See him now

SINCE making his film debut 25 years ago in good friend John Sayles’ first feature, “Return of the Secaucus 7,” David Strathairn has become one of American cinema’s most versatile and complex actors. “He’s an actor who is able to play a text and subtext,” Sayles has said of the actor, whom he met while attending Williams College.

Strathairn, 56, has collaborated with Sayles several times on films, including “Matewan” and “Eight Men Out.”

Over the last two decades, Strathairn’s played everything from a wealthy pimp in “L.A. Confidential” to a blind computer hacker in the comedy “Sneakers” to scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer in the Emmy Award-winning TV movie, “Day One.”

He also is something of a thinking woman’s sex symbol, thanks to his romantic performance as bookstore owner Moss Goodman in the ‘80s TV series “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd.”

Last month, Strathairn won the best actor award at the Venice Film Festival for his role as legendary journalist Edward R. Murrow in George Clooney’s “Good Night, and Good Luck,” which opened Friday.

Set in 1953 during the height of Sen. Joseph P. McCarthy’s communist witch hunts, the film explores Murrow’s decision to take on McCarthy (who is seen only in vintage clips) after his CBS news program, “See It Now,” profiles the airman Milo Radulovich, who had been discharged from the service without a trial based on sealed, secret evidence.

Do you remember watching Edward R. Murrow when you were growing up in the ‘50s?

No. It was later when I became aware of him. I remember Eisenhower, I remember the Korean War, which was going on at the time of this film. But no, growing up in Northern California I wasn’t exposed to Murrow. I heard about him in high school and definitely at college. I didn’t know nearly as much as I do now.

Often, performers who are cast as a real people tend to do an imitation, while others strive to capture the essence of the historical figure. You seemed to go for the latter approach. How did you find the Murrow within?

There is no evidence of what he was like in public that I had access to -- just all the broadcasts and the speeches and the biographies. There are also lots of photos of him in society and archival photographs. But no one really knew what he was like [when] not on the news. It wasn’t important to know that because the event [in the movie] was that particular time in his career and his life, and everything takes place inside the studio.

There is only one scene outside the studio, in a bar. George said, “Let’s just stick with what we know,” so you sort of relaxed the on-air broadcast persona a little bit. But since the energy of the piece was tight and was always about what was going to happen next, there never was a moment to relax, so the onus was off as to having to create the man outside the office, so to speak.

He was a man of integrity and intelligence that you don’t see much today in most newscasters. What did you find were his strengths as a journalist?

He was so clean and articulate and poetic. His writing was so wonderful -- his sentence construction and the use of image -- he would quote Shakespeare. It was very literate and at the same time so true to the point. He was an image-maker, a storyteller and not a story spinner, a qualifier. He had the skill to tell a story and get across the resonances of it, the kind of feelings involved and what it means in a larger scope. That is very hard to do, and his particular skill was in that.

When he would say something, like when he described seeing bombs going down over Germany as “puffs of white rice on black velvet,” and there was a description when he was in Buchenwald, which was a pivotal moment in his life. He said, “There is a man in front of me crawling to a latrine for a drink of water.” That’s all you need to know.

Murrow seemed like an exceptionally brave man, taking on McCarthy. It’s hard to believe a journalist would do something like that in this day and age.

It was groundbreaking. This was the first time television had ever been used like that. I think somewhere in him he knew the power of this new toy. He used it as precisely and as delicately as he approached a radio broadcast. He was brave but compelled by something natural to him.

He was late in the game [going after McCarthy]. People were asking, “When are you going to go after him, Ed?” I don’t know why he waited so long. I know he wanted to do it as smartly as he could. He was a crusader. He was such a beacon for people. He searched out the things that are common to us all.

He was a real spokesman for the common man. He was a person who lived by an adage I heard the other day: It is your duty to always take care of those who are less powerful than you and always question those who are more powerful.