From 'Wall Street' winner to suburban Costco 'King'
First the news for anyone who doesn’t read the trades: Gordon Gekko is returning. Yes. The bad boy from ‘‘Wall Street’’ will be back, probably in 2009, in ‘‘Money Never Sleeps.’’ In the new iteration, he gets out of prison only to start stomping on business ethics with brio all over again.
Welcome back, Gordo.
This will also be a reprise for Michael Douglas, who won an Oscar as Gekko in 1987. Douglas, who turns 63 Tuesday, jumped at this project but not much else. (His second wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones, turns 38 the same day.) It takes a lot to pry him from his home in Bermuda, where he has lived for nine years with Zeta-Jones and their two young kids.
Douglas was in town earlier this month to do a dog and pony show with his father, Kirk, now almost 91, at the national AARP convention. He looked good for a Hollywood elder. Trim in a gray suit against a green shirt open at the collar. Soft chocolate suede wingtips. Hair thinner than in Gekko days but still good, brushed back in a rinse in a whiter shade of pale. Healthy living and oodles of dough do that to you.
He also sat down to promote his latest movie, ‘‘King of California,’’ which opens Friday. In it, he plays a crazy man named Charlie who believes there’s Spanish treasure under a Costco store in suburban LA. (And why not?)
Douglas hasn’t done crazy before. D-Fens, his character in ‘‘Falling Down’’ (1993) snapped and went psycho over the daily horrors of life, but he was not flat-out coco-loco to begin with. Crazy looked good to Douglas, which drew him to this low-budget affair.
‘‘ ‘King of California’ was a great part — the Man of La Mancha, Don Quixote story,’’ he said. ‘‘It was fresh and innocent only in the way a Mike Cahill, first-time director/writer can do before you get beaten down.’’
It also includes the astonishing Evan Rachel Wood, about whom Douglas noted, ‘‘She’s a great actress. I still can’t get over while doing the picture she was with Jamie Bell and getting her first apartment. Next thing I know she’s with Marilyn Manson.’’
A little Charlie goes a long way. He is modestly likable and seriously irritating. When you think of Douglas on screen, though, you think of a remote, unpleasant man in a bespoke suit whom the audience either passively dislikes or actively despises. Think ‘‘Wall Street,’’ ‘‘Fatal Attraction’’ (1987), or ‘‘The Game’’ (1997), for starters. There is, then, a Michael Douglas movie?
‘‘Yes. I would say there is,’’ he said. ‘‘I’ve had more success as an unsympathetic character. I like those roles where the audience did not have a whole big reason to care about you in the beginning of the movie, and by the end you’ve won them over or they care about you.
‘‘In movies like ‘Falling Down,’ even ‘Fatal Attraction’ — to win over the audience as an adulterer was a challenge,’’ he adds. (‘‘How could you cheat on Anne Archer?’’ he mused.) ‘‘These are uphill battles where you’re flying without a net. To be totally in areas that are awkward and pull it off.’’
Douglas has had a weird career. He was a prince of Hollywood, a second-generation star who, like Peter Fonda, had a problematic relationship with his famous father.
If it was ‘‘Easy Rider’’ that freed Fonda from his father’s shadow, it was the double smash of ‘‘Wall Street’’ and ‘‘Fatal Attraction’’ in the same year — boffo by anyone’s standards — that liberated Douglas. He said that enmity between father and son was far less of a problem than Kirk’s absence.
‘‘He was in 80 movies by the time he was 70 years old — that’s something like four or five pictures a year,’’ said Douglas. ‘‘He was overwhelmed with work. He split with my mother and became a guilt-ridden father. He wasn’t there. And trying to make such an effort when he was there, it was tense. So when he speaks in terms that we didn’t get along, it’s not that we didn’t get along. He just wasn’t there.’’
But the younger Douglas has also done very well on his own: best picture Oscar for producing ‘‘One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest’’ (1975), best actor Oscar in ‘‘Wall Street.’’ He said, ‘‘I won the Oscar, but to get nominated by your acting peers in the academy meant a lot to me personally because when you’re second generation, there’s a lot not to like.
‘‘In my head, it gave me the confidence to step out of the shadow, but our relationship changed more dramatically when Kirk had his helicopter crash in 1991,’’ he added. ‘‘He had a lot of big questions to ask: ‘Why did these people die in the crash and I’m alive?’ ’’
Gordon Gekko was not all that hard a character to play, says Douglas, in part because he wasn’t carrying the picture. ‘‘Charlie Sheen was carrying the picture,’’ he said. ‘‘Sheen was the story, a great character. Gekko is like the ‘Basic Instinct’ [1992] character of Sharon Stone. I’m carrying the movie but she’s got a great part.’’
Douglas is also a rare Hollywood animal: actor/producer. ‘‘The only other time someone got Oscars for actor and producer was Laurence Olivier in ‘‘Hamlet,’’ he noted proudly.
Usually an actor moves to the other side of the camera as director. Douglas directed some episodes of the hit TV series ‘‘The Streets of San Francisco,’’ but it never took. ‘‘I’m a little lazy. It’s very lonely. Since I’ve been producing and have shared the final cut almost always with the director, I’ve never felt frustrated. Most of the time, I’ve been comfortable with that collaborative vision.’’
He’s had his share of hits, made lots of dough and apparently invested it well. Money, he notes, is what determines the fate of an aging actor. ‘‘A lot of it is financially driven, and if you’re lucky or fortunate enough to have had a career and plan properly, you don’t have to work for financial reasons.’’
Today, he’s a United Nations Messenger of Peace, along with the likes of Elie Wiesel, Yo-Yo Ma, Jane Goodall, and the late Luciano Pavarotti. His issue is nuclear nonproliferation, and he lobbies on behalf of the cause to everything that moves. The AARP invitation was appealing for the opportunity it afforded him to make his antinuke spiel.
Douglas chose Bermuda in part because his mother comes from the island and he spent time there as a child. There is still a lot of family there, so when he and Zeta-Jones were looking for a place far from the madding crowd to raise their kids, it looked perfect. ‘‘It’s paparazzi-free,’’ he said.
He is now in a world where the quotidian demands of life fill his days. Which means driving offspring to school, working out, playing some golf, doing a little business in the afternoon when Hollywood is in gear with Bermuda time, picking up offspring, that’s it. He’ll take a film project every now and then.
‘‘My priorities are different now,’’ he said. ‘‘When in the first part of my career, there was no question of career versus family. It’s not a business I think you can balance well. You’re gone for months. That’s your choice. Getting married again, having kids — you don’t take it for granted. You cherish and protect it.’’
Among Hollywood elders, he has never attracted the attention or affection of, say, Jack Nicholson. For starters, he’s not in Nicholson’s league as an actor or presence. For another, he’s laid low. And then he flew the coop ages ago. He hasn’t lived in Hollywood for 25 years.
He clearly likes it that way. Douglas performed at AARP and then lit out for home again. The flight to Bermuda is a mere hour and 40 minutes — and, more important, four time zones from LA.
Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com. 