Nolte fights demons yet remains professional
Hulk Movie star says he gets a bad rap for his alcoholism. People say the most awful things. "But they don't ever say anything to my face," Nolte growls."
People say the most awful things about Nick Nolte.
But they "don't ever say anything to my face," Nolte growls.
Steve Martin can crack wise and flash Nolte's mug shot up on-screen for the cheapest Oscar-night laugh. But Nolte wasn't there. Again, not to his face. Hilarious. But not to Nolte.
He's not unwilling to talk about his reputation, his "bad boy" rap, the legend that has grown up around his dissolute ways and his substance abuse.
"The misconception is that I'm drunk all the time," Nolte says. "But I'm not. I don't even drink anymore. Because I have trouble with it. There is no misconception that I am an addict or that I have addictive chemistry. It's genetic - probably."
He tries to set the record straight. The voice, a soft rumble, has long had a conversational slur about it. So maybe people just think he's loaded.
"I just had an incident where I had to leave San Francisco and come back to court, based on an eyewitness report that I was drunk and driving," he says. "Of course, I could account for where I was every minute of every day. Because I had receipts, credit-card receipts - and a doctor's paper that we'd left [the office] at this time, stopped at the liquor store at this time, in a bookstore for four or five minutes here, then back at my hotel. Where was the time it takes to get intoxicated?"
We don't know, and we don't want to know. But if Nolte wonders where the bum rap comes from, maybe he can read back over that paragraph to the receipt in between the doctor's office and the bookstore.
The self-destructive Nolte turns up in the mug shots, the police reports. He pleaded no contest to driving under the influence of GHB, the "date rape" drug, in December. He has long been a Hollywood punchline, such as the famous exchange with Katharine Hepburn when she bawled him out for "falling down drunk in every gutter in town" while they were making the 1984 movie Grace Quigley. Nolte's comeback was a classic.
"I've got a few to go yet."
But the Nolte liquor lore isn't fair, he says. "I've never missed work. I've never not been prepared. And I've always done the best I could possibly do. If I had been difficult, if I had not come out of my trailer, if I had pulled some of the antics that some of these people pull, I'd have been done a long, long time ago."
Truth be told, he's pretty darned lucid for a guy who sounds half-loaded. And as his career is showing, Nolte is far from done. This year, he has been in the critically acclaimed sleeper The Good Thief, the studio-backed behemoth The Hulk and now Northfork (scheduled to open in Baltimore on Friday). It was a hit at this year's Sundance Film Festival and a movie that a critic for Box Office magazine named "one of the most hauntingly beautiful films ever made."
If Nolte's not done, the reason why might be apparent in Northfork, perhaps in the scenes where he plays a priest coming to grips with a dying child in a dying town. Or perhaps in a scene in that film in which he's heard, not seen.
"My mother died six months before I filmed Northfork," Nolte says.
Mark and Mike Polish, the twins who wrote, directed and act in the movie, wanted Nolte to make the extras who play his congregation in the film cry.
"I told them the story of my mother's death."
Re-creating that memory is a performance, one that confirms that there is, indeed, a raw nerve and a titanic talent at work. Nolte is, as Steve Vineberg wrote on Salon.com, "Clark Gable with an anguished soul."
Pauline Kael was a fan. So is the great playwright Arthur Miller. And love Nolte or hate him, nobody who saw his volcanic, scene-devouring turn in The Hulk will ever forget him. He looks just like his recent mug shot in the film, an actor who has "achieved a shaggy majesty in recent years" and makes his mad scientist, David Banner, "a vision of fury and shame," Michael Wilmington wrote in the Chicago Tribune. Others complained that Nolte confused his role with King Lear and expressed amazement at his histrionics. But they knew an actor was at work.
"Where does rage come from?" Nolte asks. "It comes from the lymph system of our reptilian brain. It has two responses - fight or flight. And when you tap it, there's enough there to fight off a saber-toothed tiger."
He did more than his share of tapping that in the mega-budget Hulk.
Nolte, as Banner, scares the dogs, terrifies his wife, frightens the government and crashes and burns. His showcase scene has him in restraints, in spotlighted darkness, revealing the secrets of his lineage to his son in a ferocious monologue that he finishes with a babbling howl.
"I said, 'I don't really do this sort of movie,'" Nolte says. "But [director] Ang Lee said, 'This is Greek tragedy.' And I said, 'Great, I do Greek tragedy.'"
So it's really that simple. In the big-budget films, he's larger than life. In low-budget movies, he is life-sized, intimate. The acting is more compact and exacting. He left the studio world behind in the mid-'90s. A career of gritty cop pictures such as 48 Hours and Extreme Prejudice; the odd romantic comedy (Cannery Row, I Love Trouble) and dramas such as his Oscar-nominated turn in The Prince of Tides changed its footing as Nolte shifted gears.
"I was much better off when I started doing independent films," he says. "I could see it coming, the studios narrowing the focus of their target audience - teen-agers. I knew that four months of concentration cannot be done on a film by an actor, and that's what these big-budget things require. You can't concentrate for much more than 30 days. After that, it's a phone-in job. You can give everything you've got for 30 days, give it your full passion."
U Turn and The Thin Red Line, both filmed in 1997, big movies with big performances, were it for the studio pictures, as far as Nolte was concerned.
Instead, he turned to smaller, more personal films. He made Affliction, Mother Night, Trixie, Investigating Sex and several others. Many weren't seen. Affliction and Afterglow produced great satisfaction, great reviews and award nominations.
"I have done more indie films that people haven't seen, more films in the last 10 years than I did in the previous 20. I work just constantly. And it's good stuff. But if you end up on the money side of acting, then all of that goes out the window. You stop growing. You just get rich."
The Orlando Sentinel is a Tribune Publishing newspaper.