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Christian, how did it feel being the villain of the piece?
Christian Slater: “Wasn't there a guy named Sirhan Sirhan? (laughs). Why am I the villain? I don't get it. I mean that's the bad guy… I'm the evil bastard. Demi Moore's a vicious drunk. Bill Macy's a womanizing cheating bastard, and I'm the villain… Yes, I tackled the race issue there. I got the script — no, no, I got the call from Emilio when I was in London and he told me about the people that were involved in the movie and what the subject matter was, and I signed on prior to reading the script. ‘Where do I show up?’”
Freddy Rodriguez: “He didn't know what an a-hole he was going to be.”
Christian Slater: “Yeah, then I got the script and went, ‘Oh, s**t.’ But I was reading the character, I'm going along, ‘Okay, he's a rough guy, he's a rough guy,’ and then there was that scene, the baseball scene, the radio moment, and having that scene in the movie actually helped to make the character a lot more human. I liked that there was that arc.
To bring it back to Bobby Kennedy, I think Bobby Kennedy was a powerful enough man that he was able to raise the level of education. Even the other characters that are in the movie, a character like mine is able to grow and a bridge is able to be built eventually. People are able to see each other as human to human at some point in the film. I thought that was really important.”
How do you convey the racial issue without making it seem stereotypical?
Christian Slater: “It's certainly helpful getting to know myself more so I'm able to differentiate who I am and what the character is that I'm playing. That helps. And the exciting thing about getting to be an actor is that you get to put on somebody else's clothes and get into somebody else's mentality. I think the richness of the script, really, and the looseness of Emilio's direction. That really helped to make things feel very relaxed and human and not stifled.
For me, I come on the set and everything's very intense and very heavy. Everyone's excited doing this movie about Bobby Kennedy, and Sharon Stone is very intense, and they're all whoop de do, la di da. My character was certainly much more… You know, I was a human guy, a product of that time, and someone who had a job to do. I wanted every available person to be there.”
