An Interview with Pat Healy, Part 2: Walking Among the Giants
In the second half of our conversation, Healy discusses his experiences on films like "Magnolia" and "Rescue Dawn," and what it's like to be embedded on shoots with living legends.
Last week, we ran the first part of my interview with Pat Healy, a character actor (and writer and director) who’s been in the business for nearly 25 years. As the conversation continues, Healy continues to talk about his adventures in Hollywood, including a big scene with Julianne Moore, an excursion to Thailand with Werner Herzog, and months on set with Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese. He also offers final thoughts on the current state of his career and his own long-term desires as a performer.
I’d like to go all the way back to Magnolia, where you play the pharmacistJulianne Moore explodes at in what may be the most famous scenes of her career. Do you remember what that experience was like? To see her go to the places that she goes to in that moment?
The funny thing about that early success was that I was certainly really grateful to be there. Boogie Nights was a movie that I think I saw three times when it came out, maybe four times, so I was really excited to be in that movie and be there with her. But at that point I was cocky. I just figured, “Yeah, I’m here. I’m one of the stars of this.” A lot of actors talk about this—about being an egomaniac with low self-esteem. I felt that way, but I’m sure I felt completely insecure, too. And the day of shooting that scene, it was really remarkable the enormity of what she came and did, and I think she did that in maybe three takes. I remember she showed up for the rehearsal probably before makeup and hair, and she just looked like a movie star. I worked with Jessica Chastain recently, and they show up you're just like, “Oh right, they look like that in real life.” Like they have a diffusion filter on them the whole time.
And so that was pretty remarkable, and she was incredibly nice. And Paul [Thomas Anderson], he’s a year older than me, so that seemed like we were contemporaries, even though I acted in a scene in Magnolia when I was 27 years old, and Paul made Magnolia when he was 28 years old. [Laughs.] She did that, and I was knocked out by it, so it wasn't hard to react to, I was just being there. And in fact, the camera is not really even on me that much, so it's pretty remarkable and flattering to me that, for some people, it’s still the biggest thing I’ve done. That will probably change now with Saul, but it’s still the thing people bring up to me the most.
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Last year, John Oliver did [a segment on] the economy or something. I wish I could remember what it was, maybe you can find it. [I did! — ed.] And he says, “That kind of abuse is safe for pharmacists.” And it shows a picture of me from Magnolia, and he does the whole thing and everyone understands it. And this is 20-some years later. That’s remarkable.
There’s just so many adventures you’ve been on. I remember talking to your brother Jim, who I’ve known for a long time from film festivals. [Jim Healy is currently the Director of Programming at the Cinematheque at the University of Wisconsin— ed.] I asked about how you were doing. He said you were going to Thailand to shoot a movie with Werner Herzog. We’re both cinephiles enough to know what going out to make a movie in a setting like that with the director of Fitzcarraldo might be like. Was it what you expected?
Yeah. The first thing is that it was an experience like The Post in a way where I didn’t have a lot to do in the movie. I didn’t have a lot of heavy lifting in terms of my acting or the role. On The Post, I got to be there every day because I was just in it a lot, and I got to be among the greats and watch them do their thing. Rescue Dawn was a similar thing to that. I met Herzog and auditioned for him. A woman named Eyde Belasco cast that movie. She’s cast me in quite a few things. And so I went into the office and met him. His son was filming the auditions, and I didn’t have that many lines. I don’t think I have any lines in the movie as it is, but I had a few lines then.
And Herzog was just great. He was so easy, and he was funny and everything. He took us around Thailand. The first day we had to do our fittings and stuff, he just took all of us with Christian [Bale] and rode in the car and talked to us about theater and his friendship with [Dieter Dengler]. And then suddenly we were jumping into a helicopter with the door open, but he’s in there with you. He did the clapper board. He’s wiping the sweat off your brow.
I know there were things that Christian and Steve [Zahn] did where they had to get in the water with these snakes and things, and he would get in there with them because he wasn’t going to ask you to do anything he wasn’t going to do himself. Maybe the first thing we shot was Christian coming home, because he’d shot the movie in reverse because Christian had lost the weight and then he gained it as we went on. That guy’s something. Just tremendous, and a great guy to work with, too.
But that was another whole other level to that experience. I remember we were in this aircraft carrier and I think it was 300 extras. They found every white man that they could and put them in military uniforms. And then there was a green screen behind them so it could be 300 more or something. And it was 120 degrees outside, and we were inside the helicopter inside an aircraft carrier and were just dripping sweat. After we finished, [Herzog] got on a platform with Christian with a megaphone and he said, “Thank you so much for coming. This is my friend’s story. This is the leading man, Christian Bale. He was Batman. And thank you very much.” And then he dropped the mic, the bullhorn, and he ran out to the plank of the ship, and I guess I thought, “Okay, that's that.” Well, we walked out, and every single extra, 300 people, he stood at the end there and shook everybody’s hand and said “Thank you.” If people stopped to talk to him, he had a conversation with them. And we stood there and we watched him do it with every single person.
I had seen Stroszek. They had a taught a film study class in my high school when I was 16, I think only for a couple years. Buffalo Grove High School. [My teacher] showed us that movie and it blew my mind. I hadn’t seen anything like that before.
That’s a deeper cut than you’d expect for a high school film class.
Yeah. It was really interesting. I remember we watched The Maltese Falcon, and we watched The Godfather, and Dirty Harry, and a couple of other things, but that was really special. And to be able to be able to tell the man that made that movie that in person how much that meant to you. Seeing something like that, or seeing Blue Velvet around that time too… I was probably 15, around 1986. They changed my life. And they’ve shaped my life. They’ve made me who I am. Herzog is another person where it’s almost hard to believe I worked with him.
I remember a couple years later, none of us had gotten paid for the movie and there was that big to-do because one of the producers was a real low-level guy, and I don’t think he had produced the movie before. He was a nightclub owner or something, and he got caught trying to leave the country with a suitcase full of millions of dollars. [The producer’s name is Steve Marlton, and there are more details to be found here. — ed.] And I had Werner's email and I wrote him because I had been talking to SAG, and I had been trying to get this money. It was quite a bit of money. It was thousands of dollars, and that was before residuals or even anything like that, just getting paid for the job. And I wrote him and told him what the situation was. And he just wrote a one-line email back to me. He said, “My advice to you is this: sue them.” That was it. [Laughs.]
You’ve talked a little bit about being around icons like Carol Burnett, and Spielberg, and Scorsese. What does that do to you? This is still also your job, you still have to do work. Is it tough to bring yourself to the level you need to be at when you’re in that situation? Do you have the ability to settle yourself and be in the moment and deliver the way you want to deliver?
Most of those [icons] know that people feel that way about them, and they’re aware that it could negatively affect the work. So whether by design, whether they’re deliberately doing it, or whether it’s just who they are, they are very good the first time you meet them at disarming you and letting you know that they’re just a person, too. I can only think of one person, who I won’t name, who’s a very famous person that I’ve worked with, who’s not like that. Other than him, to a person they want to do good work and they want you to do good work, and you just become friendly.
And in the case of Steven Spielberg, I got told a week before that I was meeting with him. It wasn’t an audition. I was just out of my mind, sitting there in the conference room at Amblin waiting for him, but within two minutes of him coming in, we were just talking about movies, and we did that for 45 minutes. And with Marty, I didn’t actually meet Marty until we were shooting, and I had been in Oklahoma for three months before I shot anything. It was a big movie and there was bad weather, and all kinds of other reasons for that [delay]. I left a few times. I left to visit my brother in Wisconsin a little bit, and went to New York for Tribeca because we needed to do something, but I was mostly there. And we came in and the first five minutes are really surreal. And then he’s cracking jokes, and you're talking about movies. I think within 10 minutes, we were talking about that Jack Webb movie, Pete Kelly’s Blues.
Does that give you a little bit of advantage, just having that point of entry with a director? Obviously filmmakers, actors, et cetera, have a passion for film, but there are levels to that, and you and your brother obviously have had this education in cinema that is a little bit more unique or intense than others.
I think that helps. I also think there’s probably something to the fact that, especially with examples like Spielberg and Scorsese, we know them really well. We know a lot about them. We have an intimate relationship with them already because of the films. It’s not to say I know things about their personal life or what they’re going through, what they’re feeling, but as an artist I can speak to the fact that even if it might not be apparent at the time, looking back at my body of work as we’ve been doing and talking about, it’s a reflection of the person I am and the person I was at that time, and all that stuff. So it’s already like you have an intimate relationship with those people.
With somebody like Brad Pitt, who when I met him and worked with him [on The Assassination of Jesse James] had just started going out with Angelina Jolie, they were just the most famous people in the world. And he couldn’t have been nicer and more relaxed. We went out to dinner and nobody even noticed that he was there. If you were at a party, at the wrap party, or at the premier, and you’re just having a conversation with Brad, it’s a very easy conversation. But say we’re standing in a room of 150 people, 200 people. If Brad went to lean to get his drink, I would watch the entire room go like that. [Healy leans forward.]
But at some point, he must have realized that was just going to be a distraction. And even though they can’t quite live their lives the way that other people do, can’t just go out to a restaurant or go to a movie or something all the time, they must be at peace with that. I know some people aren’t. I also think, I know this is true with Hanks and with Brad too, they’re incredibly grateful. They love this, too. They just can’t believe their good fortune. And Tom is exactly who you think he is. He’s excited that he gets to work with Steven Spielberg. It’s pretty remarkable. “Celebrities, they’re just like us,” as they say in US magazine.
I remember we had a little wrap thing when we finished The Post and we were shooting up in Harlem at Columbia University, which was standing in for the Supreme Court, and somebody threw a little get-together at a local bar-restaurant. And Bob [Odenkirk] was there, David [Cross] was there, and myself, and Meryl is a small little thing. And she just walked in and I don’t think anybody noticed. She had dark glasses on, and we were eating wings and doing shots and talking. But Tom couldn’t go in there. He’s a big guy, and the second he opens his mouth, it’s all over.
But it’s also probably a good excuse for him to not have to go, too. I don’t want to speak for him. I had this conversation with my mother recently, too. I think we all got into this because we wanted more love than we felt that we got. It’s not to say that my parents were faulty or negligent or anything like that, but I think because of my heightened sensitivity and because they were incredibly young when they had us and there were four of us… We didn’t really have any money until I was a teenager.
You get into acting for that reason. So then you want fame, right? And some people get it and they get it early, and there’s not too many people who can handle that or know what that is. And I wanted it. And at some point, a couple years into therapy, I realized, I said to myself one day, I don't remember if it was out loud or just in my head. I’ve certainly said it out loud many times since. I realized that I wanted to do this and just be successful enough to be able to keep doing it. And I said, “I would rather be moderately successful and sane than wildly successful and insane.” I couldn’t imagine living like that. I just can’t. I like my anonymity too much.
It may come to a point where I’m less anonymous than I am now, but I’m not going to be a Tom Hanks or a Brad Pitt. Even Bob, he has accomplished so much, but people don’t swarm him. They stop and say nice things. But I think he has a pretty regular life. I wouldn’t mind that.
People have a lot of affection for “That Guy” character actors, though. You probably wouldn’t hate having Brian Dennehy’s career, if you want to go back to another Chicago actor. That is a big body of work. He did some big roles. He did a lot of small roles. He worked consistently. People liked him a lot. He got a really great role [Driveways] right towards the end of his life. Is there somebody whose career you wouldn’t mind having? Is there a template to this?
It’s tricky because there’s two people who I knew and was friends with, Jim Gandolfini and Phil Hoffman, through just being great, were character actors that became big stars. Whether or not that led to their early demise, I don’t know. I can’t speak to that. But certainly that kind of thing scares me a little bit. I don’t think that anyone is equipped to handle that kind of attention, but I do feel that now that I’m older and mature.
I’ve let it be known that I've been following the Reddit pages since the promos with my Better Call Saul episode came out.. My brother, Jim, thought it might not be a good idea that I was reading it, but it wasn’t bothering me. I found it all really fascinating. I couldn’t believe people were talking about it so much before they had even seen it, and it’s even more intense now that they have. But I think probably three years ago that would’ve hurt me in some way to read anything negative about myself, and I might have been reactionary. I’m in a good place now. It doesn’t bother me. I think generally as a rule, it’s probably good to avoid reading reviews and things like that. It’s hard not to sometimes because, as they say, if you believe all the nice things people say, you have to believe all the negative stuff, too.
But I don’t know. I don’t want to be a giant star. I just want to do things that are good and I have a good eye for things that are good, and I’m going to do them to the best of my ability. I’m not doing it because I want more fame or more notoriety. I’ll take more money certainly. Just for my lifestyle it’s a good thing to have, especially now that the economy’s in the toilet, it’s a good time to be making some money. And it’s also not to say I’m going to do things just for money. I don’t think I have that in me, either. The job I have now at Station 19 is like a family. It’s a regular job. I’ll be here for at least another year, and I will shoot until next spring. It’s fun, I like the job, and it happens to pay very well.
Where's here?
Oh, in L.A. I had left for a while. I just had to get out of here, and I didn’t want to be in my apartment anymore. So when I got Killers of the Flower Moon I left, and I was in Oklahoma for five months. And then I got Saul and I went to New Mexico for two months. And then I went to Wilmington, North Carolina, to do George and Tammy, and I was back and forth from there and here doing Station 19. And then spending time with my family and my friends that I hadn’t seen in two years because of COVID. So I just wasn’t here. I didn’t have a place. I had my stuff in storage. But now I have the opportunity to just stay in one place for a while. I’ll get a new place now and a new car, and all that stuff, and just plant my butt and do the work for a while.
‘Jim Gandolfini and Phil Hoffman’
Had to double take for a second before that familiarity set in.
This has been great. How many more parts can we expect?