In ‘Titus,’ He’s the Face of Pure Evil

This guy knows his way around a pool table. Note his form, the way he moves so smoothly to set up his shot.

“They play this game in every black neighborhood in America,” he tells his opponent.

But then uncertainty wrinkles Harry J. Lennix’s brow. For all he knows, One Pocket, the game he grew up playing in smoky joints on Chicago’s South Side, also could be the favorite of suburban schoolboys everywhere.

His opponent wouldn’t know. The poor man. Lennix circles the table, then leans in to line up his shot. He’s laying down a lesson so rough that his opponent--no, let’s call him his student--will either get better in a hurry or he’ll give up pool altogether.

Lennix, an actor, has a pool table scene in the movie “Titus.” He lays down some hard lessons there, too. Lessons about hate. Lessons about love. Lessons about prejudice. But that isn’t so much the reason for this game this afternoon. He just likes to play pool.

“I’m not as good as I used to be,” he says. “My vision.” His forefinger dances near his eyes. “This game is so precise that even a slight decline in your vision can make a big difference in the way a person plays.”

In Los Angeles, Lennix’s favorite place to play is on Crenshaw, in the “ ‘hood,” as he says. But for the sake of convenience he’ll bring his cue stick here to Hollywood to this wholesome yuppie haunt, the mirror opposite of the places he frequented growing up. Back in Chicago he played at Akins, “at 64th and Cottage Grove,” he says. “A rough part of town.” Akins was one of the seedy joints in “The Color of Money” where Paul Newman’s character took Tom Cruise’s prodigal player to teach him the true art of playing pool.

If Lennix didn’t tell you about his rough upbringing, you wouldn’t know. Eloquent and thoughtful, this 35-year-old actor who has made a name for himself doing Shakespeare on stage would never be typecast as a street tough, even if the Shakespearean role that is bringing him attention at the moment is a character as tough and hard-bitten as they come.

In Julie Taymor’s clanging, bloody rock video version of William Shakespeare’s play “Titus Andronicus,” Lennix portrays a scheming, hateful Moor. Wearing a haircut that would do Snoop Dogg proud, his face etched with ritual scars, the lean 6-foot-3-inch Lennix more than holds his own in the company of a masterful Anthony Hopkins in the title role and Jessica Lange as a vengeful Goth queen. It’s a mesmerizing performance. For some viewers, his Aaron--who sets the stage for an orgy of violence--steals the movie.

“If one good deed in all my life I did I do repent it for my very soul,” his character declaims at one point. Evil so pure is rare in film and serious literature. “His actions are not motivated by lust or sex or money,” Lennix says. “It is just the pure art and pure ecstasy of evil.

“In his own way he’s a quite holy man,” he says. “He does what he does out of the following of a discipline no less than that of, say, Joan of Arc.”

As Lennix portrays him, Aaron is not without his redeeming qualities. His performance hints at the history of scorn and mistreatment that might have given birth to such hatefulness.

In 1993, Lennix directed a stage version of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” that evoked the civil rights and black power movements of the 1960s. In an odd way, “Titus,” though set in ancient Rome, also has contemporary relevance for black Americans, Lennix believes. Unlike other evil characters Shakespeare wrote, the rage of Aaron is never explained, but Lennix believes that Aaron was turned into a monster by the way he was treated by society.

“Shakespeare never articulated it because I think he didn’t presume to know the mind of a black man, but he does presume to know the human natures of people who have been dehumanized and desensitized” by society’s scorn and by brutal treatment, Lennix says.

Aaron shows, by his love for his son, that he can care for another human being. “He values human life. He just doesn’t see you as human, just as you didn’t see him as human.

“This was a revolutionary insight. For Shakespeare to be able to do that 500 years ago when not even black people are able to do that now is really a testament to his genius.”

As Aaron, Lennix makes evil magnetic, which is why director Taymor says she hired him.

“He’s a brilliant actor,” says Taymor, who also hired Lennix to play the role off-Broadway in 1994. “He’s the only actor who was in the original stage version who is in the movie,” she says.

He’s Well Known in Chicago, New York

Lennix has long been well regarded in Chicago and in New York, but he is a virtual unknown to moviegoers. But after “Titus,” this may shortly change. (The film opened in limited release last month for Oscar consideration and is gradually going into wider release.) If not for his dedication to the stage--and to “Titus,” in fact--he might already be a familiar face. Before “ER” went on the air in 1994, Lennix auditioned for the role of Dr. Benton, the single-minded surgical resident.

“They wanted me to come out for a screen test,” he says, “but I was doing ‘Titus’ in New York. I didn’t have an understudy.” He says he discussed his quandary with Taymor, who told him that if he left the play would have to close. “Rather than sink the play, I decided to stay on and do it.”

The role went to Eriq La Salle, who now also has movie acting credits and a burgeoning career as a director and producer. But Lennix says he made the right decision. “It obviously wasn’t meant for me to do it,” he says, philosophically. “I truly believe that the right things find you. The right thing found [La Salle].

“I wouldn’t have traded the experience [of continuing in the play] for the world.”

Because of the experience, Lennix got to act beside Hopkins, who he says is his favorite actor. And Lennix, who besides being a professor of the pool room was a real-life Chicago schoolteacher until 1994, went to school in the actor’s presence.

“It was really quite intimidating,” he says. “I’ve probably done as much Shakespeare as anybody in the movies,” and he knows Americans who are brilliant Shakespearean actors. But the British “have a facility with the language that is unparalleled,” he says. “I don’t think anybody can out-Shakespeare the Brits. They have a confidence because they’re brought up with it and it was a part of their culture. It’s like us growing up on rock ‘n’ roll or soul or rhythm and blues or whatever. It’s part of our vocabulary.”

He Didn’t Want Role in ‘The Doors’

Lennix’s decision not to do a screen test for “ER” wasn’t the first time he opted not to pursue a role that other struggling actors would jump at. When Oliver Stone was casting “The Doors,” his 1991 movie about the rock group, Lennix was asked to play the small comic role of a gay hairdresser who gets made fun of. The role was a potential scene-stealer, but Lennix angrily turned it down.

“I’m sure that Oliver Stone wasn’t aware and couldn’t have cared less at the time that I wasn’t going to come audition for ‘The Doors,’ ” he says. He’s smiling but still indignant. “I have no problem playing gay characters--I did one in [Spike Lee’s] ‘Get on the Bus’--but not to be the butt of some white man’s joke. That’s preposterous. I’d rather sweep the streets before I’d do anything like that.

“At that time I was a nobody from Chicago, but in my mind I’m somebody, and I’m important too.”

Not only was Lennix a “nobody,” despite having won local acclaim for his stage acting, but he was just starting to become self-supporting as an actor.

In those days he was teaching school--grades kindergarten through eight--and sometimes holding two acting jobs at once. “There were days I didn’t eat until after rehearsal, at 9 or 10 at night. . . . It weighed on me. I finally got an ulcer from all the stress. . . .

“What a great luxury to be able to afford McDonalds, when I had enough money that I didn’t have to make a choice between getting a bus pass or eating.”

He remembers once being in New York’s Grand Central Station and seeing a coconut cream pie in a bakery. “It cost $8, which was an enormous sum at the time,” Lennix recalls. “And I remember thinking one day I’m going to be able to afford this pie and not think about how much it costs. The gauge of my success at that point consisted mainly of food.”

At first, he says, he taught to finance his acting career. But he continued to teach even after it became no longer necessary. He stopped shortly before he went to New York in 1994 to do “Titus.” Then, in the beginning of 1995, he moved to Los Angeles.

As a young man, raised by his widowed mother, he heard the call of the church. His mother had been raised a Baptist but she’d converted to Catholicism when she married Lennix’s father, a Louisiana-born Creole. By working as a laundress of a church rectory, she managed to send her four children to Catholic schools.

He studied to be a priest but dropped out of the seminary after one semester. As he became more politicized, he had begun to question the relevance of the Catholic Church to the black community. This was during the campaign of Chicago’s first African American mayor, Harold Washington. The city was polarized. At the mostly white seminary, Washington supporters were a distinct minority.

An Advocate for Change

Lennix transferred to Northwestern University, a much more politicized campus, where he became president of the Black Student Union. In a newspaper profile earlier in his career, Lennix is quoted as saying that if he had been born early enough to participate in the civil rights movement he would’ve been so strenuous an advocate for change that he would’ve been shot.

“I think part of that is youthful bravado,” he says today, sitting at the bar in the pool hall drinking a glass of iced tea. “Now at 35 I don’t know if I’d have the courage to do what those people were doing. I’d like to think that I would give my life for a cause I believe in, but frankly I don’t know that I have that courage.

“There’s a line in ‘The Catcher in the Rye’: ‘The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.’ I’d like to think that I’m mature enough now to live humbly for a cause.”