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In the spring of 2005 Bill Irwin will star along with Kathleen Turner in a revival of Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" at the Longacre Theatre.
GREAT PERFORMANCES: How do you define yourself?
Bill Irwin: I love to think that I'm an actor first and foremost. That may have to do with any number of axe-grinding issues -- desire to prove myself as an actor; also the knowledge that I need to now work more as an actor than as a highly physical comic. But for long stretches of my life, I defined myself as a clown or an actor-clown or writer-clown. Acting was some of my first training and first craft. And I'm not sure I'm as relentless a clown as you finally need to be in that craft. A lot of comics have a warrior mentality that is different than mine. My tendency, my habit, is to think of serving the cause over a long period of time rather than living or dying in any given moment.
GP: How and when did you decide to become a physical performer?
BI: It's very hard at this stage to say why I chose physical comedy, because as my body ages, it wants less and less to fling itself about. I want an easy way to get up and do something. It's hard to remember, but when I was young, physical comedy was easier than other things -- sort of more natural. I wish I could go back there in lots of ways. There came a point, sometime I guess during my university years, that I began to think, it isn't just an acting script that somebody hands me that interests me -- but something else took primacy, and that's physical characterization. I went from thinking about being cast in something someone else was directing, to creating a thing that was mine and uniquely mine and that had physical language as its primary thing.
GP: What does getting a laugh mean to you?
BI: I made a very conscious choice to explore a craft where laughter was the currency -- and like any currency, it can become debased or worshipped for its own sake. You can say all kinds of things about it. But it is -- it's the basic chip that is played. If you work in comedy and people come and they never laugh once, that's lack of success, you know. [The director] Mike Nichols once said to me, "The thing about a laugh is, if you're doing something and there's a laugh, at least you know you didn't make the dumbest choice." Do I agree with him on that? I'm not sure I totally do. But that's one of the powerful things about a laugh: you know it was an idea put forth and an idea received. It may have been received wrongly, it may have been misunderstood, but it's like somebody waving back at you. You wave and they wave back. Okay, that was a completed process.
GP: A lot of people say that your work is so original because you're not afraid to take a risk. Do you think that's true?
BI: To hear somebody say, "You, Bill, are somebody who seems unable not to take risks, you seem to need to take risks" -- I find that flattering and reassuring and like a pat on the head. I'm never quite sure it's true from my point of view, and as soon as you perceive something as a risk, it may not be so risky anymore. And sometimes people will say, "Whoo. You're very brave." I wonder -- are they trying to find something nice to say? You know, like, "It didn't work at all and you were very brave to try it."
GP: When you would watch [Charlie] Chaplin, [Buster] Keaton, and [Harold] Lloyd films as you were forming your own persona as a clown, what were you hoping to learn? What were you looking for?
BI: It's interesting -- some people see Chaplin and want to do a Chaplin imitation. There's a whole realm of Chaplin impersonators. I guess I had some flimsy notion of my own character, not that I could define what that was, but I think I tended to watch those guys and take dilemmas that I could use. Interestingly, now, in trying to talk about Chaplin and invoke him as an icon, I've tried to imitate him. In "The Harlequin Studies" or other places, I've tried to do a quick Chaplin imitation, so it's come around to needing to imitate him, his actual character, in order to try to say something about something that's driving me.
Interview for GREAT PERFORMANCES conducted in May 2004.
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