Suddenly Famous

Two months ago, Billy Bob Thornton and Geoffrey Rush were probably more concerned with securing their next job than with fending off the paparazzi. Today, after receiving nominations for Hollywood’s most prestigious acting award, the two are mobbed at premieres as if they were in the cast of “Friends.”

Both star in critically acclaimed films made outside the studio system, and both are more appropriately classified as character actors, not movie stars or even leading men. Still, they are up for best actor Oscars, vying for the statuette with such big names as Tom Cruise, Woody Harrelson and Ralph Fiennes.

Thornton, 41, grew up in the small town of Malvern, Ark. He’s nominated for the starring role in “Sling Blade,” in which he plays Karl Childers, a man greatly traumatized in childhood and released after 25 years in a mental institution, where he was sent for murdering his mother and her lover. “Sling Blade” is Thornton’s first solo-written script and his directorial debut. His screenplay has also received an Oscar nomination. He co-wrote last year’s racial drama “A Family Thing,” co-wrote and starred in the graphic thriller “One False Move” in 1992 and appeared in “Dead Man,” “The Stars Fell on Henrietta” and “Indecent Proposal.” He was a regular on the sitcom “Hearts Afire” and a frequent guest on “Evening Shade.” And he will soon begin shooting “Primary Colors,” taking on the role of political advisor James Carville.

Rush, 45, was born in Toowoomba, Australia, where he, too, led a small-town life. He is nominated for portraying the emotional struggles of real-life Australian piano prodigy David Helfgott in “Shine.” The gangly, dark-haired Rush, primarily a stage actor who has played major characters from Gogol, Chekhov and Shakespeare, has already swept most of the pre-Oscar awards, including the Golden Globe award. He has a key role in the upcoming “Children of the Revolution,” a dark comedy that gained acclaim at the latest Sundance Film Festival, and he will soon begin filming “Les Miserables,” which co-stars Liam Neeson and Claire Danes.

The two actors met face-to-face for the first time on a recent warm, cloudless Friday afternoon at the Four Seasons Hotel near Beverly Hills, each bearing gifts. Rush brought Thornton a card praising Thornton’s performance in “Sling Blade” and a gift-wrapped “little token of esteem: a nice bottle of Australian red.” Thornton presented Rush with a red T-shirt bearing the logo for Sun Records, where Elvis Presley recorded his music. “Everybody needs a little bit of Elvis,” he explained, also promising Rush a shirt from an electric company at which Elvis drove a truck.

They met the day before the Screen Actors Guild awards (which both attended and at which Rush won best actor) and discussed the new sensation of fame, the fascination people have with the emotionally troubled characters they portray, the art of transforming oneself into a role and the novelty of wearing tuxedos. They were also, clearly, big fans of each other’s work.

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Thornton: You know, I’ve got to say something to you before we even get started. I have such high regard for you, as an actor and as a human, for what you said to me while we were on the “Today” show [when they met via satellite the morning their Oscar nominations were announced. Rush had said then that he considered Thornton a colleague, not a competitor]. Now I feel like I hope Tom Cruise wins, just so we can be like regular guys together. You know what I mean? What I want to say is: I hope you win.

Rush: People have been whispering to me this week: “You know, it’s probably good for you to lose because there will be so much competition.” But it’s pretty wild to be where we are at the moment.

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Question: That’s exactly what I wanted to talk to you about. How has this nomination and this newfound fame changed your daily lives?

Rush: It’s put me into a real Jekyll and Hyde sort of picture for the last six months. I’ve been commuting to work here from Melbourne, which is a 17-hour trip or 22, if you’re going to New York. And my family life is there--my wife and kids, and they’re quite young. I go home and I go straight into family life. The kids have got colds or they’re going through a bad sleeping phase. They’re up at 3 in the morning, doing all that. And then I come over here and I’m only here for four days and there are limos and intense press. So, I’m still trying to kind of balance that.

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Q: Is it jarring to lead both existences?

Rush: In some ways it’s pretty exhilarating because there’s a small percentage of my brain that still keeps me here as a tourist. I’m still going, “Wow! Look at this here.” I’m getting to go to places I never would have been to.

Thornton: What Geoffrey said is like ditto for me: The Jekyll and Hyde thing. I’m also married. I have a 2-year-old and a 3-year-old--two little sons--and I live in a “Leave It to Beaver” neighborhood in a little white frame house [in Pacific Palisades]. I have this whole other life that has nothing to do with this that when I come out, the shock is so great. I’m at home putting together a train and my kids are saying, “Dad, don’t do that” or whatever. And the next thing I know, I have people that I never dreamed would speak to me screaming my name out.

Q: Like whom?

Thornton: From carpenters in Encino to Clint Eastwood or Elizabeth Taylor. Because, see, I thought carpenters as well as Elizabeth Taylor would never speak to me. So, it’s such an overwhelming experience to suddenly be thrust into this life that you’ve only seen on television. I’ve been an actor in this town for 16 years; I’ve never experienced any of this.

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As the two compare their Hollywood stories, oscar-winning actor Robert Duvall--who plays Thornton’s psychotic father in “Sling Blade”--strolls by. Rush threatens to “go to jelly” upon meeting the veteran actor, whom Thornton regards as his mentor. Exhibiting no signs of a gelatinous collapse, Rush chats up Duvall and Thornton for about 15 minutes. Asked about the pair’s Oscar possibilities, Duvall is diplomatic: “They should give out two of them. Dueling Oscars.”

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Q: Both of you have been in the kind of films that touch an emotional chord. These were two movies and two performances that people can’t stop talking about. I would think that people come up to you in ways that they wouldn’t come up to someone who’s just in any movie.

Thornton: It’s such a terrific feeling when people come up to you and say things like “You’ve given me the hope to go on” or “I have a little film I’m trying to make and I had given up on it and now I’m going to do it anyway.” Those are the things that really mean something to you. They don’t say things like “So, we understand that Sharon Stone is seeing you at the spa.”

Q: Whose comments or which accolades have impressed you the most during this heady period?

Rush: After the Globes, Lynn Redgrave [who plays Gillian Helfgott, Rush’s wife] had a party for all the “Shine” people. And Charlton Heston was there. Lynn very cheekily whispered in my ear, “Come and meet Moses.” He’s this huge man. Huge in my mind and physically quite big. We’re talking one-to-one, and I’m thinking, “This is the guy who parted the Red Sea when I was like 15 or something. This is the guy that said, ‘Soylent Green is people.’ ” And he’s just there saying, “I loved your film.”

Thornton: Don’t you get such a feeling of, it’s not exactly guilt, but it’s in the same family as guilt, when somebody like that tells you, “Oh, I’m honored to meet you?” Last night I met Gregory Peck at the AFI tribute to Martin Scorsese. His children met me at the door when I got there and they said, “Hi, my name is Tony Peck and this is my sister,” but the name didn’t register. They said, “Our father would love to meet you.” I’m thinking I’m just going to see somebody’s dad, which I was all for . . .

Rush: George Peck.

Thornton: Exactly. The next thing you know, I’m standing there with Gregory Peck, who’s the guy that I talk about when people ask what films influenced me. I’m always talking about “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “I Walk the Line.” There’s Gregory Peck, who’s such a distinguished, gentlemanly kind of guy, and here I am, a hillbilly standing there with him. I can’t say that I remember what these people say to me because the whole time I’m talking to them, I’m thinking, “Gregory Peck is talking to me right now.”

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The interview is interrupted midstream when a hotel guest wanders by and recognizes Geoffrey Rush.

“Didn’t I see you in ‘Shine?’ ” he asks.

“You did,” Rush says.

“May I shake your hand? You were superb, absolutely superb,” the man gushes.

“Thank you,” says Rush graciously, shaking his hand. “This is Billy Bob Thornton, who’s in ‘Sling Blade.’ So, if you’ve not seen that, please see it.”

“Nice to meet you,” the man says to Thornton, dismissing him and returning to Rush: “I saw your film twice. I’m an amateur pianist and whether you are or you aren’t--”

“I’m not,” says Rush with a laugh.

“Well, you were superb in your expertise and I wish you luck,” the man says.

“We’re rooting for him,” Thornton interjects.

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Thornton: Now how many pianists have you had come up?

Rush: That’s always my test. I’ve had close friends who say, “We didn’t know you could play the piano.” It’s just good camera angles, a bit of hard work.

Thornton: There’s probably a greater chance for you to get piano players coming up to you than there is for me to get institutionalized ax murderers coming up.

Q: Does it get old having people come up and compliment you all the time? I don’t suppose anyone ever walks up and says, “God, I hated that movie. What was wrong with you?”

Rush: You gotta ride it out. You’ve got to know for every one person who comes up to you, there’s someone who avoided you deliberately because they think, “What a trashy piece of sentimental bio-pic this ‘Shine’ is.”

Thornton: Silence becomes very loud.

Q: You just did a complete transformation for your role in “Sling Blade.” Billy Bob, you’re barely recognizable as the jaw-jutting, slumped-shoulder Karl Childers. Both of you are so radically different from the characters you played. Geoffrey, your speaking style is nothing like the rapid-fire speech of David Helfgott, and you seem far more reserved. How did you accomplish that mentally as well as physically?

Thornton: It just comes from growing up around a lot of characters. The physicality of the character, the way he walks, was largely based on old men; I worked in a nursing home. The actual dialect is not a modern-day dialect. It’s from years and years ago. I wanted the movie to have sort of a timeless quality. There’s one little bit in the movie in the beginning where I look directly into the camera. What I intended there was just for me to look at the camera and say in a way: “This is a fantasy.”

Rush: Eighty percent of the interviews I’ve done in North America you can kind of see the reporters’ faces fall when they realize I didn’t actually have a psychotherapeutic experience. I’m acting. I researched it and I listened to lots of audio tapes of David and watched a lot of video footage of him and met up with him and occasionally sniffed around the psychiatric aspects of the character, but that’s not where my instincts were leading me. I came in on David’s humor. He is eccentric. He does have these speech patterns. But I didn’t want to play him as some sort of psychiatric victim.

Thornton: When you do these characters, the journalists are always hoping that you went through some god-awful experience in order to get there. I feel probably more comfortable inside Karl than I do myself in a lot of ways. It’s so easy to go into Karl.

Rush: It’s a license, isn’t it? I can be more outward and more flirtatious and more intimate with people as David than I ever could be as Geoffrey. I liked looking at your performance for the same thing. I love acting being about transformation. It is pretense . . . I have to say I knew nothing about your film. Just before Christmas when I was here, everyone kept mentioning this film called “Sling Blade.” For some reason, I thought it sounded like L.A. gang warfare.

Thornton laughs heartily.

Rush: So when I went to see it this week, the only knowledge that I had was from our “Today” interview, where they showed a clip. There was a rhythm in that and I thought, “This is not what I was expecting.” The only times I can recall such a meaningful experience was when I saw “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and also when I saw “Being There,” with Peter Sellers. I thought, “God, where are you taking me?” and that’s what I got from this film. There are moments where you bang me deep in the chest.

Thornton: Thank you.

Rush: Some moments just absolutely floored me. The scene where you put your arm around the boy, I was a wreck. I thought, “This is such a simple thing: a man is expressing friendship.” I came out thinking, “I’ve just watched something halfway between a Greek tragedy--the fall of the great house where people killed parents--and yet it’s not set in some highfalutin place or some classical landscape. And the other thing I got from it was “Huck Finn.” I don’t know why I made that connection, but when I read “Huck Finn” as a 10- or 11-year-old, I kept getting goose bumps. I wasn’t sure where your film was going to take me. I could feel dread. But you weren’t sign-posting it, saying, “Get ready.”

Thornton: The first bit of “Shine” I saw was down in Arizona with Sean Penn working on an Oliver Stone film. So we’re out there in the middle of this really strange desert place and at lunchtime we put this tape on, having no idea what it was, and we watched 10 minutes of it, and he and I looked at each other and we just thought, “God, this is incredible.” I didn’t start hearing your name till later. So I just had this character, this guy, in my head. I was thinking, “How close is this guy to that character? Is the speech pattern his? What happened here? Exactly how much of this is him?” Then when you started to be on the talk shows, I saw this very gentlemanly guy who’s sitting there talking very normally, talking about his kids.

Q: There are some similarities between your two characters. Both of the characters come from severely dysfunctional families and both have spent time in mental hospitals.

Rush: I see David Helfgott as a great clown character because he’s able to redefine the way people see things in a very mundane, everyday way. Because he has such a different spin on reality. When I read the script, it was like “Don Quixote” or something. He was like an off-center hero who’s going to make us see the world differently, which you certainly do in your film, Billy Bob. Every scene changes because of Karl’s presence. There’s a beautiful, gentle, natural comedy.

Thornton: Our experiences have been so similar.

Rush: I can’t write.

Thornton: I bet you could.

Rush: You’re the triple threat.

Q: Are elaborate research and preparation necessary to undergo a screen transformation like you both did?

Thornton: I truly believe that for all the actors who really study hard and really work and gain 50 pounds and hang out with the street people for six months, I have a real feeling that if they didn’t do that, their performance would be very similar to the one that they do having done that.

Rush: I call them the tasks. If the description for the character is “eccentric classical pianist who’s brilliant,” then I think, “OK, he has got amazing speech patterns” so I learn them like I would in the theater. Then you sit down at night and you go over the dialogue. The research for me is pretty detached: as simple as listening to tapes, like learning an accent. The tapes were like the Berlitz “How to Speak Fluent David Helfgott.” Before takes, I had certain key phrases that I always had cued up which helped me keep in tune with the accent. I was trying to honor a human being, even though I’m, in a sense, creating him.

Thornton: I’m not saying that any sort of external thing would be the same, what I mean is the emotional content of what you do really in the end can only come from what you’ve felt in your life. In other words, Robert De Niro is not going to feel [“Raging Bull” lead character] Jake La Motta’s pain. No matter what you do technically, the performance is still going to be very, very close to what you are anyway.

Q: We’ve talked about the dazzling aspects of fame. Is there a down side to celebrity?

Rush: I got a little whiff of something slightly discomfiting the other night. I went to a premiere, “Smilla’s Sense of Snow.” I went along as a guest. There were 30 photographers outside. I walked in, I thought, “I’ll jut slip in here with my guest”’ and it was: “Geoffrey, Geoffrey, Over here!” I just said, “Guys, it’s not my movie.” And then when I came out of the movie, there were about half a dozen autograph hunters with bootleg shots of a magazine shoot I did about four months ago. I was suddenly thinking, “My God, I don’t know if I want that.” I imagine if you’re in your 20s, it could spin you around a bit, but my family life is pretty solid. And to be quite honest, my theater crew in Australia is there and if all this fell through tomorrow, I would continue with what I was doing, which is still pretty exciting.

Thornton: It goes along with the idea of watching human behavior. You want to see characters at work. Why would I only want to see the people that I grew up with, only see the kind of life that I write about? I want to see other things. Now I feel confident that I could write a story about Los Angeles or New York, and I didn’t feel that before.

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Q: What about the pressure to keep this success up? This was your directing debut, Billy Bob, and you hit pay dirt. This was Geoffrey’s screen debut in a leading role and you hit really big. You’re up for best actor. Do you feel everything you do has to be of that caliber?

Rush: I felt the pressure when I was successful in a play 20 years ago. I was playing Snoopy in “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” and I was good. It was popular; kids wanted my autograph. The next thing I did, I was terrible at. You can’t put the pressure on yourself for each role. Certain roles come along that help define you as an actor or as a person. You find a niche or something comes sharply into focus for you as an actor. And it’s hard to keep matching that. David Helfgott is a role that comes once in a career, or once in a decade. And the best antidote to that for me is not to try to repeat that or cash in on that but to go somewhere else.

Thornton: If I have a soapbox to get on about making movies, this is it: To do this performance, we rely on a lot of things. Fate is definitely one of them and people don’t understand that there’s a certain chemistry or a certain chain of events that work at a given time. Geoffrey’s a terrific actor. Period. But he may go in one day and do a part somewhere and because of the circumstances, his mood, whatever is going on in his life, he may not do as well. That doesn’t change the fact that he’s a great actor. But so often people think that if this formula works, or this thing works, it will always work. And that’s just not true.

The best example I can think of is when we made “One False Move.” This is a movie that I co-wrote and starred in. I was very proud of it. It was one of those movies that was made for $2 million and we did it on the fly and the director was called a genius and it was the critics’ darling. People think that [artistic success] can be repeated and it can’t always be repeated. This is also a great example of how Hollywood works sometimes in the big movie system. At the time I didn’t even have money. I had this movie that everybody loved but I was still wondering if I was going to have to go to work next week in the pizza parlor or whatever. My agent called me up and said, “We got some good news for you: Studio X has just called--I don’t see any sense in naming names, it doesn’t do anybody any good--and they’ve said they’re going to remake ‘One False Move’ with stars and on about a $50-million budget.” And they thought I was going to be happy!

I told them I would be insulted. This movie was what it was because of the chemistry or circumstances or whatever it was at that moment in time and it’s not some damn algebraic formula that just works and then you can take it to a larger scale and use the same formula. Now, instead of me and Bill Paxton, you’re going to have Harrison Ford and Al Pacino. You think it’s going to be the same quality movie, only greater? You’re wrong.

Karl may be the only role I ever have that is noticed by people enough to nominate me for an Oscar. I don’t know. Or circumstances may come up where that will happen, but it may be five movies from now. You just don’t know. And it’s no reflection on your work or how creative you are, it’s just simply that sometimes things happen right. I mean, how many more roles will come up like Karl? We don’t know.

Rush: Well, you’re lucky. You can write yourself one.

Thornton: But who knows if I’m going to be able to? As a writer I’m much more influenced by novelists than I am movie-makers. So, I may never write anything else that will translate to the screen.

Rush: People are throwing more money at me than I’ve ever seen in my acting life. It is a Faustian pact. You think, “Oh dear, I’ve got to cut that deal. What’s my cutoff point?” But ultimately the right reasons are going to be hopefully what they’ve always been in the theater: an interesting story or a good director or a good team.

Thornton: I’m not going around looking for only million-dollar movies to do. If a movie costs $50 million to make and it’s a wonderful story with wonderful characters, that’s OK, too. Because there are plenty of really pretentious independent films that mean nothing.

Q: What have you learned about how Hollywood functions as a result of these roles and what have you personally learned?

Rush: People shouldn’t isolate the studios or independents. It’s what Billy Bob was just saying. There are creative people who work in the studio system. They’re not dumb. It is much more a business, but there are a lot of people in that area that do have very creative impulses. I thought the actor’s role was just the raw material of the shoot and the development before and then there’s post-production after. But I have learned that it’s a big country. Communicating the film to the audience, I realize, especially in America, is a particular skill because there’s so much product around us. I’ve learned to appreciate why you have to have this media treadmill and let people know the tone, the pitch and the feel of your film. If you had gone to somebody and said, “ ‘Shine’ is about an eccentric classical pianist from Perth,” they all would say, “We’re not going to put money into that. Unless you put A-list players or whatever.”

Thornton: I’ve learned that people slam the big-movie guys, but the fact of the matter is when you meet them personally, generally what they’ll say is “God, I wish I could make movies like this.”

Rush: [Steven] Spielberg is quoted as saying that. When he saw “Shine,” he said, “I wish I had made that film.”

Q: How did that feel?

Rush: We dined out on that for months.

Thornton: When I get the big guys telling me that “Sling Blade” is their favorite movie of the year, how are you going to slam those people? They are working at a job where they have to do what they have to do. On a personal level, what I learned from doing this is that what I learned growing up and the way that I lived really means something. I have a certain confidence about talking about the things that I know. It’s not some kind of weird alien [expletive] that nobody’s going to care about. People are really interested in human beings.

Q: What about all this glamour? How does it feel attending all these awards events?

Rush: The Golden Globes was my first tuxedo in my life.

Thornton: I’ve worn one a couple times. Once I was married and once I was a waiter at a party. But I put on a tuxedo recently, and my wife says, “God, you look handsome,” but I certainly don’t ever think of myself in that way. And when you start to get attention, every now and then you start to do things that you normally didn’t do. You’re about to go out and it’s like you think, “Maybe I should wipe the mustard off my mouth this time.” You start to suddenly think, “Well, God, I’m kind of representing something.”

Rush: I said facetiously that I felt ambassadorial because I am representing a film that is, I think, distinctly Australian and represents the kind of aesthetic and budgetary principles that we work on down there. The film has been doing well in Italy and in the U.K. and making great strides here, and you do sort of feel like it’s school again and you’ve got to have your uniform on when you go outside the gates.

Q: So, there’s one last big gala event coming up. Any specific plans for it?

Thornton: We should wear matching Elvis jumpsuits for the Oscars. What if we went to the Oscars together? It would be so great if I could pick you up from the hotel in my Jeep. We’d sit at the same table.

Rush: We’d get the coverage.

Thornton: Wouldn’t we? It would be the first time in Oscar history two guys who were up against each other just came as pals.