Post by domenicaflor on Jul 4, 2005 11:50:04 GMT -5
Courtesy of BobbyG of http:\\www.vincentdonofriofans.com, we have the text of this new article from Australia's Women's Weekly. It appears that this interview was conducted over a month ago, before D'Onofrio's trip to Australia, but it has some very nice snippets including a fun outtake from the CI set and some cute commentary about his children from the obviously proud dad.
D.
******************
Australian Womens Weekly
July 2005
by Sharon Krum
Vincent D'Onofrio sheds his reclusive shell to tell The Weekly about his pain and passion and why he calls Australia home
A VERY PRIVATE DETECTIVE
As the darkly intense star of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Vincent D'Onofrio is a hit with fans and police. Sharon Krum finds a reluctant celebrity who would rather be with his children than at a Hollywood party.
"Quiet please, rolling ... action!" On command, Vincent D'Onofrio --- in the body of Detective Robert Goren in Network Ten's Law & Order: Criminal Intent --- charges into a dark New York City apartment, gun drawn. Immediately he spots a corpse, male, sprawled over a kitchen table. His eyes widen. He wants to touch it, but he won't, because as any good detective knows, procedure must always trump desire. First, he and his partner, Detective Alex Eames, have to don rubber gloves --- only then can they go to work. Vincent dons his seamlessly, but actress Kathryn Erbe's pair refuse to roll down her fingers. In fact, the more she yanks, the more they stick. Suddenly, smiles crawl across the faces of the two actors, then the pair bursts out laughing. Now the cameraman is laughing. Soon everyone on the set is.
"Cut! Let's do this again. And somebody fix the gloves please."
While a new pair of gloves is prepared for close-up, Vincent, 45, doesn't waste time chatting with the crew. He wanders off immediately to question a retired detective on set about the correct position for his gun, then the director of photography about camera angles. During another break, it's over to the director with a suggestion about dialog.
Watching this, you quickly realize two things. One, the questions could on forever, but for the director yelling "Action!" again. And two, Vincent D'Onofrio is definitely not the kind of actor who is content to show up and walk through his role.
He is as focused and hands on as his alter ego Robert Goren, the TV character, who for many has become an object of fascination and addiction.
The body-bending, the Einstein-level smarts and the inscrutable personal life and sex appeal, Robert Goren is what would result if Sherlock Holmes had movie-star looks, no inhibitions and lives in New York.
"From the beginning, I set it up with all the bending and idiosyncrasies, so it would leave the door open for me to go anywhere I want with Goren," Vincent explains. "For that he had to be larger than life."
So, given his intense manner between takes, it's interesting that later in his dressing room the actor is such a quiet, calm presence. Actually, it's not really his dressing room as much a family room. In one corner is a box of toys for when his son Elias, 5, comes to visit. Polaroid pictures of Elias and daughter Leila, 13, are taped to the wall. As we talk, he smokes cigarettes, a vice he clearly enjoys. Softly spoken and polite, he will, if you let him, talk all day about his children, whom he adores. He seems comfortable being interviewed today --- and later confesses that this is because he loves Australia --- yet normally Vincent is one of the most reluctant celebrities on earth. While many actors giddily go to the opening on an envelope, you don't see Vincent at Hollywood premieres, he doesn't schmooze on talk shows and you'll never find him photographed with Paris Hilton.
"I can't do it," he pleads, when asked why in this age of 24-hour celebrity, he doesn't play the game. "I'm not a star. I'm a character actor and always will be. I don't have the type of personality that could be out there, I just don't handle it well."
He takes a drag on his cigarette and continues. "Look, I am a single guy," he says, alluding to the fact he is recently divorced from wife Carin van der Donk, the mother of Elias. Vincent's relationship with English/Australian actress Greta Scacchi ended in 1993. "I don't want to end up being "the bachelor actor guy" at the Hollywood party. I do get in gossip columns. It happens, but I'll never put myself in a position to make it happen."
In person, Vincent is one seriously handsome guy. He's 193 cm, has brown eyes and his hair is graying, but he looks in great shape, though he begs to differ. Twice, in recent months, he has fainted on set, was taken to hospital and diagnosed with exhaustion. "I worked and worked 14-hour days until my body just gave out on me," he says.
Next season, Vincent is going to start splitting the show with actor Chris Noth (Mr Big from Sex & The City), shooting 11 instead of 22 episodes. "I;m really happy," Vincent says of his reduced schedule. "It will give me more time with my kids." When I tell him that Criminal Intent fans will mutiny over the news, he smiled sheepishly. "That would be flattering if they did. But I'm not going anywhere. I want everybody in Australia to know that this is going to keep me around longer."
When I mention the ferocity of his female fans' worship, he blushes and looked at the floor. "I only understand because I feel the same about women. I am attracted to women, I would hope that women are attracted to me and that's the way the world goes round. If they like the show, that means I'm doing my job, I'm telling the story right. I can't think about it any further than that."
Vincent was born in Brooklyn in 1959, but grew up in Hawaii and Florida after his parents divorced when he was nine. He describes himself as a shy boy who spent his sixth birthday party hiding under his bed. His father, Gene, ran a community theater and, by the time Vincent was a teenager, he was working with his father operating the stage lights and sound. Gene D'Onofrio introduced his son to legendary character actors Peter Sellers and Alec Guinness. After attending university in Colorado, Vincent went on to New York.
He studied acting at the American Stanislavsky Theater and Actors Studio. In 1983, he appeared on Broadway in "Open Admissions" and in his first film, the teen sex farce "The First Turn-On!".
Neither set the world on fire, but what happened next would. He was cast by Stanley Kubrick as Private Pyle, the fat boy who shoots his drill sergeant in "Full Metal Jacket". Vincent went on a 40,000 kilojoule-a-day diet for the role and put on 32 kg. It was worth it. Entertainment Weekly later listed it as one of the top 100 performances overlooked for an Academy Award. By 1988, he was starring with Julia Roberts and Lili Taylor in "Mystic Pizza", and staring stardom in the face. "The movie was a hit and this was when they were making all those brat-pack films. I had that choice, but I didn't want it."
Determined to be a character actor, he signed on for more dramatic roles: part of a love triangle with Julia Roberts and Campbell Scott in "Dying Young", the screenwriter murdered by Tim Robbins in "The Player", Orson Welles in "Ed Wood", Keanu Reeves' troubled brother in "Feeling Minnesota", the alien in "Men In Black", a killer in "The Cell" and the socially inept yet brilliant writer Robert Howard in "The Whole Wide World", with Renee Zellweger. Of Renee's 2003 Oscar speech, in which she thanked Vincent for teaching her how to work, he says, "I didn't see it live, I heard about it afterwards. She is a great girl, so it didn't surprise me. It's a little weird she did it in front of all those people. But it's cool."
By 2000, Vincent's ability to dissolve into his characters had earned him a reputation as a celluloid chameleon and made him the actor on Hollywood's speed dial. Film work was constant, he was creatively satisfied and a darling of the critics, so it's curious why, four years ago, he went into TV.
"I had no plans to, but Dick Wolf (Law & Order's creator) came to me with a show and I liked the fact it was storytelling, no soap, just crime drama. I had watched detective shows when I was a kid and loved them."
"He said, you can create Goren, you can build him from the ground up and that really appealed to me. So I made him weird, a little arrogant, too smart for his own good." Yet not so off-the-map that real detectives don't relate to him. In fact, they love Goren, often inviting Vincent to attend police functions as their guest of honor. He always goes --- "It's important to be gracious."
While Robert Goren is his baby, like any parent, Vincent admits he needs time out. "I get bored sometimes. Dick always said to me, out of 22 episodes, they're not always going to be interesting to me and that's what you live with when you do a show. But I enjoy Goren because he is constantly evolving. If I start to feel I get to know him, it would be over," he says.
Though he continued to view himself as a character actor, the reality is that TV has changed both Vincent and the public's perception of him. As a film actor, the public was not possessive about him. As Goren, he belongs to them. "Now I can't go around the corner to get milk without signing autographs," he says, but not bitterly. "It's fine. You have to be gracious", he repeats. "That's why more than ever I love going to Sydney. It's better there." Sydney is the place Vincent called home for three years in the early '90's, after meeting and falling in love with Greta Scacchi on the set of "Fires Within". They moved to Coogee in 1991 and had a daughter Leila one year later.
"I still consider Sydney a home," he says, smiling. "It's very nostalgic for me. My daughter was born there. At the time, I was working a bit, but mostly raising Leila, while Greta was doing theater."
"Sydney's such a great place --- the people are awesome, the weather is great, the heat doesn't bother me. I feel so comfortable there. Even though it's different now --- there were pictures taken of us at the beach every day when Leila and I were there last Christmas (he likes to boogie board) --- it's okay."
"What I love about Australia is nobody bothers you, they respect that you want privacy. For me it means it's a place I can always go back to. I miss Sydney when I'm not there, so does Leila. Though she lives in England, she feels Australian. I tell you we're there an hour and she loses her British accent."
Leila was on set, visiting from the UK, the day The Weekly was there. She is tall, bubbly and looks like Greta.
"She has my sense of humor and her mother's smarts," Vincent says. "And is very strong and feminine like her mum."
On the break-up of his relationship with Greta, all he will say is, "It was an intense relationship and we have a wonderful daughter from it." These days, Leila spends half the year with Vincent, sometimes as a production assistant on the Law & Order: Criminal Intent set. "She's seen most of my films, but not the violent ones," he said of how she handles her dad's career. "But she rarely mentions me, it's more the story she wants to talk about." Does she want to be an actress? "I don't know, but she has said she must have acting blood in her." Then he leans in conspiratorially and whispers, "I am so proud of her, she is doing her first play at school. She is playing Nancy in Oliver! and she doesn't know it, but I'm going to England to see the show and surprise her afterwards. I asked for two days off. There's no way I'd miss it."
Leila is on the cusp of adolescence and Vincent admits he is protective. Yet, while he's worried, he also has a plan. "An Aussie actor I won't name told me a great way to deal with it. He said once he put a case of Fosters in his garage for a couple of weeks, opened it and let it spoil. Then when boys would come over to take his daughter out, he made them drink the beer and they'd be sick. It got around if you went to see her, the father made you drink this awful beer, and he never had a problem again. So I filed that one away," he says, laughing.
He says his five-year-old son Elias, is "a carbon-copy of me, not in looks, but in behavior". Elias knows his father has a job called an "actor", that's why people stop him in the street to say hello. "I showed him where I went to acting school, right across the street where he goes to school. He comes to the set, he watches me work, so he knows I have to work so he can get toys."
Vincent wants to continue acting in films when his TV work permits. (His latest movie "Thumb sucker" premiered at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival). Now he wants to direct. "I made this 30-minute film, "Five Minutes, Mr. Welles", about an event during the shooting of "The Third Man". He not only directed it but also played Welles. "It's been getting a good reaction, which is satisfying."
A production assistant says they need Vincent on set. He stubs out his cigarette and extends his hand to shake mine.
"Tell everyone in Australia I'll be back soon. You know sometimes I imagine I'm sitting in a cafe in Sydney overlooking the beach having coffee and a cigarette. It always puts me in a good mood."
*******************
D.
******************
Australian Womens Weekly
July 2005
by Sharon Krum
Vincent D'Onofrio sheds his reclusive shell to tell The Weekly about his pain and passion and why he calls Australia home
A VERY PRIVATE DETECTIVE
As the darkly intense star of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Vincent D'Onofrio is a hit with fans and police. Sharon Krum finds a reluctant celebrity who would rather be with his children than at a Hollywood party.
"Quiet please, rolling ... action!" On command, Vincent D'Onofrio --- in the body of Detective Robert Goren in Network Ten's Law & Order: Criminal Intent --- charges into a dark New York City apartment, gun drawn. Immediately he spots a corpse, male, sprawled over a kitchen table. His eyes widen. He wants to touch it, but he won't, because as any good detective knows, procedure must always trump desire. First, he and his partner, Detective Alex Eames, have to don rubber gloves --- only then can they go to work. Vincent dons his seamlessly, but actress Kathryn Erbe's pair refuse to roll down her fingers. In fact, the more she yanks, the more they stick. Suddenly, smiles crawl across the faces of the two actors, then the pair bursts out laughing. Now the cameraman is laughing. Soon everyone on the set is.
"Cut! Let's do this again. And somebody fix the gloves please."
While a new pair of gloves is prepared for close-up, Vincent, 45, doesn't waste time chatting with the crew. He wanders off immediately to question a retired detective on set about the correct position for his gun, then the director of photography about camera angles. During another break, it's over to the director with a suggestion about dialog.
Watching this, you quickly realize two things. One, the questions could on forever, but for the director yelling "Action!" again. And two, Vincent D'Onofrio is definitely not the kind of actor who is content to show up and walk through his role.
He is as focused and hands on as his alter ego Robert Goren, the TV character, who for many has become an object of fascination and addiction.
The body-bending, the Einstein-level smarts and the inscrutable personal life and sex appeal, Robert Goren is what would result if Sherlock Holmes had movie-star looks, no inhibitions and lives in New York.
"From the beginning, I set it up with all the bending and idiosyncrasies, so it would leave the door open for me to go anywhere I want with Goren," Vincent explains. "For that he had to be larger than life."
So, given his intense manner between takes, it's interesting that later in his dressing room the actor is such a quiet, calm presence. Actually, it's not really his dressing room as much a family room. In one corner is a box of toys for when his son Elias, 5, comes to visit. Polaroid pictures of Elias and daughter Leila, 13, are taped to the wall. As we talk, he smokes cigarettes, a vice he clearly enjoys. Softly spoken and polite, he will, if you let him, talk all day about his children, whom he adores. He seems comfortable being interviewed today --- and later confesses that this is because he loves Australia --- yet normally Vincent is one of the most reluctant celebrities on earth. While many actors giddily go to the opening on an envelope, you don't see Vincent at Hollywood premieres, he doesn't schmooze on talk shows and you'll never find him photographed with Paris Hilton.
"I can't do it," he pleads, when asked why in this age of 24-hour celebrity, he doesn't play the game. "I'm not a star. I'm a character actor and always will be. I don't have the type of personality that could be out there, I just don't handle it well."
He takes a drag on his cigarette and continues. "Look, I am a single guy," he says, alluding to the fact he is recently divorced from wife Carin van der Donk, the mother of Elias. Vincent's relationship with English/Australian actress Greta Scacchi ended in 1993. "I don't want to end up being "the bachelor actor guy" at the Hollywood party. I do get in gossip columns. It happens, but I'll never put myself in a position to make it happen."
In person, Vincent is one seriously handsome guy. He's 193 cm, has brown eyes and his hair is graying, but he looks in great shape, though he begs to differ. Twice, in recent months, he has fainted on set, was taken to hospital and diagnosed with exhaustion. "I worked and worked 14-hour days until my body just gave out on me," he says.
Next season, Vincent is going to start splitting the show with actor Chris Noth (Mr Big from Sex & The City), shooting 11 instead of 22 episodes. "I;m really happy," Vincent says of his reduced schedule. "It will give me more time with my kids." When I tell him that Criminal Intent fans will mutiny over the news, he smiled sheepishly. "That would be flattering if they did. But I'm not going anywhere. I want everybody in Australia to know that this is going to keep me around longer."
When I mention the ferocity of his female fans' worship, he blushes and looked at the floor. "I only understand because I feel the same about women. I am attracted to women, I would hope that women are attracted to me and that's the way the world goes round. If they like the show, that means I'm doing my job, I'm telling the story right. I can't think about it any further than that."
Vincent was born in Brooklyn in 1959, but grew up in Hawaii and Florida after his parents divorced when he was nine. He describes himself as a shy boy who spent his sixth birthday party hiding under his bed. His father, Gene, ran a community theater and, by the time Vincent was a teenager, he was working with his father operating the stage lights and sound. Gene D'Onofrio introduced his son to legendary character actors Peter Sellers and Alec Guinness. After attending university in Colorado, Vincent went on to New York.
He studied acting at the American Stanislavsky Theater and Actors Studio. In 1983, he appeared on Broadway in "Open Admissions" and in his first film, the teen sex farce "The First Turn-On!".
Neither set the world on fire, but what happened next would. He was cast by Stanley Kubrick as Private Pyle, the fat boy who shoots his drill sergeant in "Full Metal Jacket". Vincent went on a 40,000 kilojoule-a-day diet for the role and put on 32 kg. It was worth it. Entertainment Weekly later listed it as one of the top 100 performances overlooked for an Academy Award. By 1988, he was starring with Julia Roberts and Lili Taylor in "Mystic Pizza", and staring stardom in the face. "The movie was a hit and this was when they were making all those brat-pack films. I had that choice, but I didn't want it."
Determined to be a character actor, he signed on for more dramatic roles: part of a love triangle with Julia Roberts and Campbell Scott in "Dying Young", the screenwriter murdered by Tim Robbins in "The Player", Orson Welles in "Ed Wood", Keanu Reeves' troubled brother in "Feeling Minnesota", the alien in "Men In Black", a killer in "The Cell" and the socially inept yet brilliant writer Robert Howard in "The Whole Wide World", with Renee Zellweger. Of Renee's 2003 Oscar speech, in which she thanked Vincent for teaching her how to work, he says, "I didn't see it live, I heard about it afterwards. She is a great girl, so it didn't surprise me. It's a little weird she did it in front of all those people. But it's cool."
By 2000, Vincent's ability to dissolve into his characters had earned him a reputation as a celluloid chameleon and made him the actor on Hollywood's speed dial. Film work was constant, he was creatively satisfied and a darling of the critics, so it's curious why, four years ago, he went into TV.
"I had no plans to, but Dick Wolf (Law & Order's creator) came to me with a show and I liked the fact it was storytelling, no soap, just crime drama. I had watched detective shows when I was a kid and loved them."
"He said, you can create Goren, you can build him from the ground up and that really appealed to me. So I made him weird, a little arrogant, too smart for his own good." Yet not so off-the-map that real detectives don't relate to him. In fact, they love Goren, often inviting Vincent to attend police functions as their guest of honor. He always goes --- "It's important to be gracious."
While Robert Goren is his baby, like any parent, Vincent admits he needs time out. "I get bored sometimes. Dick always said to me, out of 22 episodes, they're not always going to be interesting to me and that's what you live with when you do a show. But I enjoy Goren because he is constantly evolving. If I start to feel I get to know him, it would be over," he says.
Though he continued to view himself as a character actor, the reality is that TV has changed both Vincent and the public's perception of him. As a film actor, the public was not possessive about him. As Goren, he belongs to them. "Now I can't go around the corner to get milk without signing autographs," he says, but not bitterly. "It's fine. You have to be gracious", he repeats. "That's why more than ever I love going to Sydney. It's better there." Sydney is the place Vincent called home for three years in the early '90's, after meeting and falling in love with Greta Scacchi on the set of "Fires Within". They moved to Coogee in 1991 and had a daughter Leila one year later.
"I still consider Sydney a home," he says, smiling. "It's very nostalgic for me. My daughter was born there. At the time, I was working a bit, but mostly raising Leila, while Greta was doing theater."
"Sydney's such a great place --- the people are awesome, the weather is great, the heat doesn't bother me. I feel so comfortable there. Even though it's different now --- there were pictures taken of us at the beach every day when Leila and I were there last Christmas (he likes to boogie board) --- it's okay."
"What I love about Australia is nobody bothers you, they respect that you want privacy. For me it means it's a place I can always go back to. I miss Sydney when I'm not there, so does Leila. Though she lives in England, she feels Australian. I tell you we're there an hour and she loses her British accent."
Leila was on set, visiting from the UK, the day The Weekly was there. She is tall, bubbly and looks like Greta.
"She has my sense of humor and her mother's smarts," Vincent says. "And is very strong and feminine like her mum."
On the break-up of his relationship with Greta, all he will say is, "It was an intense relationship and we have a wonderful daughter from it." These days, Leila spends half the year with Vincent, sometimes as a production assistant on the Law & Order: Criminal Intent set. "She's seen most of my films, but not the violent ones," he said of how she handles her dad's career. "But she rarely mentions me, it's more the story she wants to talk about." Does she want to be an actress? "I don't know, but she has said she must have acting blood in her." Then he leans in conspiratorially and whispers, "I am so proud of her, she is doing her first play at school. She is playing Nancy in Oliver! and she doesn't know it, but I'm going to England to see the show and surprise her afterwards. I asked for two days off. There's no way I'd miss it."
Leila is on the cusp of adolescence and Vincent admits he is protective. Yet, while he's worried, he also has a plan. "An Aussie actor I won't name told me a great way to deal with it. He said once he put a case of Fosters in his garage for a couple of weeks, opened it and let it spoil. Then when boys would come over to take his daughter out, he made them drink the beer and they'd be sick. It got around if you went to see her, the father made you drink this awful beer, and he never had a problem again. So I filed that one away," he says, laughing.
He says his five-year-old son Elias, is "a carbon-copy of me, not in looks, but in behavior". Elias knows his father has a job called an "actor", that's why people stop him in the street to say hello. "I showed him where I went to acting school, right across the street where he goes to school. He comes to the set, he watches me work, so he knows I have to work so he can get toys."
Vincent wants to continue acting in films when his TV work permits. (His latest movie "Thumb sucker" premiered at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival). Now he wants to direct. "I made this 30-minute film, "Five Minutes, Mr. Welles", about an event during the shooting of "The Third Man". He not only directed it but also played Welles. "It's been getting a good reaction, which is satisfying."
A production assistant says they need Vincent on set. He stubs out his cigarette and extends his hand to shake mine.
"Tell everyone in Australia I'll be back soon. You know sometimes I imagine I'm sitting in a cafe in Sydney overlooking the beach having coffee and a cigarette. It always puts me in a good mood."
*******************
