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L.I.E. ACTORS
( Long Island Expressway )
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L.I.E. Lot47
Films
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Paul Dano (Howie in
L.I.E).
Paul Franklin Dano was born in Wilton, Connecticut in 1984. He has appeared in a number of Broadway productions, including Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," in which he appeared as Scrooge at age 12 opposite both Roddy McDowall and Hal Linden. Other Broadway credits include Ragtime (Toronto World Premiere), Inherit the Wind, A Month In The Country and A Thousand Clowns at the Roundabout Theatre. Paul has made a couple of independent films, "The Newcomers" and "Animal Room." His television credits include "Smart Guy" and "Sense! Rainbow & The Dojo Kids." Dano's special interests are singing, guitar, snowboarding, biking, soccer, basketball, rollerblading and skate boarding.
Despite the hubbub around his performance in L.I.E. (L.A. Outfest2001 Grand Jury Award - Outstanding Actor in a Feature Film, BAM's New Festival Best Breakout Performance, Stockholm festival Best Actor award, Independent Spirit Award for Best Debut Performance) and a follow-up role in Universal Pictures’ The Palace Thief with Kevin Kline, Dano’s true love, like any good teenager, is music. "I have a band
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Cherry Revision
and we’re going to play at New York City's Wetlands this summer, which is kind of cool for us," he says. "Most of it is acoustic rock with congas and bongos, lots of vocal harmonies with a reggae influence and Phish-type sound." And while the acting gigs will likely keep coming, Dano imagines more: He has just completed a five-week course in film directing at NYU.
As for his role in this quietly devastating film, Dano says, "Everything you do, every experience that you have, enlightens you a little bit or worsens you. L.I.E. was big for me. I think it's one of the best things I've been a part of in my life so far."
Taken from Official L.I.E Site & FCRant The Magazine September/October 2001
His favorite movies are: Fight Club, American History X (he likes Edward Norton) and he's seen MOULIN ROUGE and thought it was 'pretty good'. On a typical Saturday he likes to drive his sister around (her name is Sarah and she's 14), go over to his friend's house and 'jam' in the basement, and just hang out and go out somewhere. His house burned down 3 months ago from an electrical fire (nobody was at home at the time), and he's now living in a rental. He checks his e-mail over his friends house because the computer at his house has a, quote, "slow-ass modem".
He's going to see his favorite band, PHISH up in Manchester, MA (near Boston) sometime in June or July. He likes the band GUSTER and went to one of their concerts, went backstage and went on their tour bus.
He's moving to New York when he gets out of school and is pursuing his music career - though he doesn't really care if his band, CHERRY REVISION, gets big or he becomes famous in music, as long as he's having a good time that's all that matters.
Paul Dano (IFC Entertainment Awards)
Billy Kay and Paul Dano (Gary and Howie in L.I.E.)
Billy Kay, Michael Cuesta and Paul Dano (Gary, The
Writer/Director and Howie in L.I.E.)
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Billy Kay (Gary in L.I.E.)
Billy Kay plays Gary, Howie's best friend, in "L.I.E." Currently, Billy is appearing in the popular CBS-TV daytime drama "Guiding Light," in which he portrays the rebellious teenager, Shayne Lewis. Billy just completed a new film, "Time Share," with Timothy Dalton and Nastassja Kinski. This film will air on June 7th on the Fox Family Channel.
Growing up in Huntington, Long Island, Billy started in show business by appearing in commercials, print ads and the feature film "Three Men and a Baby" at the ripe old age of six months. He was 11 when he appeared in the musical "Oliver" in which he played the Artful Dodger. He also appeared in the "The Wiz" and "Tommy."
Although he has a wonderful singing voice, Billy considers himself an actor who can sing too. His latest musical endeavor is a new CD entitled "Kids with Heart" which he recorded with other young people in the entertainment industry. The royalties earned by this CD will benefit various children's charities.
Billy's film credits include "Alice," "Nathan Grimm," "Tom's Journey," "The Magic of Marciano," and last summer completed an independent film, "The Newcomer" in which he appears with "L.I.E." co-star Paul Franklin Dano. He has appeared in such television shows as "Zoya," "The XY Films" and "The Invisible Man." Billy also appeared in the Mariah Carey Christmas video entitled "All I Want For Christmas Is You."
When not appearing on stage or before the camera, Billy enjoys singing, dancing and playing the drums. He has a huge collection of valuable comic books. In his leisure time, Billy works with The Leukemia Society, Mothers Against Drunk Driving and many other charities. He also enjoys in-line skating, baseball, basketball and, especially lacrosse.
He is currently shooting Dimension Films "Halloween 8."
Billy Kay getting his tattoos as Gary on the set of
L.I.E.)
Billy Kay (Gary and Brian Cox (John Harrigan) on the set of
L.I.E.)
Billy Kay (Gary on the set of L.I.E.)
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Brian Cox (John Harrigan in L.I.E.)
Brian Cox
Considered "the most prolific actor of his generation," Brian Cox has two Olivier Awards for Best Actor to his credit for his performances in Titus Andronicus at the Royal Shakespeare Company's Swan Theatre and Rat in the Skull for the Royal Court in London and New York.
Cox has roles in a number of upcoming feature films including "An Affair of the Necklace," with Hillary Swank; "Morality Play" with Willem Dafoe; and, playing in Sundance’s "Park City at Midnight" section, the ensemble comedy "Super Troopers." He starts work in his next project, "The Bourne Identity" with Matt Damon, in January.
The year 2000 saw Cox receiving acclaim from new career paths. He received a Golden Globe nomination for his role as Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering in the TNT original film "Nuremberg," and made his directorial debut at the helm of an episode of the hit HBO prison drama "Oz."
Cox' other film work includes roles in "The Minus Man," "For the Love of the Game," "Rushmore," "The Corrupter," "The Boxer," "The Long Kiss Goodnight," the Academy Award-winning "Braveheart," the Academy Award nominated "Rob Roy," and "Hidden Agenda," which was honored with a Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Notably, Cox originated the celluloid Hannibal Lecktor in Michael Mann's cult classic "Manhunter."
Cox remains active in theatre, recently returning to the London stage to star in the World Premiere of Conor McPherson's Dublin Carol, which opened the new Royal Court Theatre. Recent New York theatre credits include Art on Broadway and St. Nicholas at Off Broadway’s Primary Stages, for which he was honored with the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Actor and received Drama Desk and Outer Critic’s Circle nominations. Other theatre credits include St. Nicholas at the Bush Theatre in London and the Matrix Theatre in Los Angeles; King Lear and Richard III at the National Theatre in London and Skylight at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.
Cox is the author of two books, Salem to Moscow: An Actors Odyssey and The Lear Diaries.
Brian Cox (John Harrigan on the set of L.I.E.)
Brian Cox (John Harrigan and Howie on the set of L.I.E.)
Brian Cox ( John Harrigan in L.I.E.)
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Something wicked this way comes
From a serial-killing cannibal to a Long Island pederast, Dundee actor Brian Cox has made a career out of of playing plausible monsters. But what makes Hollywood's Mr Evil tick?
Words: Peter Ross
HIS Satanic Majesty requests the calamari, and casually announces that, at 54, he is to be a father again. The devil, it seems, has all the best news.
'I found out about a month ago,' he says, holding court in a Camden restaurant, his sandpaper face softened by undisguised chuffedness. 'It was quite a shock and also quite exciting. It alters things a lot. I'm no spring chicken, and suddenly there's this whole other responsibility.'
Of course, Brian Cox isn't really the devil, but looking at his CV you could be forgiven for assuming he has some sympathy for him. In a four-decade career, the Scottish actor has played a rogue's gallery of scary monsters and super creeps, imbuing his characters with such charisma and humanity that we end up rooting for the bad guy.
Writing about the seductive Satan in Paradise Lost, William Blake claimed, in rather more flowery language, that Milton did a great PR job for the dark side. You could say the same about Cox.
Most famously there was his appearance as Hannibal Lecter in Michael Mann's Manhunter, which preceded Anthony Hopkins' celebrated performance in Silence Of The Lambs by four years. With his wobbling jowls and Scottish vowels, this Lecter was a mundane psychopath, perfectly embodying the banality of evil, while still coming across as the sort of guy you could have a beer with.
More recently, Cox starred as the leading Nazi Hermann Goering in the Channel mini-series Nuremberg, a performance which has earned him an Emmy nomination. His Goering -- witty, intelligent, cultured -- dominates the drama and seems to have rather captivated the man who was playing him.
'Goering, for all his prejudice, was actually, er, quite a nice man,' he says, aware that this is not a popular view. 'He wasn't a bad man. He became associated with evil and everything that was corrupt. And I think he realised it too late.
'I hope I don't make the characters sympathetic,' he continues, sweeping a hand through the snowdrift hair that stands in chiaroscuric contrast to his riotous black eyebrows. 'But I want to make them empathetic. I want to make people understand the nature of evil. Particularly now. If you want to understand the Balkans, you've got to understand the notion of tribalism, the notion of sentimentality, and the fact that these people are human beings. The evil lies within us all. We're all capable of it, and it leaks out or is held in check at any particular point.'
This is the way Cox talks. He seasons his responses with references to literature, politics, history, morality and current affairs. Not bad for a kid from Dundee who left school at 14, having taught himself to read by listening to his sister's gramophone records, matching the songs to the words printed on the label. His hard-won erudition is scored into his conversation as deeply as the glens and gullies of his face.
The last six years have been good to him. He has spent much of that time living in Los Angeles, carving out a career as a supporting actor in films including Rushmore and The Long Kiss Goodnight, happily taking minor roles in blockbusters so that he can afford to appear in meaningful low-budget movies.
We are meeting in the restaurant near his north London home to discuss his latest labour of love, L.I.E., an extremely controversial work in which he plays a pederast. Not, he insists, a pedophile, which suggests sexual attraction to very young children. His character lusts after boys between the ages of 14-18.
However you define it, abuse of minors -- sexual and otherwise -- has never been a more inflammatory topic. Post Sarah Payne and Jamie Bulger, it seems that the only acceptable response is kneejerk anger. As Chris Morris recently discovered with his Brass Eye TV show, a sophisticated look at the issue is likely to be met with incomprehension and outrage. It is into this climate that L.I.E., a film in which a sexual predator becomes a genuine father figure to a boy he is trying to bed, is about to be released.
'For all the reasons that I shouldn't have done it -- and they were piling up -- they eventually became the reasons I should be doing it,' says Cox, chuckling at his own perversity.
He had initially turned down the role of John Harrigan, a Vietnam veteran and pillar of a Long Island community, who becomes involved with a teenager. But the script kept gnawing away at him until he said yes.
Harrigan, like all of Cox's smiling villains, is curiously likeable. Whatever his intentions, surely the Scottish actor must admit that he's a one-man rehabilitation centre for society's bogeymen?
'I don't think I ultimately am,' he says with a frown. 'I always find a moment to be really hardball, so there's clearly moments when my characters are not very sympathetic.
'With John Harrigan, I have a scene where I have to put on a pornographic video and seduce this boy. That's a very difficult scene to play, particularly to a 15-year-old boy. It's not something that you do every day of the week. It's not very nice but you have to do it.'
BRIAN Cox is an expert at getting on with things that aren't very nice. If grinning and bearing it was an Olympic sport, he'd be a gold medallist. He's proud of his tenacity, his capacity for endurance, tracing these virtues back to his upbringing and -- further -- to his genetic makeup.
He was born in 1946, the son of Irish Catholic immigrants. His father Charles, or 'Chic' as he was known, was a weaver; his mother Mary had been a spinner in the mills. It was a very poor upbringing -- on Thursday nights, Brian was sent to the chip shop to collect the batter scrapings from the fryer for the family tea.
At the age of nine, he suffered the brace of blows which have shaped his life ever since -- his father died of cancer, and his mother -- unable to cope -- had a breakdown. One day he returned home to find her with her head in the oven in an apparent suicide attempt.
Profiles of Cox often refer to his mother as having emotional problems, but today the actor is more blunt. 'She went mad, really,' he says. As was the way in those days, she was given electro-shock treatment. This permanently damaged her memory, and she was never really the same woman again. She died in 1973.
After his father's death, Cox was raised by his eldest sister and an aunt. Constantly moving between homes at a formative age, he grew up feeling most at ease while in transit. Even now, at an age when most men would have worn a deep groove into the mantlepiece, his life is in a state of flux.
He says he feels equally at home in London, Los Angeles, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow and New York. But the truth, I think, is that he doesn't really feel at home anywhere. The man who once played King Lear at Broadmoor for an audience of the criminally insane is actually king of the road.
You can romanticise this, as Cox does, and regard it as a kind of wanderlust, a natural quality for the great grandson of an Irish itinerant worker. 'I think my life is odyssey,' he says, grandly (mind you, he says everything grandly). 'The Scots and Irish have always understood the transitory, the nomadic way of life.'
But equally, Cox's peripateticism is a sort of curse. Take his 18-year marriage to the actress Caroline Burt, which ended in 1986. He married because he wanted a home and the stability of a family (he has two grown-up children). However, he felt unfulfilled as a human being within the marriage and, when it ended, was able to be more single-minded about his career.
Cox is fond of regarding the world through the eyes of Shakespeare: Hermann Goering is 'a Falstaffian figure'; the history of Germany is 'like a Shakespearian tragedy'. I think he even regards himself as one of Shakespeare's tragic heroes. He certainly shares a fatal flaw with Macbeth -- ambition. It has, he says, always been the driving force in his life. He was too focused on his career, too willing to be away from home making his name, to pay sufficient attention to his wife and children. The resulting break-up was inevitable.
These days his ambition is under control. The late actor Fulton McKay, perhaps most fondly remembered for his part as an uptight prison guard in the 1970s sitcom Porridge, was a father figure for Cox, and gave him the best piece of advice he has ever been given: 'I was young and ambitious and wanted to be a star. He said, 'Don't worry about that. Just be a good actor. Say your prayers and do your work'.'
McKay's wisdom took a while to sink in, but has taken root now. And, much to his surprise, Cox has been given another chance to balance work with family -- his live-in girlfriend, 31-year-old German actress Nicole Ansari, is pregnant.
So now that he's going to be a dad again, he'll finally be putting down roots in one place, right?
'God forbid, no,' he says, looking genuinely horrified and taking a swig of lager. 'This child is going to be a little nomad, at least for the first five years of its life. And then we'll see.'
Will he approach fatherhood differently this time?
'Hopefully, yes. I was 24 when my son was born. I was 31 when my daughter was born. And there were unquestionable mistakes I made with both of them. I'd like to say I'm not going to make those mistakes again, but I don't know...' His key mistake seems to have been not being around enough, although he now enjoys a good relationship with Alan, an actor, and Margaret, who is studying for a PhD in Japanese cinema.
Schooling is the question which is currently vexing him. How best to educate the new child? Alan and Margaret were both sent away to private school, a decision he deeply regrets because of the distance it put between them and because he believes -- as an unreconstructed socialist -- that it perpetuates the class system. British state education is not the answer ('it's f***ed') so he is considering relocating abroad, probably to France, in search of a good school.
In the meantime, he is preparing to return to Los Angeles, where he has been cast as the lead in The Court, a West Wing-style series which begins shooting in September and will broadcast on ABC in January next year. The series, in which he plays a Supreme Court judge, could well make him a household name in America. Cox takes a sort of perverse delight in Los Angeles, where he is about to buy a new home in the Laurel Canyon area. 'It's Sodom and Gomorrah!' he trumps, adding, 'It's like Edinburgh except you get a better view.'
Class-obsessed Britain vexes Cox so much that he has to flee it occasionally, but America troubles him too. He believes that, until the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the nation was in an unhealthy state of arrested childhood. 'This sounds awful,' he says, 'but one of the best signs of America growing up was getting a blowjob in the Oval Office. Suddenly, sex had arrived, right in the seat of government.'
This is just the sort of rant he's known for, the kind of thing that has seen him dubbed the angriest actor in the world. The truth is that he's a very approachable man with a chip on his shoulder that would dwarf any fish you care to pluck from the Tay. 'It's not very fashionable to have opinions about things these days,' he harrumphs with a brimstone grin. 'And the world is so much blander for it.'
Cox likes to come across as grumpy and forbidding, but that's not the whole story. Talking about Nicole Ansari, who he may marry, his manner changes. 'I'm not very good on joy,' he says with a laugh that isn't quite as grim as he probably intended. 'It's the one thing I haven't got in my background. So it's nice to be with someone who understands a lot more about joy.'
It has taken him 54 years and several detours into the sulphurous side streets of the human psyche, but Brian Cox is finally beginning to learn that heaven can be pretty wicked too.
Part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, L.I.E. is at the Cameo 1, August 14, 8pm and August 17, 6pm
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