from "Caught in the Act" ----------------------------- Caught in the Act / New York Actors Face to Face (published in 1986) Lenny Von Dohlen grew up in the tiny Texas town of Goliad, not far from the Mexican boirder, where his father was a Ford dealer who owned a racetrack on the side. Lenny had his heart set on being a jockey until he turned fourteen, at which point he was much too tall at six feet. His fixation then turned to becoming an actor. The first order of business was shaking his accent. He started by sending away for a record of John Gielgud reading The Ages of Man, which he played obsessively in his room and imitated at the dinner table - "Pahss the salt." Naturally, when he made his movie debut, the first thing he had to do was greet Robert Duvall with a good ol' Southern "Hah!" as the country-rock bandleader in Tender Mercies, a role he got by lying to screenwriter Horton Foote and swearing, "I used to go listen to Willie Nelson when he had a crewcut, man." His foghorn bass voice and bay-blue eyes match Lenny's "Yessir/Nosir" Southern-gentlemanly manners, but there's something unexpectedly searching in his attitude toward his work as an actor. When we met, the twenty-six-year-old actor had most recently appeared onstage as British playwright Joe Orton in Terence Feely's The Team in New Haven, and he'd just finished shooting Billy Galvin with Karl Malden in Boston. Throughout the interview, Lenny smoked incessantly, until he was lighting each new cigarette from the butt of the old one. My first acting teachers ever were these two Polish women at the University of Texas, who I thought were very glamorous. They'd moved from Warsaw and were living in Austin, Texas, this college town, exuding this incredible energy and hope and this wonderful sense of truth. One of them had worked with Grotowski. They were very good for me, except that (as one of them said) Poles thrive on suffering. There was this sense of "Oh, what we've been through! And we're here to tell you about it." Now, I'm an obedient sponge, and I'll absorb anything around me, and I did not need to absorb any more of that notion that an artist needs to suffer. Before I realized that maybe these women from Poland weren't the great messiahs, I would hear these stories about catastrophic things that happened to people, or I'd walk on Fifty-seventh Street and see some atrocity, and I'd give full rein to my feelings. It's that pain we all feel momentarily when we see something or hear something, but I'd drag it out. It had a lot to do with where I grew up. For a long time, I wanted to be black. Then I wanted to be Jewish. Actually, I didn't want to be black, I wanted to be a black woman. I thought they were particularly soulful. Enviable, somehow. They knew something that made them purer and wiser than I was and closer to God and goodness. Anyway, these two women left at the end of the year to go to different schools. I was unhappy with school, so I was going to go to New York. And this one teacher said [Polish accent], "Lenny, if you go to New York now, it's like throwing a sheep to the wolves." She was probably right. I would have been a baby, and I might have gotten eaten up in the teen market. She recommended this small liberal-arts college in Denver, which allowed me to do classics, work hard, learn my craft. I met an Indian woman there in the dance department - all these exotic women in my life! - who taught musical theater and stage movement. I played Romeo at eighteen, which I had no business doing, considering my experience. I had all the passion, I knew what this guy was goin' through, and I though I got it right a couple of nights because I got an erection in the balcony scene. I thought, "This is it, man! Forget Grotowski, Stanislavsky, whatever - I've got the proof." But I didn't know anything about voice projection, and my body wasn't projecting - well...[He looks down at his lap.] After she saw my Romeo, this American Indian mystic said two words to me: "Jump rope." I looked at her like she was nuts. What she was saying was, "You can have all the feelings in the world, but if your body doesn't communicate what you're trying to say with your heart - on a stage, or anywhere - then you're sunk." Are you a vain person? Yes. When you do movies and see yourself, you want to be true and good and be the part and all that, but then you also want to be attractive. I did a lot of research for Electric Dreams, went around to all these architectural firms and got the idea of wearing the bow tie and glasses from watching a Cary Grant movie. All that was part of building a character, but I was aware that it was also me hiding. Because subconsciously I knew it wasn't War and Peace, and it wasn't going to be Mean Streets. It was not going to do anybody any harm, but it was fluff. I was getting paid a lot of money, and I was going to do it with as much charm and finesse as possible. But at the same time, maybe I could hide behind these glasses while I did it. So there's less of you involved? Yeah. And it's braver to be more you. Beau Bridges was directing this TV movie called Don't Touch, and he wanted me to play this child molester. I was very encouraged by the fact that it was the first part I ever got offered without having to audition, but it alarmed me that he wanted me for this particular role. An instinct I had was to make him a little bit off. There was a guy I knew growing up in Goliad who everyone was a little frightened of 'cause they thought he might be a child molester. He wore his pants way up around his waist, and he would walk real goofy. You definitely knew there was something peculiar about this guy. So I thought that's what I'll do, I'll play him. Then I realized that the brave thing to do, the right thing to do - and the reason Beau wanted me, I found out - was for me to play myself, because this fellow in the story had to be perfectly likable and unsuspicious, even though he did these terrible things with this little girl. So that was a pretty brave thing, to open yourself up to that. I listened to that Bruce Springsteen song a lot - you know, "Hey, little girl, is your daddy home?" My parents recorded that movie on their VCR, and the thing that's kind of weird is that my younger brother has two little girls, four and two. They always watch me when I'm on TV or in the movies, but for some reason with this thing, I guess because they saw Bubba (that's what they call me) playing with this little girl and they didn't know the implications of the story, they watched it over and over and over. I said, "Mother, how could you let those kids watch that?" I didn't even want them to watch it once, much less over and over and over. She said, "Because they cried when it was over and they wanted to see Bubba." I said, "Oh, God, that's not good. Mm-mm." ----------------------------- BACK