Taking the lead, onscreen
To the rest of America, Richard Jenkins is a talented character actor with everyman versatility, imperfect skin, and a long, vaguely familiar resume.
Probably best known as the wryly haunting patriarch on HBO's "Six Feet Under," and with more than 70 films and television shows to his credit, he's suddenly getting media attention for making his big-screen leading-man debut in "The Visitor," writer-director Tom McCarthy's follow-up to the critically acclaimed "The Station Agent."
The film opens tomorrow in the Boston area. But to most New Englanders, especially those fortunate enough to have witnessed the talents of Providence's Trinity Repertory Com pany in the 1970s and early '80s, Jenkins has long been a star.
"I've done it onstage for years," acknowledged the actor who cut his teeth headlining productions of everything from "Ethan Frome" and "The Iceman Cometh" to lesser-known triumphs like Nikolai Erdman's "The Suicide." He also served as Trinity Rep's artistic director from 1990 to 1994. So it's amusing to read article after article trumpeting this latest career benchmark.
"They all have a sense of surprise, don't you find that?" the 60-year-old entertainer said with a laugh during a recent Boston interview. " 'He's really the lead! Amazing!' "
Yet there doesn't seem to be any offense taken. Jenkins, who has lived quietly in Rhode Island for the last 38 years (his wife, Sharon, still choreographs for Trinity Rep), understands that he has neither the pedigree nor the presence of a typical Hollywood leading man. In fact, he banks on it.
"I'm an actor, that's what I am," he said emphatically. "I can fit into a crowd, so people don't stop and scream, 'It's Al Pacino!' . . . That really is an advantage when you're filming."
He added that he's been fortunate to work with "great people on great projects." (The list includes "Hannah and Her Sisters," "Outside Providence," "North Country," and the Coen brothers' upcoming "Burn After Reading.") "And on top of all that, I get this," he said.
"This," a.k.a. "The Visitor," is a modest, sometimes humorous drama that - similar to "The Station Agent" - brings together a trio of disparate characters unknowingly in desperate need of each other. Jenkins plays a widowed Connecticut professor who drops into his standby New York flat one night, only to find that a young couple has been renting the place from a scam artist. Instead of having them arrested, the burned-out academic befriends his naive squatters - a Syrian jazz drummer (Haaz Sleiman) and a Senegalese jewelry maker (Danai Gurira) - who then get a chance to teach him about passion, playing the djembe, and post-9/11 immigration policies. As Jenkins's soft-spoken character fights to keep one of his new friends from being deported, his own world opens wider than the camera lens.
Interviewed alongside Jenkins, McCarthy explains that he conceived "The Visitor" after taking "The Station Agent" to Beirut as part of a State Department outreach program. There he saw a new generation of young people who were "furiously attacking the arts," which seemed like perfect fodder for a character-driven film about enthusiasm and contemporary culture clash.
A fortuitous LA encounter and subsequent dinner with Jenkins (the two share the same agent) prompted him to write the professor part "with his voice in my head," said the 39-year-old filmmaker and sometime actor (see the TV show "The Wire"). "It was him and Gene Hackman. They have a similar way about them."
Jenkins chuckled.
"Before I read something I always go: 'Well, that's Robert Duvall; I don't know why I'm even bothering,' " he quipped.
Then he turned slightly more serious.
"Really, when I read it I thought it was an amazing role," he said. "And I thought: Well, they are going to offer it to Gene Hackman first, probably; then they'll come to me. But Tom said 'No, I want you to do this.' So I said OK."
McCarthy, a Boston College graduate whose parents grew up in Rhode Island, claims he wasn't aiming low or indulging some regional bias.
"I like characters who have a unique texture and quality; someone that you might, at first glance, pass by," he said. "There's a very short list of people of Richard's age and type who can carry that off. This is why he can afford to live in Rhode Island and have people come after him."
Not only was Jenkins the perfect type and inscrutable blend for this role; he also turned out to be a natural on the skins. From somewhere deep inside he summoned five years of drum lessons that hadn't been tapped much since his youth, and by the end of the movie you see him banging out a beat that's skilled and spirited enough to make a Manhattan subway rider sit up and take notice.
Only none did, even with the cameras rolling. McCarthy says passersby never broke stride during four weeks of filming.
Guess he picked the right leading man for the job.
Janice Page can be reached at jpage@globe.com. 