Jack's back
A mob boss in "The Departed," he's about to become one of the departed in "The Bucket List"
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. In "The Bucket List," Jack Nicholson - the apotheosis of American virility - is dying of cancer. His head is shaved for a brain scan. He retches violently while kneeling in front of the toilet. He's so tired he can't reach the TV remote right next to him.
Perhaps because of a hospital stay of his own just before filming, Nicholson really does look sick in the movie: pasty and puffy and - despite his character's being a billionaire hospital administrator - heartbreakingly constrained. But by playing a rich and powerful man refusing to go gently into that good night, Nicholson seems to be participating in a speculative meditation on how we as an audience and a culture will feel when Nicholson himself dies.
In a Beverly Hills hotel suite recently, Nicholson, 70, was sprightly and bright-eyed, trim and somehow glowing, as if to remind everyone that what they were seeing onscreen was only a movie.
"I didn't think I could look bad enough," Nicholson said. "I normally train for a part, physically, but I didn't have the energy. I mean, I wanted to be, like, a regular cancer guy, and I just couldn't do it. I couldn't get myself real skinny."
"The Bucket List" follows Nicholson and costar Morgan Freeman around the world as they try to cram a lifetime of accomplishments into the few months they have left as terminal cancer patients. The title comes from the list Freeman keeps of all the things he wants to do before he kicks the bucket.
Initially, Nicholson talked of everything but the film.
Twiddling a toothpick, he discussed solar electricity and George McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign, legalizing pot and "the end of social life" (thanks, AIDS). Ruminating on these world-according-to-Jack topics, he was animated, charismatic, and at moments, charmingly obtuse. It was as if he were reprising some long-lost intellectual rebel who had ended up on the cutting-room floor in the '70s.
The youthful, familiar figure Nicholson cut in person was at odds with the puffy-faced, sick man he plays in the film. What was it like to face such a weakened countenance each morning?
"It's acting - you've got to let the character talk to you . . . I had a tougher time [looking in the mirror] with 'About Schmidt' because I'd wake up every morning - I could still see the mirror - and I got myself into this state, and I thought, 'What if this don't go away?' I mean, am I gonna be like this forever?" Unlike the skydiving tycoon he plays in "The Bucket List," Nicholson's character in "About Schmidt" was a regular guy, unceremoniously retired.
Nicholson's recent hospitalization provided him with some of the truest moments in the film. " 'I can't reach the goddamn toilet! I gotta buzz somebody? I'd rather piss my pants! Whatever you do, don't give me the morphine while I'm asleep.' All those things [in the movie] came from the mundane, 'Why is my blood pressure so important that I'm trying to get any sleep and you're now waking me up.' . . . Like anything, you think a certain thing, but when you're in the situation, it's very different." Nicholson seemed glad to have all that hospital stuff - both real and Hollywood - behind him as he ducked out of the interview to catch his son's high school football game.
As he stood up to leave, he put on his sunglasses and morphed into the Jack we're used to seeing in publicity photos - all Joker smile and obscured eyes - and it struck me how intimate things had seemed when he was without them. Glasses on, his posture straightened into that preening peacock stance. Which is the real Jack: the charming, masked sorcerer or the surprisingly introspective guy who'd been reminiscing about the hospital just a moment before?
When I spoke to Nicholson a few days later, on the phone, he was in a contemplative, sunglasses-off mood. His voice was spent from days of junketing and he seemed to be stifling a cough. I asked him whether his son's team had won their football game and he told me they'd lost. He seemed very proud of his role as an active father. When I posed the inevitable what's-on-your-bucket-list question, he replied by saying, "I'd like to live long enough to see my children get rolling, you know?"
Did his own recent reality check, courtesy of that hospital stay, help him channel the vulnerability necessary to play a dying man? Instead he said, "The easiest preparation for vulnerability is to be able to look someone in the eye and say, 'I love you.' And you're immediately vulnerable." Speaking slowly and deliberately over the phone, his voice weak and gravelly from interview overload, he sounded intense, and sincere. Where was the Nicholson we're used to? The manic imp who was always kidding around? The rascal portrayed in the press? "I just want to make a good interview sometimes, and . . . the press just gets rollin'. If anybody were as wild as what I imagine they think I am, I don't know that I'd even be around!" he said.
So why does the public want to paint him as a Casanova, instead of someone more sensitive? "Well that's partially my own doing. You know, we used to say, 'Well, at least it's good for business.' Some things, or most things, have some basis in truth . . ."
We have a perception of Nicholson as someone who shoots from the hip, whose persona is defined by spontaneity, but in talking to him I got a sense of his deliberateness. It's not so much that he doesn't care what people think, it's that he wants people to think he doesn't care what they think. Nicholson knows how to manipulate his message.
"Certainly I've had an entertaining life . . . I mean, I don't want to start saying I've lived like a church mouse. But you wind up having to live with everything you ever say in public." And for Nicholson, maybe that hasn't always been living with the truth, per se. "I don't like to repeat myself too much. [Fashion doyenne] Diana Vreeland told me . . . 'Jack, I want to give you some advice. You are going to have to lie.' 'What do you mean I have to lie?' 'Well, I imagine that over the course of your life, you are going to be doing a lot of interviews. And if you continually repeat the truth, you'll become bored with your life.' "
It's true that no interviewer ever seems to feel they've figured Nicholson out. And that must be exactly how he wants it - he's too shrewd an actor not to know how he's coming across in real life. "Sometimes it's hard to look at the reflection you create. But most of the time it's pretty good. You never hear me furious about the press, certainly not related to me. Any interview, as you know, can destroy somebody, and I think they've given me a pretty fair shake over the years."
Then he mentioned doing something he regretted recently. A journalist at a press conference had upset him by asking what his next project was before inquiring about the movie he was there to promote. "And I know better than to go off like that, but I went off on the poor man and I wake up two days later with my mother in my ear saying, 'What if he had a disfigurement under that hat, Jack? You're not always right, Jack. What if that was the case?' You know, she never stops talking to me . . . 'Don't blow your own horn!' That's my precaution before any time I get into a series of press discussions."
By now, most Nicholson fans know that the woman he refers to as his mother was actually his grandmother, a fact he claims went unrevealed until after her death (the woman he knew as an older sister was his birth mother). He credits his ease with women, both on- and offscreen, to growing up around his mother's beauty salon: "I was an early learner at the feet of these ladies who raised me."
One can imagine a miniature Jack mesmerizing a roomful of women in dryer bonnets. Perhaps he began wearing shades to titillate and defend against early fans?
"I wear them, obviously, for the sun - they're all prescription glasses . . . I certainly don't wear them at home. I wear them primarily as a defense against flashbulbs . . . It's a habitual thing . . . and it might look strange to you, but when you're lit a lot, you have to protect your eyes against it. It takes energy away."
As Nicholson tried to justify his sunglasses, he could tell I wasn't convinced. The sunglasses still seemed like brilliant spin, a literal barrier between an unknowable actor and the public desperate to understand him. "[At junkets] they would just run photographers through . . . and they would say, 'We want to see your eyes,' and I said, 'Well, they'll know who it is,' and then it's more distinctive in some ways, than photographing the eyes."
In Nicholson's case, this is true. 