A Most Willing Villain

NEW YORK — Brian Cox is just making a point, but still, when he tells you that he doesn’t like the way you’re rolling that pen in your hands or the way you’re eating, you tend to want to put your pen, as well as your fork, down. Maybe it’s the way the actor burrows into you with his penetrating blue eyes, his craggy features taut with tension. Or the way his barrel-chested physique suddenly shifts, panther-like, in his seat. It’s more than a little unsettling.

“We start picking on people--we don’t like the way they eat, we don’t like the way they dress or the way they speak, and it builds up and up, oh so very slowly, almost imperceptibly, to a psychotic level,” he says of the nature of evil. “You have layer and layer and layer of it, and, as an actor, you have to be so careful about it. It’s so surgical, it’s so precise.”

The 53-year-old Scottish-born actor has brought that surgical precision not only to some very memorable villains--after all, he played the very first incarnation of Hannibal Lecter in the 1986 film “Manhunter”--a prequel of sorts to “Silence of the Lambs”--but also to a whole range of characters exploring the human psyche. Though he has only begun to be known in this country for his appearances in such movies as “The Boxer,” “The Long Kiss Goodnight,” “The Corrupter” and “Rushmore,” he has long been considered one of Britain’s leading stage actors, earning raves for his many classical performances in London, including work in “King Lear” at the National Theatre and “Titus Andronicus” for the Royal Shakespeare Company.

In Los Angeles, he played the gruff, wealthy restaurateur in David Hare’s “Skylight,” at the Mark Taper Forum in 1997. In both New York and London, he appeared as the sperm-donating doctor to Glenda Jackson in the 1985 production of “Strange Interlude,” the tormented Irish Protestant policeman in “Rat in the Skull” and the cynical, sarcastic Mark in “Art.” And he has not given short shrift to television either, having played to acclaim the closeted gay father in the BBC-WNET production of “The Lost Language of Cranes.” Indeed, so protean is the actor that he even played Harold Hill in a Regent Park production of “The Music Man” in London.

But it is the villains in his resume who are weighing on his mind during a recent lunch at Joe Allen’s, a popular Manhattan hangout, on an overcast summer day. Not surprising, since he has just flown in from Montreal, where the day before he finished playing Nazi leader Hermann Goering in a TNT production of “Nuremberg,” a TV movie about the trials of the Nazis following World War II that co-stars Alec Baldwin and is planned for broadcast sometime in 2000.

And, following a brief vacation in Mexico, he returns to Los Angeles to reprise his role as a nasty, sadistic drama critic in Irish playwright Conor McPherson’s “St. Nicholas.” The one-person show, the title of which is an ironic reference to the holiday setting for its narrator’s bender of all benders, is being staged for just a week at the Matrix Theatre, through next Sunday.

“Why do I play all these bad guys? I mean I’ve been trying to work it out for myself,” says Cox in a Scottish burr redolent of his working-class roots. In his rumpled slacks and sports shirt, he looks the type of sporting fellow who’d buy you a pint at the local pub after work and talk your ear off. “I mean, I’m not a bad person, at least, I don’t think so. So why am I doing it? And I figure that it serves a purpose, showing people what the components of humanity are, that evil resides in all of us. What fascinates me about acting, and about playing these guys, is getting to the complicated truth about them, not the black-and-white, this-is-a-good-guy-and-this-is-a-bad-guy kind of truth. But exploring the gray areas that we can’t distance ourselves from, can’t elude our responsibilities for. Monsters usually aren’t monsters. They’re ordinary human beings.”

Emotional distance, of course, has long been the defense mechanism of the character known simply as the drama critic, whom Cox first created at London’s Bush Theatre before taking the show to the prestigious off-Broadway Primary Stages. Hailed by the critics (“A delectably droll celebration of storytelling as striptease,” wrote Ben Brantley in the New York Times), the drama was once the calling card of McPherson, the 26-year-old wunderkind whose “The Weir” is on Broadway and whose “Lime Tree Bower” is at Primary Stages.

Like McPherson’s other works, “St. Nicholas” is a ghost story, this time about vampires and sexual obsession as told by a man who has himself been feeding off the work of others and whose loveless marriage and empty career have left him filled with a self-loathing and disgust that he pours into his heedless and venomous attacks. That changes one night, when on his usual destructive rounds in Dublin, he becomes fixated on an attractive young actress.

Noting that he has not based his playing of the character on anyone in particular, Cox adds, “I’ve met critics like him at a party, beads of sweat when they think some actor’s going to slug them, and I’ve been rubbed in the wrong way by critics myself.” But, he says, the fear of the protagonist in “St. Nicholas” is not a punch to the head, but rather something far more threatening: indifference. “He’s defined by what he does and he’s so locked into that definition that he’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown,” says the actor. “Nothing could be worse than being ignored because he’s got nothing else in his life, no spiritual center to tell him that it isn’t what you do but who you are that matters. He feels a failure, but he can’t own up to his responsibility in it: ‘Yeah, I see what I’m doing because I’m jealous and envious.’ We, all of us, have to own up to that a bit more than we do.”

Cox says that while he has little sympathy for critics, playing one has given him an empathetic window into the challenges of the profession. Chief among these, in his opinion, is holding onto one’s ideals, maintaining an integrity and passion for the “invaluable” art of William Hazlitt, Kenneth Tynan and George Bernard Shaw, particularly in an age that demands that everything be boiled down to a sound bite. “It’s a great tradition, criticism, but it’s under the threat of debasement all the time,” he says. “You’re constantly being told, ‘Everybody has the attention span of a gnat,’ and things get corrupted. Nobody comes into the business doing that. We all come in with smiles, prepared to do our best.” Even Goering, adds Cox, was at one time just an ambitious German patriot who was out to right the wrongs of the heavy reparations exacted on his country after the defeat of World War I. One could argue, he says, that the crimes against humanity for which Goering was responsible, along with his fellow Nazis, were committed more out of political expediency than by design.

“We’re all capable of it, closing our eyes to what we don’t want to see, not owning up to the responsibility of our actions and those of others committed on our behalf because we have too much invested in it, power, material wealth, ambition,” he says. “That’s true today, in Serbia, in Africa, as it was then in Nazi Germany. And, remember, after the war, there were suddenly no Nazis. Nobody was a Nazi. You couldn’t find a single one in the streets of Berlin.”

Cox says that the previous day’s filming of “Nuremberg” was one of the most emotionally wrenching experience of his career. He shot a scene replicating events at the original trial that called for repeated viewing of the vintage newsreel footage of the Nazi atrocities that George Stevens filmed following the Allied liberation of the camps.

Shooting had to be halted because the cast and crew were so overcome by the footage that they had to leave the set.

“It was pretty frightening, pretty scary,” Cox says. “At the original trial, after the footage was shown, Goering’s response was: ‘Oh, we were having such a wonderful afternoon, laughing with lots of jokes about [high-ranking Nazi] Ribbentrop being such a klutz, and then they showed that awful film. And it ruined the afternoon.’ That’s even scarier.”

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The strata of moral concern that run through many of Cox’s roles appear to be a measure of the man himself. Director Lindsay Anderson, who cast him as a miner’s son in his 1974 film “In Celebration,” once observed of Cox, “It’s taken Brian a long time to find himself. His work has always had a strong moral quality and a Celtic streak. And he has another quality: the courage to explore his emotions. That’s rare for a British actor.”

At first, Cox admits, that moral backbone lay in an uneven alliance with his strong ambitions. He is the youngest of five children born to a hemp worker/shop owner and his wife--a lower-middle-class Scotch-Irish Catholic couple who struggled to provide for their family. The children were all natural performers, and his father, a boisterous and exuberant fellow who was the youngest of 13, cajoled Brian to do Al Jolson impersonations. “An actor was the only thing I ever wanted to be,” Cox says.

His father died when the future actor was only 10, and it increasingly fell to him to help take care of his mother, who was creative and dynamic but emotionally unstable. At one point, Cox returned home to find her with her head in the oven in an apparent suicide attempt. Cox feels that her emotional problems were due in part to the suppression of her creative desires, which had to be subjugated in order to concentrate on raising a family. “It was, again, another instance of doing what you felt you should do, instead of what your heart told you,” he says. He has not forgotten this lesson about the cost of deferring your dreams.

Growing up in Dundee, Scotland, Cox’s heroes were not Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud, but rather James Dean, Marlon Brando, Spencer Tracy and the brooding, socially minded American films of the 1950s, such as “On the Waterfront” and “East of Eden.” He discovered their British equivalent in 1960 when, as a 14-year-old, he saw Albert Finney in “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,” a raw, working-class melodrama that resonated with his own environs. “I knew I had within me this darkness, this imperative of the soul, but I had to find an outlet for it,” he says. “Part of it stems from the British class system, of being put in your place. I knew that was wrong.”

By the time he matured, however, British cinema and contemporary drama had moved on from the socialist-minded aesthetic of such works as John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger” to a hipper sensibility. The actor, who still describes himself as “something of an old-fashioned socialist,” was caught in a time warp. “You know what the ‘60s were for me?” he jokes. “It was going into a booth to change into a pair of velvet trousers that split right down the middle. I was no Mick Jagger.”

Cox threw himself into classical theater; after training at London’s Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, he worked regularly in rep in Britain, achieving a breakthrough in “Titus,” collecting accolades for his take-no-prisoners contemporary approach to Shakespeare’s tale of political intrigue and folly. He was 40 at the time and able to find black humor in the tragedy--”a man who has his daughter raped and his sons murdered and yet it’s also funny,” he says. “I like that when ludicrousness comes to the fore.”

Not too long after, having been spotted by casting director Bonnie Timmerman in the Public Theatre production of “Rat in the Skull,” Cox got the role of Hannibal Lecter in “Manhunter,” four years before the aesthete cannibal would become a vehicle to Oscar glory for Anthony Hopkins in the film of the novel’s sequel, “The Silence of the Lambs.” Cox is characteristically philosophical about not being tapped to reprise the part. “No way could I be disappointed,” he said. “It gave me a profile and one has to be grateful for that.”

More substantial roles have been coming his way of late; he’s particularly proud of the upcoming release of “The Minus Man,” in which he co-stars with Mercedes Ruehl as an unhappily married and self-abusive alcoholic who unwittingly befriends a serial killer (Owen Wilson). He also stars in “Mad About Mambo” as the owner of an Irish soccer team, and he recently completed another starring role, that of a single father in hock to the mob in “Salt Water,” the debut film for playwright McPherson.

After returning to London this fall to star in McPherson’s new play, “Dublin Carol,” at the Royal Court, Cox hopes to begin preparations for his film directorial debut, a work about a British painter who travels to France in the early 20th century and becomes the protege of a flamboyant French artist. The hectic schedule is a continuation of the peripatetic, gypsy lifestyle Cox has long bemoaned--it was one of the main reasons for the breakup of a marriage, from which he has two grown children, including Alan Cox, a 28-year-old actor. But he feels helpless to do anything about the traveling, at least in the short term. He currently is involved with a Berlin-based actress, Nicole Asari; he has homes in London and Los Angeles, although he is about to relinquish the latter.

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Though he once described living in Los Angeles as “swimming in blancmange” (referring to the custard-like dessert), he says that he loves the city, the beauty of the Santa Monica Mountains, even the social rituals that he finds somewhat primitive. “It’s like a series of tepees, with various tribes and hunting grounds,” he says.

And though there is not much wampum in it, Cox saves most of his affection for L.A. theater. “I find the people who work in theater there, people like Joe Stern [artistic director of the Matrix] and Andy Robinson, a director and great friend, very committed,” he says. “Ironically, I’d given up theater when I moved out there. I wanted to do movies. And then I did ‘Skylight’ at the Taper, and I thought, ‘Wow, this is great.’ When you do London theater, you get jaded. But Los Angeles audiences are terrific, a bit naive and enthusiastic. I love audiences that don’t know quite how to behave.”

While Cox seems to be taking particular pleasure in being a “late bloomer” in his career, he says that he’s also learning to let go of the ambition that has led him to some dead ends in his life. “Ambition is a thing that ‘o’erleaps itself and falls on the other side,’ ” he says, quoting that Scottish play. “I see it with a lot of American actors I’ve worked with, this intense pressure to always be on top.

“A wonderful old friend of mine, Fulton McKay, who played the old tramp in the Bill Forsythe film ‘Local Hero,’ used to always tell me, ‘Brian, why are you worried about being a star? Just be a good actor. Say your prayers and be a good actor.’

“It’s the best advice anyone ever gave me.”

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“St. Nicholas,” Matrix Theatre, 7657 Melrose Ave. Today and next Sunday, 7 p.m.; Wednesday-Saturday, 8 p.m. Ends next Sunday. $22.50. (323) 852-1445.