It wasn't about getting famous or making money or anything. It was just about having our own thing.
I think that for a lot of these young companies that start out now, it's tempting to go off and do a movie and make a lot of money and become a movie star. You really have to not have those options placed in front of you. Because any actor working in theatre, if he's presented with a good role and a good director in the movies that will make him 10 times the money, will have a hard time turning it down to work in a 50-seat theatre for no money, even if you're committed. It's easy to say, "I'm going to go off and do this movie and come back." But then what about the other guy who says the same thing when it's his turn, and then he does it, and then they're all gone for six months?
We had a foundation of people for the first four or five years that weren't doing anything else but coming to the basement and banging heads together and producing our own work. If it hadn't worked and we had hated what we were doing, it would never have lasted. But we got a lot of support and we learned a lot together.
We had a real attitude in those days that I think was helpful and necessary. We hated everything we saw, except certain things that Pacino was doing or Cassavetes or something like that. We hated most everything and we would make fun of it all of the time. We just had an attitude. There were only a few people that we looked up to. And we developed kind of a thick skin, which helped us in those early days.
BSW: Why did you decide to break into film with Miles From Home?
Sinise: I'd been the artistic director of the theatre for a long time. I kind of felt I'd done as much as I could in that area. I had directed a couple of plays that had been successful-True West and one called Tracers that was originally done in Los Angeles at the Odyssey. I saw it there in 1980 and wanted to do it and ended up doing it in 1984 at Steppenwolf. It was a very emotional experience.
And then I did a play called Orphans which originally was done at the Matrix in L.A. I was out here at the L.A. Stage Company directing Randy and Dennis Quaid in a production of True West when Joe Stern came over and said, "I've got a play for you. You should direct this play." I didn't know who he was or anything, and you get plays from everyone, you know? But I read it on the plane to New York-we were doing Balm in Gilead there-and it ended up being my next play. We moved it to New York and it got a lot of attention. And then moved it to London and it ended up being a movie.
It was at that time that my agent at ICM, Sam Cohn, introduced me to a lot of film guys. I was itching to get into film and I was offered a sort of first-look deal at Columbia Pictures by David Putnam and David Picker. They moved me to Los Angeles and gave me an office to develop movies to direct. I ended up finding a script, written by Chris Gerolmo, about two brothers-like Orphans and True West-and that fall of '87, I started shooting Miles From Home with Richard Gere and, like, seven Steppenwolfers.
BSW: What do you enjoy about working in film as opposed to theatre?
Sinise: So much of movie acting is in the preparation. You have to prepare your role the right way, think it through and look for the moments, and make sure you bring out the moments when you have the chance. Because you're only there for 10 hours or whatever, and that scene is over after that, so you have to prepare it the right way to make sure you get everything out of it. It's hard to make a good character, to make him make sense for a whole film, to shoot it out of sequence, to do it all backwards and forwards and upside-down. You have to know, OK, what's he supposed to be thinking now? This morning I was 20 years younger than I am now. Like in George Wallace, I would do something from 1950 and then go get made up and it would be 1970 in the afternoon, and if you haven't thought through the story or the character in the proper way, you can end up with a story that doesn't add up.
You've got to look at the entire thing and try to say, "I'm going to make sure that the emotional peaks are where they should be at the right time." Make sure you're not blowing it out in one scene where you really shouldn't. If you've got a good director, he'll keep an eye on that. But I think the actor really has to do that himself most of the time. If you've done that and the director is good and he's going to protect your work and he has a sense of how to put those elements together, it can be a very satisfying movie experience.
On the other hand, acting in the theatre is much more gratifying for an actor, because you have complete control over your performance at all times. To go through two hours of that eight shows a week can be much more rewarding than movies. But when you see your final performance in a film, and it turns out all right, it's like, OK, I did something right.
BSW: There seems to be a certain "American" quality to your characters in film-from Wallace and Truman to Ken Mattingly, Lieutenant Dan Taylor, Burt Hammersmith, and even Stu Redman. Agreed?
Sinise: I'm drawn to more contemporary, American type things as an actor. I remember when I was first starting out, the kinds of things that I was drawn to were Pacino and Nicholson and Hackman, what those guys were doing. And they were doing contemporary American anti-hero stuff. I'm just drawn to American stories, because I'm American, I guess. Watch-the next thing I'll be doing is some English thing, some Irish guy.
BSW: Or a light comedy.
Sinise: Hey, don't laugh. I'd like to do a light comedy. But even Mission to Mars and Impostor, which are both futuristic, they're also really American.
BSW: Do you ever envision a time when you won't work at Steppenwolf?
Sinise: I don't. I'm very involved in the leadership of the company. All three founders are still very involved 25 years later. The current artistic director, Martha Levey, we work very closely with. As of now I don't see a time when I'm not going to be involved in it.
It's the most unique thing I've ever done in my creative life. Anybody can have a movie career, but how many people start their own theatres and have them last this long? It's a very important thing to me. I still get a lot of pride and energy from all we do there.
BSW: You had no formal training. What do you think is the best training for a young actor?
Sinise: The best preparation is doing it. And unfortunately if you're a waiter and having to support yourself doing all sorts of things, you have to find ways that you can do it regardless. Some young actors are lucky: They start getting jobs and they start working, but the kinds of roles that are available in movies aren't necessarily very challenging until you get to a certain level. So working on great plays is a way to stretch those muscles and develop those skills. How can you do that if you're not hired to do it? Well, you just have to get a script, get some people, go somewhere, and start doing it-anywhere you can. And work on the most challenging material you can as often as you can with good people that you think are of quality, people you can also learn from.
If you're lucky enough, start your own theatre company or find a space where you can control your own work. That's the way I did it. And we developed a lot of good chops early on, because we were working on Tennessee Williams and Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter and Sam Shepard, great playwrights. In those early days, we all worked a number of different jobs and we'd go to the theatre at night and work all night and then get up and go to our jobs. The jobs supported our acting habit. That's the way to learn.
BSW: You mentioned how important it is to find that initial group of performers with whom you feel comfortable. Tell me your first memories of some of the more notable people who came out of Steppenwolf. Laurie Metcalf?
Sinise: Laurie went to college at Illinois State University, which is where Terry Kinney and Jeff Perry went. I first met her through Terry. They were dating at that time and Terry directed Laurie-the first time I saw her act-in a production of Home Free by Lanford Wilson with H.E. Baccus. And Laurie was just sensational, a very intuitive actress. She always had great instincts from early on, a great presence. Her instincts were always wacky and funny. A natural from the very beginning.
BSW: Joan Allen?
Sinise: Joan came to our company through John Malkovich. They went to school together. She was very shy, quiet, but then she'd get onstage and she could really go.
BSW: Glenne Headly?
Sinise: Glenne came to us through Malkovich, as well. Because they started dating. There was a very incestuous thing going on with our group. We just kind of kept swapping in those days. I remember seeing Glenne in Curse of the Starving Class that she did with John, with Bob Falls directing, and she was hysterical in it. So when it came time to add members to the company, Glenne was one of the first choices. The dating of these people was useful in those days, as Malkovich demonstrated.
BSW: John Mahoney?
Sinise: That's another Malkovich thing, but he wasn't dating him. Actually, Malkovich was the first to defect from the group a little bit, and I remember that was a big debate. We had a lot of meetings about it, because it was like, "Well, wait a minute, we're not supposed to go and work at other theatres. We're all just supposed to work here." But Malkovich went and auditioned for a play called Ashes in Chicago and got in it. John Mahoney was in the play and they met there. Then we did a production of Philadelphia, Here I Come in around '78 and we asked John Mahoney to be in it. And he joined the company in 1979, along with Glenne and Fran Guinan and Tom Irwin and Rondi Reed.
BSW: I understand that the group's name comes from the Hermann Hesse novel, but I've never understood the connection.
Sinise: It was nothing philosophical. It just happened that we needed a name. In 1974, we were going to print up a program and I said, "We need an identity. We want to put, So-and-So Theatre Company presents..." And one of the guys, his name was Rick Argash, was reading Steppenwolf, and he held up the book and said, "How about this?" And I said, "Great. That's it. Put it down." And that was it. We put it down. I still haven't read the book. BSW