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| John C Reilly: 'I have a strong female side' | John C Reilly: 'I have a strong female side' |
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| In the course of a career spanning 26 years and 70-plus performances, John C Reilly has learned when to stand out and when to blend in. There he is tucked away at the back in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? Here he comes heading up Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and scene stealing in Boogie Nights and Magnolia. Today, in Cannes, it’s a stand-out day. Reilly arrives at the festival rocking a three-piece cream suit, matching fedora and a cane with a wooden duck’s head for a handle (“I’m fine. It’s for show.”). He works the carpet and dazzles the press. In person, he’s laidback and thoughtful. For the cameras, he’s a star. | In the course of a career spanning 26 years and 70-plus performances, John C Reilly has learned when to stand out and when to blend in. There he is tucked away at the back in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? Here he comes heading up Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and scene stealing in Boogie Nights and Magnolia. Today, in Cannes, it’s a stand-out day. Reilly arrives at the festival rocking a three-piece cream suit, matching fedora and a cane with a wooden duck’s head for a handle (“I’m fine. It’s for show.”). He works the carpet and dazzles the press. In person, he’s laidback and thoughtful. For the cameras, he’s a star. |
| With a career as long and varied as Reilly’s, there are films you forget and films you shout about. He’s in Cannes supporting two – Tale of Tales and The Lobster – worth a holler. The latter, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, is set in a near-future where being single is illegal. The lonely have 45 days to get themselves together before they’re turned into an animal of their choosing. Reilly plays the Lisping Man, sweetly yet awkwardly sidling up to other singletons in the hope of avoiding life as a parrot. He plays it clever, never letting his character’s nerviness become too wearing. As ever, you root for him. You want that perch left vacant. | With a career as long and varied as Reilly’s, there are films you forget and films you shout about. He’s in Cannes supporting two – Tale of Tales and The Lobster – worth a holler. The latter, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, is set in a near-future where being single is illegal. The lonely have 45 days to get themselves together before they’re turned into an animal of their choosing. Reilly plays the Lisping Man, sweetly yet awkwardly sidling up to other singletons in the hope of avoiding life as a parrot. He plays it clever, never letting his character’s nerviness become too wearing. As ever, you root for him. You want that perch left vacant. |
| His Tales of Tales role is less meaty. Matteo Garrone’s film, based on a collection of stories by 16th-century Neapolitan scholar Giambattista Basile, is a lush and creepy fairytale portmanteau. It has Salma Hayek chowing on the heart of a sea monster and Toby Jones falling in love with a flea. Reilly plays Hayek’s husband, the king who retrieves her hideous snack. It’s a quickie role: you wish he’d been allowed to stick around longer. Still, he’s always been great at lending slight parts weight. He enjoys world-building, even for a character with a gnat-like half-life. | His Tales of Tales role is less meaty. Matteo Garrone’s film, based on a collection of stories by 16th-century Neapolitan scholar Giambattista Basile, is a lush and creepy fairytale portmanteau. It has Salma Hayek chowing on the heart of a sea monster and Toby Jones falling in love with a flea. Reilly plays Hayek’s husband, the king who retrieves her hideous snack. It’s a quickie role: you wish he’d been allowed to stick around longer. Still, he’s always been great at lending slight parts weight. He enjoys world-building, even for a character with a gnat-like half-life. |
| When you improvise, it's like opening the tap: out comes what you're interested in or afraid of or obsessed with | When you improvise, it's like opening the tap: out comes what you're interested in or afraid of or obsessed with |
| “I used to play this game with my kids: give me an object and a place and a person,” he says. “I’d take these ideas from the air as they said them and pretend to eat them. And then I’d pretend to regurgitate – bleurgh! ‘Once upon a time ...’ A lot of times when you improvise like that, it’s just like opening the tap: out comes what you’re interested in or afraid of or obsessed with or attracted to. That’s the most profound thing you can say about fairy tales: they’re a manifestation of the human subconscious.” | “I used to play this game with my kids: give me an object and a place and a person,” he says. “I’d take these ideas from the air as they said them and pretend to eat them. And then I’d pretend to regurgitate – bleurgh! ‘Once upon a time ...’ A lot of times when you improvise like that, it’s just like opening the tap: out comes what you’re interested in or afraid of or obsessed with or attracted to. That’s the most profound thing you can say about fairy tales: they’re a manifestation of the human subconscious.” |
| Reilly was born the fifth of six in a family with Irish and Scottish heritage. A stage actor from the age of eight, after theatre school he made his film debut in Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War, playing one of a group of Vietnam grunts accused of rape. His part got bumped up when De Palma recast after filming started. He’s said the experience reminds him that nothing in movies is set in stone. So he’s kept adaptable – popping up in studio comedies (Step Brothers, vying for alpha man-child status with Will Ferrell) and arthouse totems (Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line). | Reilly was born the fifth of six in a family with Irish and Scottish heritage. A stage actor from the age of eight, after theatre school he made his film debut in Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War, playing one of a group of Vietnam grunts accused of rape. His part got bumped up when De Palma recast after filming started. He’s said the experience reminds him that nothing in movies is set in stone. So he’s kept adaptable – popping up in studio comedies (Step Brothers, vying for alpha man-child status with Will Ferrell) and arthouse totems (Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line). |
| Related: The Lobster review - dark satire on relationships gets fishy near the tail-end | |
| In a musical skit at the 2007 Oscars, he told Jack Black and Ferrell how the comedians could gain respect from their peers. “You can have your cake and eat it too, just look at my career!” he sings. “Mix it up and Oscar shall be yours.” Well, almost. He got a best supporting actor nomination for Chicago, where he plays a genial sadsack who falls to bits after he’s implicated in a murder. Oscar or no, Reilly’s consistently excellent at expressing disappointment on camera. His characters are always hoping for more before being dealt considerably less. | In a musical skit at the 2007 Oscars, he told Jack Black and Ferrell how the comedians could gain respect from their peers. “You can have your cake and eat it too, just look at my career!” he sings. “Mix it up and Oscar shall be yours.” Well, almost. He got a best supporting actor nomination for Chicago, where he plays a genial sadsack who falls to bits after he’s implicated in a murder. Oscar or no, Reilly’s consistently excellent at expressing disappointment on camera. His characters are always hoping for more before being dealt considerably less. |
| He’s never been big on heaping meaning on to his roles: “All of this armchair intellectualising really has nothing to do with an actor’s job.” He says he works on “basic human stuff”. His looks can switch from sourface to sweetie in a second. You realise pretty quickly if he doesn’t like a question, his eyes vanish behind an imposing slab of frown. Directors use this to pull a bait-and-switch on the audience. | |
| He’s superb in Boogie Nights because he gives porn star Reed Rothchild a guileless naivety. In Magnolia, also written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, he’s an LA cop, but he’s really a softie, looking for love and fretting that losing his gun might drive a new girlfriend away. It was Boogie Nights and Magnolia that drew director Lynne Ramsay to Reilly. She cast him as a father blind to his son’s murderous impulses in We Need to Talk About Kevin, her adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s bestseller (Reilly is godfather to her daughter). | |
| “He wanted to work with me at the same time that I was thinking I wanted to work with him,” says Ramsay. “So it was just serendipity that we got together. He’s a warm, funny guy – a natural comedian. But he’s got a dark side. He was playing a difficult part in my film. I was a real dorky part. In a way you wanted to hate him. But he really put himself out there.” | “He wanted to work with me at the same time that I was thinking I wanted to work with him,” says Ramsay. “So it was just serendipity that we got together. He’s a warm, funny guy – a natural comedian. But he’s got a dark side. He was playing a difficult part in my film. I was a real dorky part. In a way you wanted to hate him. But he really put himself out there.” |
| Tale of Tales, Garrone’s English language debut, spins stories of lusty kings, women obsessed with beauty and an ogre who’s idea of courtship is offering his beloved a human leg. The archetypes are ancient, but the female characters are unusually rich. Women are given agency and nuance in two of the film’s three story strands. A couple of days after we meet, Reilly’s co-star Salma Hayek will take part in a Variety panel on women in film-making. She’ll argue that Hollywood is undermining women’s intelligence. “They don’t see us as a powerful economic force,” she said. “It’s incredible ignorance.” | Tale of Tales, Garrone’s English language debut, spins stories of lusty kings, women obsessed with beauty and an ogre who’s idea of courtship is offering his beloved a human leg. The archetypes are ancient, but the female characters are unusually rich. Women are given agency and nuance in two of the film’s three story strands. A couple of days after we meet, Reilly’s co-star Salma Hayek will take part in a Variety panel on women in film-making. She’ll argue that Hollywood is undermining women’s intelligence. “They don’t see us as a powerful economic force,” she said. “It’s incredible ignorance.” |
| It's amazing that we haven't embraced the truth that women's movies make a ton of money | It's amazing that we haven't embraced the truth that women's movies make a ton of money |
| Reilly agrees: “It’s amazing that we haven’t embraced the truth that womens’ movies make a ton of money. But it’s a dark view to say that the men in charge of Hollywood want only male stories and want to keep women down. That sounds too organised. It’s much more chaotic than that, much more market-driven. | Reilly agrees: “It’s amazing that we haven’t embraced the truth that womens’ movies make a ton of money. But it’s a dark view to say that the men in charge of Hollywood want only male stories and want to keep women down. That sounds too organised. It’s much more chaotic than that, much more market-driven. |
| “At the core of everything that’s wrong with the world – everything that’s imbalanced and every conflict – is an inability to balance between male and female energy,” he says. “Extremist religions are based very much on supressing one gender and boosting another. I think if we could all recognise the fact that there’s male and female in all of us then there might be more balance in the world. More stories about women would be part of that.” | “At the core of everything that’s wrong with the world – everything that’s imbalanced and every conflict – is an inability to balance between male and female energy,” he says. “Extremist religions are based very much on supressing one gender and boosting another. I think if we could all recognise the fact that there’s male and female in all of us then there might be more balance in the world. More stories about women would be part of that.” |
| His own male-female balance is “pretty 50:50”, he says. “I may look like this hulking Irish galoot, but I have a strong female side.” He calls himself a romantic and an appreciator of beauty, defining romanticism as “falling in love with things or people – appreciating the more poetic aspects of life and the beautiful essence of things”. What was the last beautiful thing he fell in love with? “Léa Seydoux. She’s not a thing, but ...” | His own male-female balance is “pretty 50:50”, he says. “I may look like this hulking Irish galoot, but I have a strong female side.” He calls himself a romantic and an appreciator of beauty, defining romanticism as “falling in love with things or people – appreciating the more poetic aspects of life and the beautiful essence of things”. What was the last beautiful thing he fell in love with? “Léa Seydoux. She’s not a thing, but ...” |
| Related: Tale of Tales review: monarch of the gran | |
| Hollywood’s getting interesting for stars like Reilly. He’s a character actor from a generation who thrived in a mid-budget ecosystem that’s declining. That means developing a career outside movies (he plays bluegrass with his band, John C Reilly & Friends), and popping up in weird, fun stuff like his Adult Swim series Check It Out! With Dr Steve Brule, a spoof guide to living from a damaged life coach. For films these days, he likes to look further afield – to Europe and directors like Lanthimos and Garrone – for parts that grab him. The goal is to plug into something that lasts. | |
| “I think there’s a lot of nothing out there,” he says. “There’s a lot of volume, but a lot of it’s nothing. It’s like we have a Snapchat consciousness. Stuff appears and you instantly forget it. I’m more interested in the stuff that stays with you. | “I think there’s a lot of nothing out there,” he says. “There’s a lot of volume, but a lot of it’s nothing. It’s like we have a Snapchat consciousness. Stuff appears and you instantly forget it. I’m more interested in the stuff that stays with you. |
| “Some things are eternal. Sometimes you hear a song one time and you immediately memorise the melody and it never leaves you. Why is that? There’s something alchemical about it. If you put these notes in this order people respond to it. I find that comforting. There are some definite things. Not everything is open to interpretation, there are some things that are elemental.” | “Some things are eternal. Sometimes you hear a song one time and you immediately memorise the melody and it never leaves you. Why is that? There’s something alchemical about it. If you put these notes in this order people respond to it. I find that comforting. There are some definite things. Not everything is open to interpretation, there are some things that are elemental.” |
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