It’s an interesting question, you know? I don’t know. It’s the chicken or the egg question. You look at society’s sociopaths, the general consensus is that they were neglected or almost completely neglected as children and they never learned how to form those human bonds and therefore they can flay you and eat your innards and then have a bowl of cereal and watch Saturday morning cartoons as if nothing happened. There’s no sense of right or wrong. There’s no sympathy, there’s no empathy, and there’s no sentiment. It has not roosted and never formed. Whether or not this is a biological deficiency or whether or not these people just never learned it – is it something that’s been learned or is it something that innately grows within you is a debatable question. But I think what’s fascinating about playing Frank is that here’s someone who is obviously a fully formed human being at one point, has had everything stripped away, and then can he rebuild himself? Will he be able to claw his way back into a sense of humanity and become interconnected and reestablish human relationships? His ability or inability to do that and his struggle to do that is what makes him fascinating to play and what, in my view, subverts the genre.
How do you prepare to play someone so full of rage?
It’s something I’m still trying to interpret.
You did all the physical training, but you still had to prepare mentally.
All that stuff, the physicality… The key part to me was through the physicality of the part. All the training, the pushing iron, was all a part of bringing Frank to life and that really helped with his world view and his mental state and what he valued. But how do you relate as an actor to something as incomprehensible as having your entire family wiped out? How do you do that? What do you draw on? Sure, it happens in life. It’s part of reality. People lose people, we lose things in our life as we’re constantly growing and changing. That’s what life is is change, and a lot of that is loss. It’s what you gain from that loss that makes life.
For me, I don’t know how this movie is going to be taken but I know this movie could not have been made five years ago. The incomprehensibility of Frank’s personal tragedy, the only chord that that strikes in my life is in a visceral way is when they flew those two planes into those two towers in New York City. The incomprehensibility of that act, the absolute devastation – the devastating impact that that had on us as a nation, that had on us as individuals, it really resonated with me in a way that I’m still trying to process. I think that we’re all still trying to process that. I think that we’re incapable of fully processing exactly what the implications of that were for us as a nation. Try to recall the feelings that you had on that day. It literally felt like the end of the world.
It did.
You’re right. We have time separating us from that event now, but that event forever changed us as a nation. In what ways, we don’t know, but we’re still feeling the impacts of it. That’s why we’re in Iraq right now. That’s why we made the choices that we made and we’ve done the things that we’ve done. The initial reaction as a country on all the radios, TVs, dinner table conversations, and in bars down the street was, “Let’s go get those dirty b**tards.” The sentiment was very strong and very real.
And very immediate.
And very immediate. Our reaction as a nation was very swift. We did go over there and we bombed the living hell out of them. The retribution was swift and hard. And then the guilt kicks in. “What did we do wrong? Have we been bullying around the world for so long that this is our just desserts? Or are we victims here of people who are jealous of what we have?” Questioning ourselves and asking when is enough enough. Have we punished them fully? Are we done punishing them or should we continue to punish them? Or, now that we’re done punishing them, we’re going to go punish these people over here. Do we want their oil or are we really trying to bring them democracy or do we just want to f**king kill some people? What is it? These questions are rolling around us as a nation. It’s affecting our economy. It’s affecting our jobs. It’s affecting our personal lives in ways that we don’t personally fully comprehend.
So, yeah, is it a social comment on what’s going on? Abso-f**king-lutely. It doesn’t have anything to do with sitting down on a Saturday night and enjoying “The Punisher.” But in a way, this movie would not have been made before those events.
PAGE 4: Tom Jane on an R Rating and Violence
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