Jeremy Davies - interview with actor - Cover Story - Interview

Interview, August, 1997 by Graham Fuller

Some actors go off with a bang, ethers just fizzle. Jeremy Davies doesn't so much explode as implode in two upcoming movies that will make people realize what a scorching talent he is

Jeremy Davies, the actor who was so indelible getting it on with his room in 1994's Spanking the Monkey, appears to devastating effect in two more independent movies scheduled to open next month. In Mark Pellington's Going All the Way, adapted by Dan Wakefield from his novel, Davies is the randy, self-conscious, mother-smothered ex-GI Sonny Burns - not so much a performance as a multitextured hymn to sexual humiliation. Then, in John Patrick Kelley's The Locusts, he plays the emotionally crippled Flyboy, a farmyard runt who is almost literally emasculated by his man-eating more (Kate Capshaw). What is it about Davies and mothers?

To put it one way, the Oedipus complex has had no keener screen ambassador. To put it another, Davies is a fledgling master whose fragmented, often hesitant delivery lends itself perfectly to the '90s cinema of familial dysfunction. Indeed, Davies is so naturally adept at the tacit expression of various neuroses that he can be discomfiting to watch - he comes too close to what some of us sometimes see in the mirror. He could, I think, be as great as Montgomery Clift, to whom a female admirer compares the whippet-thin Flyboy in The Locusts.

Davies is not yet fashionable, either in terms of media interest or demeanor. It was a very serious young man in a plain white shirt and plain gray pants who met me in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont hotel in Hollywood, just prior to his departure for England to act in Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. He looked like he needed a square meal - he looked like he needed mothering - but all he required was tomato soup and coffee to help him through his first major interview.

GRAHAM FULLER: What can you share with me about your upbringing?

JEREMY DAVIES: Actually, the only thing I'm comfortable saying is that I feel like I'm from everywhere - I'm from America. I grew up mostly in isolation and had a really peripatetic youth. There 're many pockets of America that have echoes for me. But beyond stating that, which is fairly dull, I don't really want to get into my family and all that.

GF: HOW did you wind up in L.A.?

JD: I just came here after high school and went to acting school. I guess I didn't know what to expect, and in the end it didn't really fulfill anything for me. If I know anything about what I wanted then, it's that I had a true desire to work hard. I never really considered myself anything other than a civilian actor. I'd grown up without TV, largely, and I'd never been struck by any films or film stars that really shook loose a desire in me to chase something similar. I didn't entertain thoughts that I would get any special opportunities, and I didn't feel like I deserved any kind of special path.

GF: Why did you choose acting in the first place? Did someone indicate that you were good at it?

JD: There was no one person who lit my skyrocket. But I've always been interested in interpreting behavior. I've been around complex people where it was very necessary to do that to survive, not that I had any extremely harsh circumstances. So I think that was the first invitation, the first developmental drive.

GF: Why did you pick acting, though, and not another means of self-expression?

JD: I don't know. The best I can come up with is that I stumbled into it. It's a fluke, really. When you're younger, you inevitably experience the indifference of the world to your life, and you have all those suffocating, philosophical thoughts. That's how I feel today, finding myself here and thinking about the legions of talented actors who aren't working. So I'm grateful to be succeeding in a small way at what I'm doing, but I can't say what my driving impetus was. I just came out willing to take whatever was offered to me. Guncrazy [1992] was my first film, and I came across that by the same route as every other actor banging on the sidewalk.

GF: Since then, the films you've given yourself to - I'm thinking specifically of Spanking the Monkey and The Locusts, as well as Going All the Way - have been-extremely intense studies of young men in. crisis. What's drawn you to them?

JD: I've never really held onto something that made me think, This doctrine will work for me. But if I look back on the projects I've been lucky enough to be involved with, I can say that I'm instinctually drawn to complexity more than anything else. And I find that in the vast array of scripts that I read and films that I see, there's no allowance for complexity in the writing. What I'm drawn to most in a character are not the words he says, which is all you see in black and white on the page, but everything that surrounds the words, that fits in between and aside from them: the stutterings, the stumblings, the eloquence of the silences, the communication that goes on - or doesn't go on - onscreen. In most cases, I would much rather watch an actor communicating with the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth senses, and communicating something he can't actually articulate. And the last thing an actor can use to do that is words. I also like good characters who do horrible things and bad characters who do beautiful things. I don't see that very much, especially in the popular, commercial part of this business.