The Icon GQ+A: Robert Duvall

Everett Collection

What qualities of your mother do you have?

I don’t know… Maybe a certain kind of strength, certain kind of being opinionated too much, sometimes. She was like that too: opinionated sometimes.

The other quote about acting I came across—when you played [the Nazi SS officer and Holocaust organizer] Adolf Eichmann in The Man Who Captured Eichmann, you said, “The key to playing anyone is to find the contradictions inside them — that even Eichmann loved his family.”

Oh yeah. Yeah.

If someone were to play Robert Duvall, what contradictions would you advise them to locate?

Contradictions? I don’t know. I have to think about that. Well, you get idealistic in one way and then you go the other way, you know.

Cynical?

You don’t follow your instincts.

What’s your best instinct?

I don’t know, things like picking what I want to do. Sometimes I go against those instincts and people talk me back into it. I didn’t want to do this thing [The Judge] with Robert Downey, Jr. at all.

Why not?

The character. He’s an incontinent guy, shit all over himself, had cancer. And then I was talked into it. And sometimes when I go back a second time, it goes better.

Who’s your oldest friend?

Well, one of my oldest friends went behind my back once, so I won’t get into that. My oldest friends are, I don’t know, my wife, my new wife. We do a lot together. So we’re very close friends. Yeah. So I don’t have a lot of friends outside the family. The smallest family circle.

The one of you and your wife?

Yeah.

But, like, who’s known you the longest in your life?

The longest in my life… oh, I guess my brother, but he’s in Milwaukee; he’s getting old and senile. So, I don’t know, who really knows me? My wife knows me well. She knows me as well as anybody, I guess.

Yeah. You’re familiar with Citizen Kane, of course—

Citizen Kane?

You know—Rosebud, the sled.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen that movie. It’s a very well-made movie. A lot of the old movies I don’t like much.

Why not?

I just don’t like them.

What do you consider an old movie?

The Searchers I don’t care for.

Why not?

Because it’s not acting. Except for John Wayne.

Really?

And Monument Valley’s not west Texas.

Right. Do you like Montgomery Clift as an actor? Red River?

To a point. Not nearly as good as Brando, for me. Not even close. But I think the young actors now are better than ever.

Who among the new—

Oh, there are a lot. I never saw Montgomery Clift come close to what Matthew McConaughey did in this movie.

Dallas Buyers Club?

Great. Great. And there are others, you know. Many others. Because the field is open now. Black actors, Spanish actors… I mean, it’s an open field now.

Yeah. What did you learn from Brando?

I’ll tell you exactly what I learned. I did The Chase with him. He was sitting there on the couch, mumbling and they said “You’re on, action.” They said “cut,” he went back to mumbling. There was no beginning. It was all the same. Here, acting, action, cut, there. It was all him, extended.

So life and work were all one.

Yes. Yes. It was great to watch that, yeah.

There’s that line that you have in The Godfather which I think is one of the best lines you’ve ever delivered, “Why do you hurt me, Michael? I’ve always been loyal to you.”

Yeah that was Godfather 2, wasn’t it?

Yeah.

I believe, yeah. I forget that, yeah, that’s right.

Can you say that line for me?

I don’t remember it.

Remember, when he says, “I need a wartime consigliere.” And he says, “You’re out, Tom.”

He said what?

He says, “You’re out, Tom.”

“You’re out, Tom. Why do you hurt me, Michael?”

And you say, “I’ve always been loyal to you.”

“I’ve always been loyal”—oh yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a beautifully made movie, but the second day of Godfather, this guy—he was a makeup guy—came in, and said, “This guy’s playing a kindly old uncle.” So there wasn’t any real mafia in there, you know? Yeah, so, they were beautifully made movies, the first two, but I don’t know if you ever get that sense of, these aren’t great guys. And they’re capable of stabbing each other in the back.

Well, when you were playing Tom Hagen, how did you come to that character?

My friend Louis Concertina lived in East Harlem, where Carmine Tramunti was one of the five families in Manhattan. He talked about this one guy who used to go around and hold his chair for him, light his cigarette for him, get food for him. Like a gofer. Like the secret service. And I said, “Yeah, I’m in the position of a gofer, but you better not—anybody—make light of that.” So that’s kind of what I was, like a professional gofer to Brando.

Is there a memory, a recurring memory from your childhood?

Not so much. Not so much.

No? I ask because when I talked to Hackman, he told me this story about—you probably heard it—when he was out playing in the street and he saw his father drive by and wave. And he said, “That was the last time I saw my father.”

He never saw him again?

No.

His mother burned up in a house, didn’t she?

Yeah. And his father just walked out on the family.

Wow. He always had a lot of the guilt, you know, when he was married to his first wife, Faye. Leaving, you know, he had guilt.

He had guilt leaving his first wife?

I think so. I would never discuss that with him. When I sent him an email, he never got back to me. But we were always good friends, way back. I busted my pelvis on a horse, was laid up, and he offered me his last $300, which I didn’t take. He was good like that.

Did you and Hackman room together? Or, you and Hoffman…

Hoffman, me, my brother, three or four other actors and singers had a place on 107th and Broadway in Manhattan, uptown. About a year or so. But Hackman pal-ed around, because he knew Dusty—he introduced me to Dusty when Dusty moved here.

In one of the interviews I read with you, you talked about being an actor back then, and a friend of yours said being an actor was the greatest leg-opening job in the world. Did you have a go-to pick-up line?

It was so stupid of me, and it didn’t work. We’d just fid up our apartment, and, I’d say, “Come up to our apartment, we just put new linoleum on the floor!” I think Dusty quoted that recently. He got more women than anybody, Dustin Hoffman. More than anybody. I had one floor, he had the other, and I came down one day and he had a naked girl up on the table. He had told her he was a painter; he was painting. Funny.

Are you still in touch with him?

No. I should, but it’s a strange business. England is different, everything is close. English actors stay in touch. But this country is so big. People here, there. And once you make it, it’s kind of a fickle—it’s strange. You work together and then, yeah.

Yeah.

But, if I would see him—somebody gave his number to call, I’m going to call him—you pick up right where you left off years ago. Me and Hackman are the same way. But, you know, I haven’t seen Dustin. We have different worlds. Different worlds.

From what I’ve read about you, you seem to be more of an individual, maybe even a loner. I mean, you weren’t in that party scene back in L.A. in the ’70s. You stood apart.

Yeah. Well, no. I like a good Hollywood party. But, you know, we live in Virginia. Periodically, we go to L.A. I have more friends in L.A. than back East actually. But, you know, you can dip it in the boat. You can dip into all that. I kind of have my own world. But I always liked hobbies. A young actor once said to me, “What did you do between jobs when you were young, go nuts?” I said, “Hobbies, hobbies, more hobbies keeps you off the dope.”

Do you consider yourself a loner?

No. No, everybody’s just got so many friends. I go to a function with all these friends; I say, “I don’t have this many friends.” Yeah, me and my wife are both loners, kind of. She’s cut off from Argentina. She doesn’t like Argentina; that’s where she’s from. I like Buenos Aires a lot. I just do, something about it. I told Giuliani, “You keep New York; I take Buenos Aires.”

Who would you really love to work with?

Who do I want to work with now?

Yeah.

I’ve tried that before; it didn’t work out.

What do you mean?

Well, you want to work with some actor and it doesn’t work out. But I don’t know who I want to work with now. I’ll find somebody.

Of the seven deadly sins, which do you think is the worst?

I don’t even know the seven.

Lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, pride.

I guess I can be convicted of all of those. All of them. I weigh two hundred pounds. I should be, like, one eighty-five. I eat too much… Always crazy thoughts go through your head: thoughts of wrath, here and there. Wrath over certain directors.

Which ones?

Oh, there have been a few. There have been a few. But you know, they always say, “Actors are difficult to work with.” Well, directors are difficult to work with.