A taste for the weird and wonderful

Actor James Spader stars in Steven Shainberg's sado-masochistic Secretary

Innocent-looking and attractive, James Spader is that strange cat who strives on swarmy, nearly creepy roles, yet still manages to retain that leading-man image. Hardly a box-office sensation because of his predilection for offbeat characters, Spader nevertheless remains a household name.
"It's weird, isn't it?," he agrees while in Toronto recently to promote Steven Shainberg's Secretary. "I'm always amazed when people recognize me, but it's never a 'star' thing. It always startles me in the way that I think it always seems to startle them. And that is when you find yourself in a rather remote locale, and you are in a gas station or convenience store, and I walk in there and it's in the middle of nowhere and that person last night will look at me with a look of befuddlement mixed with shock and confusion, and say 'Are you Jim Spader?', and I'll say 'Yes,' and they'll say 'I just saw you in a movie last night.' And that always strikes me as strange."
Spader cites an experience he had recently while driving to visit a friend in Virginia. "This teeny little coffee shop off the side of the highway in this postage stamp sized town, literally just a gas station with a coffee shop, and I was in this place, and I was eating a sandwich and it was raining out. I was wearing a raincoat and I hadn't shaved in a week or something," recounts the actor. "So I got up out of my seat, and I'm walking towards the door and there's a woman standing there with her kids and she's looking at me with this look of shock in her face. And I walk by her and she says 'I just saw you in a movie last night!' She looked so shocked and startled and sort of afraid. That I found strange."
Indeed, especially considering what film the poor woman had seen the night before. Perhaps it was Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies and videotape where Spader played the sexually impotent outsider who disrupts the life of a young Southern lawyer, his wife and her sister; or Less Than Zero where he plays the lowlife rich kid who forces Robert Downey, Jr., to prostitute himself for drugs; or White Palace where's he's a yuppie widower who falls for an older woman; or perhaps David Cronenberg's sexually charged Crash where he plays a man obsessed with death. The list can go on, but you get the picture.
So what is it with the weird roles, I ask.
"I don't know," smiles the youthful 42 year-old. "I'm just interested in doing them. I don't know why that is. I think that people are interested in certain things, and I guess I'm interested in this sort of thing."
There's no denying that in the past Spader has turned down roles in films that have been both critical and box-office successes. "I know," he admits. "Very often they send me things, and whether or not they offer it to me, and they turn out to be hits, I'm still not interested in them. Sometimes it's a rather substantial piece of work that others are interested in, but I'm just not, because I just can't find my way in that. Something like this I can find my way in."
This being Secretary, a quirky tale about a mousy young woman, Lee (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal) recently released from a mental hospital that finds employment as a secretary with a morose lawyer (Spader). Soon the relationship transforms into a sado-masochistic one, which both Lee and her boss find ultimately liberating.
"I'm embarrassed to say that the first time the script came around, I turned it down right away because I didn't read it," admits Spader. "They sent it to me about six months before they wanted to shoot it and they didn't have any money. And I was broke at the time which is often the way it is with me. So I couldn't afford to commit to doing the film six months in advance if that had that much of a budget. So I said no without even reading it. And then three months later, my agent called up said 'There's this script and they said you passed on it, and I can't believe that you would pass on this material which seems just your sort of thing.' By that time I had got another film that I could fit in that would make it financially possible that I could do it. So I read it, and I did it."
Famously private - he's married with two children - Spader divulges very little of his non-screen life. Yet one wonders how his personal life is affected by his racy roles, particularly this one where he spanks his co-star.
"It's all acting," he says. "The only things I find uncomfortable to do are scenes that are some way approximating my life. Anything that is clearly delineated from my own life is just fine for me. But as soon as it starts to approximate in any way something that is too close to my life, I'm not interested in sharing. And I'm not willing to compromise or trade on or exploit anything that's really truly dear to me, my own life, for the sake of a film. I find it amazing when I see other actors share something that is so intimate to them and so dear to them and that lives in the deepest part of their heart and soul, and they're sharing them with an audience. Sometimes that's easy for them, but the fact that they're able to do that, or willing to do that, I'm really surprised."
So the question begs to be asked: What roles will he take?
"Well, they have to contain a series of things," he answers in his very monotone, soft voice. "Sometimes it's a matter of timing. Sometimes I feel I got to get back to work because I've got to pay the mortgage, and that doesn't mean that I take just the best paying gig that's around. That means that, given the choice, I won't be working at that time, but given that I have to then I'll look for the most interesting and curious piece of material available that there happens to be. Sometimes it's interesting, and sometimes it's something that comes along that you look at it and say 'I wish I could find a way to be able to do this,' and you really do try. But when I look back at the films that I've done, they've never been the sort of things where I've heard about the film or somebody told me about it, and I've pursued it. It's never been like that. It's always been just a sort of turn of fate."


Secretary is currently playing in local cinemas.

Publication Date: 2002-09-22
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=1771