The Power Deep Within

Snock snock snock snock.

“He just wants to play,” Ving Rhames says.

Rhames stares solemnly at a spot just below your belt, silently inventorying the possibilities that now present themselves to Kong, the 170-pound dog who has buried his snout deep within the confluence of your lap. You sound these words out slowly in your mind, trying to imagine how they will sound to the stretcher-bearers when they have arrived. Kong, who just wants to play, is making a wild snuffling sound down there.

Snock snock snock snock.

“The dog was actually bred to guard slaves,” Rhames says, nodding redundantly at the 1-year-old Fila Brasileiro, that is--how to say this?--about to get medieval on your lap. Rhames’ ancestors and the dog’s once regarded one another warily across the rolling piedmont of a South Carolina plantation. “It was the only dog they found that had the temperament to guard a slave,” Rhames says. “It could be around you every day, but if you tried to run away . . .”

Snock snock snock.

”. . . it would deal with you like it never saw you before.”

Rhames has picked up the small tape recorder you have carefully positioned before him on a coffee table, narrating his thoughts into the thing as he holds it an inch from his mouth, caressing it with his warm baritone while staring straight ahead with cold, obsidian eyes--as if the thermostat controlling these two functions had somehow become disconnected in the great, gleaming parabola of his head.

Just as you are thinking how helpful this will be to the forensic specialists, he pulls the dog away with his free hand before it can playfully disembowel you. Then, the tape recorder still churning away in his meaty fist, Rhames leads Kong onto the patio behind his Brentwood home. There he puts the dog in a fenced-off area that separates him from an equally petrifying Ambullneo mastiff named Samson, and three mastiff puppies--Storm, Scorsese and Cage. Scorsese and Cage were named after a couple of pretty bad pups in their own right, Martin Scorsese and Nicolas Cage, with whom Rhames worked on “Bringing Out the Dead,” coming out this Friday. Rhames plays an emergency medical services technician in the film, trapped in one of the seven circles of Hell’s Kitchen with Cage, who is so completely zombiefied that his performance in “Bringing Out the Dead” could pass for a sequel to “Leaving Las Vegas,” made post-mortem.

If it doesn’t take much to be the life force in “Bringing Out the Dead,” when Rhames erupts into a tent-revival-style “healing” of an overdose victim in the middle of a nightclub, the movie can scarcely contain him. Rhames, who is 6 feet and 210 pounds of muscle and the will of God, seems likely at any moment to come twitching off the screen.

“He understood that truth of having a close relationship with Jesus,” Scorsese says. “He could fly across the frame but still be rooted in the truth about that religious feeling. He’s not afraid to make a bigger move, because it’s grounded in a reality. And that’s electrifying.”

“I mean you could feel the energy coming off of him in that room,” Cage says, recalling the day the scene was shot. “It was really powerful stuff. It seemed like everything Ving did in the movie rang with some measure of truth. He’s a very majestic person, just as a man. He holds himself with a lot of dignity and power.”

During another scene, Cage and Rhames attempt to rescue two babies, but only one of the children lives. “And I remember him saying, ‘Bless you, father. Praise you,’ thanking God that he had saved this child,” Cage says. “And it was used in the film. But off camera, just psyching up, he would go into that mode. I had no doubt that it was totally real and genuinely emotional. And I felt solace just being around it.”

Navigating a landscape of spiritual decay and rotting flesh, Rhames pounds furiously at his character’s heart in every scene. “I said, ‘How can I bring him to life?’ ” Rhames says. “I tried to play it as real and truthful as possible, because I’ve witnessed healings, experienced healings upon myself. I’m not faking--can’t fake. I try to allow the spirit of the character to live through me. That’s the only way I know how to approach acting. I have to live it.”

Rhames first knew he had “felt the power of God” through the laying on of hands at the small Pentecostal storefront church he attended every Sunday in Harlem. (He had wanted to be a preacher, until he decided he would rather play professional football. When Rhames made this determination, he stood 5-foot-5, weighed 130 pounds and was attending New York City’s High School of the Performing Arts, which didn’t even have a football team.)

Now, on the rare occasions that he gets to play something other than the sidekick to some white guy, Rhames often lays healing hands upon his characters.

“A lot of times scripts are written so the character is all one way,” Rhames says. “Even with ‘Bringing Out the Dead,’ the character was written a little more generic. But the spirit of that character was alive and in me. I can watch some parts of my performance now and I don’t feel it’s me. I feel the rhythms are different, the speech is different, the look is different. I feel that I went through the metamorphosis, the transformation.”

The metamorphosis of Irving Ramses Rhames took place almost entirely on 126th Street in Harlem, where he lived in a first-floor front apartment with his mother, Reather, his father, Ernest, and his older brother, Ernest Rhames Jr. “My brother and I slept on the couch,” he says. “I didn’t get my own room until I was in college. We didn’t even have a telephone until I was in college.”

The Black Panther Party headquarters was in the back apartment, and the Nation of Islam half a block up. It was the late ‘60s, and, a block away, 125th Street was a drug bazaar. “There was a shooting gallery right above us,” Rhames recalls. “I’d come home from school and junkies would be in the hallway, on the stairs, shooting up. I saw so much. I don’t know if I hadn’t grown up poor, and in the neighborhood I did, if I would have had that much to bring to my art form. I call upon my past with characters. From the preacher to the pimp and the drug dealer, that’s a huge range to draw upon.

“You’d be surprised by some of the people who would take an interest in the kids on 126th Street,” Rhames adds. “A lot of times it’s the street pimp or the drug dealer who says, ‘You need some food, Shorty? Here’s $20.’ Where I grew up, I didn’t see the NAACP. Those people were not in my neighborhood. The pimp and the drug dealer, they seemed like they were achieving the American Dream.”

His parents had been sharecroppers in South Carolina, literally dirt-poor, and after coming to New York allowed themselves only one luxury: Every weekend Rhames’ mother took him around the corner to the Apollo Theater, where he saw Sam and Dave, James Brown and the Mighty Clouds of Joy.

“Things were happening in Harlem,” he says. “There was a lot of political energy, a lot of creative energy swirling around. I didn’t know what to make of it, but like osmosis, it was affecting me.”

Also affecting him, and not in a good way, was his name. Though his middle name--Ramses--had belonged to one of the great pharaohs of Egypt, Rhames says his first name came from a radio announcer his mother listened to--Irving R. Levine, an NBC radio and TV correspondent. Rhames was the only black kid in all of Harlem named Irving, he was sure of that. And the teasing was merciless. Years later, while he was making a name for himself as an actor, Rhames often refused to tell reporters the derivation of the name Ving, for fear that people would start calling him Irving again. It was a Juilliard classmate, actor Stanley Tucci, who lopped off the offending syllable, and “Ving” stuck.

Rhames’ father was a mechanic who had dreamed of being an airline pilot, despite his sixth-grade education. Ernest Rhames’ absences, though frequent, were never so long that he came home without the reek of whiskey following him like a contrail. “My dad would challenge me by drinking a lot and then saying negative things about my mother,” Rhames says.

One day someone tried to break into the apartment while Irving and his mother were alone there. “I remember thinking, ‘When Dad gets home, everything is going to be OK. I won’t be afraid,’ ” Rhames says now. “But by the time I went to bed that night, my dad still hadn’t come home. I realized then that my dad wasn’t reliable for certain things, but I didn’t know why. I remember telling God, ‘I’m going to have to take care of Mom.’ ” He was 6 years old.

Just as Rhames, at 38, sees his own life as an act of resurrection, each new role is an act of communion with the dead and the dying. In “Rosewood,” he stops to look at someone who has just been lynched, and the horror that pools on his face is a reflection of what he felt the day he came out of church in the South Bronx two decades ago and saw a man hanging by the neck from a fire escape.

“I had seen dead people before, but I had never seen someone hanged,” Rhames says. “I immediately thought about the Billie Holiday song ‘Strange Fruit.’ ”

He survived his own childhood with little else but the memory of it. “I feel like one of those guys who came back from Vietnam when the rest of his troop was blown away, all of those guys in my neighborhood that are no longer here, or are in jail, or in a life of crime, or on drugs.”

And now, one by one, he is bringing out the dead from his old neighborhood. “I know I’m a survivor,” he says. “Why was it God put me in a position to get out of that life? Maybe it’s to tell their story. Maybe all of their spirits, their souls, their hearts and their blood lives through me. I really believe it does.”

While Rhames was blazing a trail through the High School for the Performing Arts (later the setting for the movie “Fame”) and the rigors of the Juilliard School’s classical training, he was also losing track of his brother Junior. “He was living his life, and we basically had no way of getting in touch with him after a while because he was moving from place to place,” Rhames says. “We just kind of accepted that.”

Ving had been acting for nearly a decade when he showed up for a day of location shooting at a homeless shelter while working on “The Saint of Fort Washington” in 1992. One of the production assistants said there was a man at the shelter claiming to be his brother. “I thought it was a joke, but it really was my brother,” Rhames says. “I didn’t know he was in a homeless shelter. I got him out of there that night, offered to pay his rent for six months and gave him $500.” In the distinctive way he has of parsing everything that happens to him as the visible movement of God’s hand, Rhames says this proved to him that he is his brother’s keeper, even if Junior and his friends blew the 500 bucks on a party.

For a vessel of the Lord, Rhames made his first--and most lasting--impression as the baddest-ass in the lineup of unusual suspects in Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 crime souffle, “Pulp Fiction.” Though he was on screen for less than 10 minutes--much of it with his back to the camera--Rhames burned a hole in the film. As drug lord Marsellus Wallace, he made the words “I’m gonna get medieval on yo’ ass” the most resonant threat of the ‘90s. He was finally given a chance to carry a film in John Singleton’s little-seen “Rosewood” when Denzel Washington bowed out of the lead role, one of the three times in his career he has been allowed to so much as kiss a woman in a movie. When he is reminded that this is not a lot of kissing for 16 years, Rhames looks displeased. “What’s your point?” he demands.

Well, the point would seem to be that Hollywood has only occasionally figured out what to do with this classically trained Juilliard actor, who yearns to make his own version of “Othello” but instead gets to play mostly sociopaths and sidekicks in such movies as “Con Air,” “Entrapment,” ’Striptease” and “Mission: Impossible.”

Rhames doesn’t see it that way.

“Even if I did films where I was kissing women, they could say that I haven’t played the president of the United States,” he says. “You can always find something to complain about. If God wants to bless me with being paid $3 million to do a movie, then I will accept the blessing and let people talk about it all they want.”

Even some of the blessings Rhames does have, he doesn’t have, if you count the 1998 Golden Globe he won for the HBO film “Don King: Only in America.” In a tearful, rambling nonacceptance speech, he gave the best actor trophy to Jack Lemmon, who had been nominated for “12 Angry Men.” Rhames didn’t even know Lemmon before that night and had never been particularly inspired by him as an actor. So what happened? “God laid it on my heart to give it to him,” Rhames explains. “And when God tells me something, I don’t question God. If it was up to me, I wouldn’t have given it away, period.”

He’s not the only one. “I’ve heard that some people in the black community said, ‘He gave it to a white man. Should have given it to a black man,’ ” Rhames says. “Fine. When you win a Golden Globe, you don’t give it away. I don’t concern myself with people’s opinions about me, and I don’t act for awards. They don’t mean anything to me.”

What does matter to him is giving a convincing performance as yet another member of boxing’s rogues gallery in “The Sonny Liston Story,” which will begin production in a few months. He has spent two years training in the ring with former welterweight champion Sugar Ray Leonard. But while Rhames was making “Bringing Out the Dead,” he never spoke to Scorsese about how to make a boxing picture.

“I think ‘Raging Bull’ is a dynamite film for the time that it was done,” he says, “but watching the boxing scenes I could see where it wasn’t real. I don’t want that in my film. I want people to feel like this fight’s happening right now.”

There will be little of the standard fight film choreography. “We’re going to be punching,” Rhames says. “I have no problem with somebody punching me. I’m sparring and I’m getting punched now.”

The first time he sparred, one of his coaches knocked him down. “Getting knocked down was kind of this floating feeling, like you’re in the air for 15 or 20 seconds, kind of like a high,” he recalls. “And then when you hit, you think, ‘What the hell am I doing down here?’ ” Rhames knows this story lends a frisson of authenticity to his boxing, but it isn’t the frisson he wants to send you home with.

“So yeah, my first time sparring I got knocked down,” he says, then pulls the tape recorder closer to his mouth and lowers his voice. “And it hasn’t happened since.” Rhames gets up, and with the recorder still in his hand, walks out to the backyard to see how the dogs are doing.

Days later, when the tape of this is played back, you can hear him walking out of the house. Then there are several minutes of slurpy kissing noises, interrupted occasionally by this large, intimidating, righteous man talking baby talk to his dogs.