In order to make someone like that make an impression, I think you have to be really specific about his interior life, in a way that has its own merit. There’s no exposition about him in a big way. We don’t hear very much or know any specifics of his life as far as what had brought him to this point of living in an apartment without anything; it's just sort of subtly referred to.
I think you have to be specific. You can really help yourself out a lot by building his life in a really specific way. I don’t know how else you could do it. If you don’t, then it just becomes sort of a general mopey guy and it loses its energy in a weird way. That can get really tiresome really quick, I think, if he didn’t have a journey to make in the film. That was the acting that was the challenge of the piece.
How do you think this character learns so much from someone he meets so briefly? What is it about these two that you saw as the connection?
I think it’s his coming back to life through the transformational energy of love. I think as he’s explaining the world to her and the wonders, and he's maybe experiencing it from her point of view. He kind of remembers how alive he was at one point. Just maybe in an unspoken way she reminds him of what it is to be alive and the joy of it, and the wonder of it.
What do you think happens to your character a month down the road from where the movie leaves him?
(Laughing) I don’t know. It’s an interesting question. That’s a tough moment. As you get older you kind of realize that you can make decisions about the way you read certain events in your life. If you're really present, you can have a lucid moment where you say, "I can take this event and have it destroy me or I can take this event and have it empower me." It’s a discipline.
The only way that I can imagine that Lee isn’t just completely eviscerated from finding this news out... It was something that we talked a lot about like, "I don’t know, man. How can this guy go on after this?" I think that he actually goes on to begin again. He paints his apartment, he buys furniture, in this balance of how he carries his grief. It’s a participation in life instead of it being this deadening experience. "The joyful participation in the sorrows of the living," as Joseph Campbell said.
Do you see him falling in love again?
I hope so. I'd like to think so.
Given the choice of playing either of the two lead male characters, was the husband character something that interested you at all or were you always attracted to the role of Lee?
For me, I kind of like the Lee character. I definitely see what’s appealing about the husband. I felt like that’s something I have a more immediate handle on, you know, playing that type of a role. The more challenging thing for me at this point in my career was the Lee role, the sort of stoic man-type that has a sadness and stillness in him that was, for me, more of a challenge - although the husband role spoke to me more clearly right off the page in a weird way. But I immediately said, "This is the part for me - this 'Lee.'"
