Reluctant star

William Hurt, co-star of Into the Wild. (Evan Agostini/Getty Images)

After the microphone is clipped to William Hurt’s fleece vest, he asks whether I’ll be able to hear my own questions on the tape later. “I don’t matter in this equation,” I joke. He looks me in the eye and thunders: “You matter to me!”

Ah yes, William Hurt is an egalitarian: I had forgotten that he has told people who congratulate him on a performance to go thank the lighting guy.

Hurt, despite a reputation for being a difficult interview, is actually a very alert and gentle personality up close. Perhaps he’s tamed today by exhaustion — he was up late the night before shooting The Incredible Hulk with Edward Norton, which is being filmed in Toronto. Despite the sleeplessness, he’s agreed to do interviews for Into the Wild, which is premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival.

“If it gets the film some attention, then I don’t mind this,” he says, motioning toward the publicists and the line of journalists outside the door, and sounding like a man who minds a little.

Into the Wild is the Sean Penn-directed adaptation of the eponymous John Krakauer non-fiction bestseller. The man who went “into the wild,” as he wrote on a postcard to a friend in 1992, was Chris McCandless, a wealthy 24-year-old from suburban Washington, D.C., who fixated on an ascetic, romantic fantasy of America. After college, McCandless donated $25,000 US in savings to Oxfam, burned his cash and vanished from his family and old friends. He spent a few years trekking across the country as a “leather tramp” (by foot, rather than the vehicular “rubber tramps”). In spring, 1992, he took his final, much-anticipated trip into the Alaskan wild. Months later, McCandless’s 65-pound corpse was found, wasted from starvation, in the back of an abandoned bus. Underlined and well-thumbed books by Thoreau and Jack London were stacked near his sleeping bag.

In the film, McCandless — who called himself Alexander Supertramp — is played with overflowing sweetness by Emile Hirsch. Hirsch gives him a fatal naïveté; he was a young man on a picaresque journey determined to redefine the parameters of happiness handed to him. What he wants to escape is embodied in his father, played by Hurt. Walt McCandless is emotionally remote and wealthy, with some family secrets that, in part, spur Chris McCandless to flee, essentially divorcing the parents he came to see as hypocrites. After years grieving their missing child, his death is a second loss, and the depths of their mourning are made vivid in an image of Hurt as Walt collapsing in the middle of his clean, leafy street, legs splayed in front of him like a child, moaning.

Walt McCandless (William Hurt, centre left) and his wife Billie (Marcia Gay Harden) watch their son graduate from college in Into the Wild. (Paramount Vantage)

“I had great qualms about playing a man who was living,” Hurt said. “I’ve never met Walt McCandless and I never will. But I can live with it because I did not see him as a villain and I did not play him as such. Anyone who is a parent knows the complexity of that role.”

The film’s sympathy for the abandoned parents may be in part because Hurt has three children; director Penn, who also wrote the script, has two.

One wonders how Hurt and Penn, two legendarily mercurial actors, might work together, and whether their matching intensity would lead to full-out war.

“It was fantastic,” Hurt says. “Sean had the intelligence not to put himself in the film, which is always a terrible idea.”

Can an actor tell when a director is also an actor? “Only in that he is very sensitive. He allows for the sensitive choices, the thoughtful choices.” 

Penn, who has been very public with his anti-Bush views, might have been expected to make a film that directly addresses America’s presence in Iraq for his first outing as a director since the war started. But even without any head-on war critique, Into the Wild is a comment on the U.S., a film about escaping contemporary corruptions for an ideal America, one of sublime landscapes and a varied and complicated people. McCandless’s obsessions — freedom, liberty, the pursuit of happiness — are, however messily, central to America’s efforts abroad; that McCandless believed they were hardly available to America’s own citizens at home is the dark irony of Into the Wild. 

“The film is about an escape from a particular, highly neurotic corner of America, but not all of America is depicted in the film, of course,” Hurt says. “But it’s true that America is in the throes of a great paradigm shift, as [historian Arnold J.] Toynbee predicted. He said that about 200 years into the experiment, the first flush would be gone, and the bloom is off the rose in America. There is much civilization to escape.”

Hurt, who is 57, is known for throwing such casually cerebral bombs; at one point in our brief conversation he sketches out the history of man’s evolution from fish to human, naming brain parts. This kind of personality is not so common in Hollywood. After reluctantly moving from stage to screen in the mid-’80s, Hurt earned three back-to-back Oscar nominations, winning in 1986 for playing a gay inmate in a South American prison in Kiss of the Spider Woman. He was one of the biggest stars in the world, but he could never abide his celebrity.

“Celebrity is a pathological sickness of the culture. Narcissists on screen being consumed by narcissists off-screen,” he says.

When Hurt’s star was brightest, he vanished from Hollywood for a while, retreating to the stage and art-house films (with the occasional obscenely commercial diversion, such as Lost in Space). But the global obsession with celebrity has seen a manifold increase in the decades since Hurt began his career.

“It affects you as an actor because when you walk in to a room, eyes are on you. It looks like schools of fish.” He wiggles his fingers and leans forward, eyes bugging. “After enough years, you have the confidence to stare back. But the mendacity of it is you start to believe it, that somehow you are the centre of the room, of the universe, somehow you are not equal to the people around you, or to the people you portray. And then how do you work?”

For the past few years, Hurt has eschewed his leading man status for a series of supporting roles in films such as The Good Shepherd and the A History of Violence, for which he earned his fourth Oscar nomination as a Philly gangster. These parts, like the devastated father in Into the Wild, seem to suit Hurt better than his headlining Broadcast News days; he has described himself as a “character actor in a leading man’s body.”

Just don’t call the parts “small.”

“They’re not small parts,” he says. “They’re all part of the same heartbeat. They’re beats in the same piece, the same big heart, the art.”

Hurt himself has taken a few Chris McCandless-type journeys in his life. After dropping out of Julliard in 1975, he read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and drove a motorcycle to Ashland, Ore., where he joined the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

“On that trip, I learned to cry and drive a motorcycle at the same time. That’s a very important skill,” he says, smiling. “There have been lots of those kinds of journeys in my life, though I like going by canoe best.”

For all his hesitation about the industry around his work, Hurt has never escaped from acting entirely. Does he still love it?

“I love it more than ever,” he says. “And I think that’s because I was so blessed to have parents who gave me a good education. I have a way of synthesizing. That’s what I would encourage any young person to do: take in the ideas, the conflicts, and the world. Watch and listen and live before you go public.”

Into the Wild screens Sept. 11 at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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