The Many Faces of Voight Reveal His One True Passion

He seems a bit befuddled, the lanky, bearded man on the elevator who can’t get the buttons to work. “What floor are you headed to?” he asks, and a second after I see that we’re going to the same place, it registers that I’m talking to Jon Voight, the man I’m here to see.

Wearing a beard and with his hair long, Voight looks nothing like the embittered high school coach he plays in his new film, “Varsity Blues,” who looks nothing like his conflicted police inspector from “The General,” which also is out, who’s no closer than distant cousin to the smoothly ambitious and evil national security chief he plays in the recent “Enemy of the State.”

What is startling about each transformation is the way the characters seem so physically different without the aid of elaborate makeup. Voight doesn’t eschew disguises--it’s not for nothing that he calls Lon Chaney a role model--but he’s built these characters from the inside out. A prosthesis here, a dab of hair color there--whatever he does to alter his looks, you get the sense he starts by transplanting a soul. So when you meet the actor for the first time, you don’t quite know what to expect.

This all is complicated by the breadth of Voight’s career, the number of films that crowd the mind. “Midnight Cowboy’s” wide-eyed Joe Buck brushes against the gnarly thief from “Heat,” who circles the lunatic from “Runaway Train,” the reluctant hunter from “Deliverance” and the “Coming Home” sensitive vet.

Which Jon Voight is the one that I’ve found?

It turns out he is none of them. This Voight welcomes me into his office the way you’d usher a friend into your home, introducing his staff like they’re family (it turns out much of his staff is related--to one another, not to Voight) and keeps insisting that I share his lunch, which someone has left on a table crowded with books and papers.

This Voight is solicitous and philosophical, an actor who loves talking about his craft and who, after almost 40 years of acting, still enjoys plunging into a difficult role. There is a playful quality about him mingled with earnestness.

Most of all, this Jon Voight is his father’s son.

Where do they come from, the menacing figures Voight mostly plays now that he’s aged gracefully from offbeat leading man to accomplished character actor? (He turned 60 last month.) They glower and strut, bitterness burning in their eyes. That certainly is the case with Coach Bud Kilmer, the role he plays in “Varsity Blues,” a teen comedy-drama that stars James Van Der Beek (Dawson from the WB’s “Dawson’s Creek”) and was the most popular movie in the country last weekend.

“He was the first actor I thought of when I read the script,” says Brian Robbins, who directed the film. Robbins recently had seen “The Rainmaker,” the 1997 movie adapted from a John Grisham novel. “He was so wonderful and evil [as a fierce Southern lawyer] that I thought he’d be great as the coach,” Robbins says of Voight.

Voight’s first scene with Van Der Beek was an intense confrontation on the football field in which the coach grabs the player and drags him down the field. “He grabbed that facemask and I thought he was going to rip his head right off,” Robbins recalls. “I saw James’ eyes get so big. But it was great. Jon got the reaction he wanted out of him.”

Voight’s coach is a domineering god in tiny West Canaan, Texas--football is his religion, winning his only tenet.

Voight’s first shot in the film is an image of his hand rising up to immediately silence a cheering crowd at a pep rally. The gesture looks like a wan Nazi salute, and in the football-obsessed culture of the film he is the Fuhrer--his word is law.

Sitting in his Century City office, no trace of the anger and ambition that drive characters such as these now touches Voight’s face; nor does he seem to draw from memories of a troubled childhood to create them. He describes those years in and around Yonkers, N.Y., as heaven, the best years of his life.

His father, Elmer Voight, was--like Coach Kilmer--a local celebrity. But unlike Kilmer, the gregarious country club golf pro was beloved by all. The poor Czechoslovakian immigrant had gone to work as a caddy when he was 8 years old. The members of the all-Jewish club took him under their wing; they taught him not only about golf but also how to speak good English, how to use a knife and fork, how to treat people.

He followed their example when he got older, helping others.

Voight’s father “was just a delightful man, a wonderful man, full of fun,” remembers the actor, who grows teary talking about him. “And he had very strong principles. He didn’t tolerate dishonesty, didn’t like liars and didn’t suffer fools gladly. . . . People loved him.” Elmer Voight died in 1964 after he was hit by a car.

Every night he told his three sons rollicking stories that he’d make up on the spot, all of them containing a moral. His father’s influence is evident in Voight’s own skills as a raconteur (he launches into hilarious full-blown impersonations of his father and others when he talks about them), and also in his values, perhaps even his line of work.

“I am a storyteller. What we are giving is the stories that we tell,” he says of acting and filmmaking. “They’ve got to be good stories. We’ve got to tell good stories that people can take something positive from.”

His father’s influence also is evident in Voight’s other two brothers’ high-profile professions. His brother Chip Tayler is a singer-songwriter--he wrote “Wild Thing” among other well-known songs. His other brother, Barry, is one of the world’s leading volcanologists.

Voight’s children also are following in the tradition. Angelina Jolie, a rising young star with a featured role in “Playing by Heart,” which opens nationally today, is Voight’s daughter. And his son, James, is a budding actor and director.

The walls and shelves in his office are full of photographs of his family and friends. In all of them Voight is beaming. He looks genuinely happy, content--the exact opposite of his often bitter persona on screen.

Choosing Films That Have a Moral Message

Set in small-town Texas, “Varsity Blues” is a queer bookend to Voight’s breakthrough role. In “Midnight Cowboy,” the Oscar-winning 1969 movie, he was an unconquered fool, a street hustler who refused to see how desperate his life really was. “What I got to stay around here for?” he bellows to his fellow dishwasher before he sets off from Texas for New York. “I got places to go, right?”

He went nowhere but down, right up until the conclusion when he tells his dying only friend, Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), that he’ll get a legitimate job and change.

The coach in “Varsity Blues” is just as desperate, though in profoundly different ways, and he, too, just as staunchly refuses to see the truth until the very end. Unlike Joe Buck, the coach stays in Texas and becomes the local hero. Through intimidation and the use of illegal painkillers, he’s led his high school team to 22 consecutive division titles.

“I think he was probably a good coach at one time,” Voight says, explaining how he fleshed out a part that could easily have been a caricature--a feat he’s done again and again in recent performances.

Over time the coach turned bitter, perhaps over losing his wife, Voight says. He turned to drink. Eventually, winning championships became the sole purpose of his existence and “anyone who stood in his way became his enemy. He’s fighting for his life in the end.”

The coach’s primary enemy is the character played by Van Der Beek, a morally upright second-string quarterback. The movie starts out as a gross-out comedy. By the end, though, it becomes a commentary on societal values and the win-at-all-cost philosophy that has perverted sports (not to mention business and personal relationships).

This underlying message, Voight says, is the reason why he took the role. He likes the way Van Der Beek plays a good kid who, though tempted and though possessed of normal teenage rebelliousness and hormones, continues to walk the straight and narrow--and comes out on top in the end.

Voight is big on moral messages; he carries a Gandhi quote on a pamphlet in his pocket and he says one wall of his home holds portraits of heroes such as Gandhi, Mother Teresa, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and John and Bobby Kennedy (in contrast to the movie star portraits and photographs that fill his office). For a while in the 1980s, Voight stopped making movies to promote causes and to make TV films about subjects dear to him, such as the welfare of children, veterans and the homeless.

He stays constantly busy acting now. More often than not, he says he chooses films based on their message.

One movie that he is bringing to the screen because of its message is “Baby Geniuses,” which deals--he hopes in an entertaining way--with the ability of infants to grasp concepts and understand language. He grows excited talking about it, veering off into a doctor’s research on the issue and touting a favored book. Voight is executive producer of the movie, which was directed by Bob Clark and stars Kathleen Turner and Christopher Lloyd; it will be released by Sony Pictures on March 12.

Robbins says Voight just as enthusiastically shared his life’s passions with his co-workers while making “Varsity Blues.” “When you work with a lot of [veteran] actors they talk to the young actors about the business,” says the director. “He didn’t do that, which was great because it meant his life didn’t revolve around that.”

When he came to the set, though, Voight’s dedication and intense preparation raised everyone’s level of performance. “When he steps onto the set he is the guy,” Robbins says. “There’s no denying it, he was the character when he came to work.”

Though Voight often came to the football field in character and paced the sidelines like a real coach even when he wasn’t in the scene, Robbins says in real life the actor couldn’t be more different from the role.

“It’s funny that he plays all those bad guys,” Robbins says, “because they are the antithesis of who he really is.”