Thanks Katie! Here is the full text. This looks to have been conducted last summer (2004) after the Monaco press junket for L& O with Dick Wolf.
Rebel Dom
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Part 1 of 2:
He’s said to be the best character actor in the world
TEDDY JAMIESON
January 10 2005
The Herald - UK
What do you mean, who is he?
Vincent D'Onofrio is a bit of a magician. Has been for some time now. It started when he was a kid in Florida, where there was this small magic shop in Hialeah city he used to go to, owned by a Cuban couple – big entertainers in Cuba before the revolution. The guy used to teach him the odd thing. Other times he'd hang out with Cuban street magicians, picking up bits of business, "anything from sleight of hand to crap with doves". He can still do some of it, he says. "I can still do some awesome card tricks. I can still do sleight of hand."
I can well believe him. He's certainly got the hands for it. D'Onofrio is a big man, on the high side of six foot, and everything is in proportion. "Anything else beyond sleight of hand is just gimmick stuff anyway," he continues. "You just buy a magic trick."
None of this will come as much of a surprise to D'Onofrio's unexpectedly large fanbase. They've long had him pinned down as rather magical, though more for his way with character parts than his way with cards. He is, according to one fan website, "the world's greatest character actor"; the Internet Movie Database, the film enthusiast's first-stop website, has him down as a "human chameleon".
Some of you might be scratching your head at this point. Certainly, in the days before I meet the actor, most people respond to the mention of his name with a look of incomprehension and the question: "Vincent who?" But you do know him. You just might not know you know him. So let me introduce you. Vincent – never Vince, he tells me – D'Onofrio has been the large guy in the corner of a whole host of movies big and small (around 50, he reckons) in the last 20-odd years. He's worked with everyone from Oliver Stone to Julia Roberts; from Spike Lee to Jennifer Lopez.
Specifics? OK, in Stanley Kubrick's Vietnam epic Full Metal Jacket he played Private Gomer Pyle, the fat boy with the moon face who ends up shooting his sadistic drill sergeant and then blowing the top of his head all over the latrine. In Men in Black he's Edgar, the dungareed redneck who gets infested by an alien bug and starts slouching around Washington DC with insects spilling out of his sleeves. In the over-the-top and often deeply unpleasant J.Lo thriller The Cell he's a serial killer, Carl Stargher, who drowns his female victims in a holding tank and then bleaches their skin. Nice. And in Tim Burton's gorgeous love letter to Z-grade movie-making Ed Wood, he plays Orson Welles. You're with me now? Yeah, that's the guy.
D'Onofrio is not a leading man by nature or choice (his choice, that is, though presumably also Hollywood's). There are the odd exceptions, though. A few little-seen indie movies, mostly; oh yes, and then there's his television series. This week D'Onofrio returns to channel five as Detective Robert Goren in Law and Order: Criminal Intent. It's one of the many American crime buy-ins alongside the likes of CSI, CSI Miami and parent show Law and Order that have helped raise the channel's profile and quality threshold in the past few years. Viewing figures too – Criminal Intent regularly pulls in more than two million viewers for channel five, which works out as a 13 per cent share in industry-speak. In the US, meanwhile, its ratings come in at about 18 million.
Like its contemporaries, Criminal Intent is a busy, tightly plotted hour-long drama (around 42 minutes if you cut out the ads). What makes it different is the way it is built around D'Onofrio's performance. While everyone else in the cast – his fellow cops and the people, good and bad, who cross his path – play everything straight, D'Onofrio is given the chance to have some fun. And he takes it. He is reminiscent of a beefier John Malkovich (if you take away the mincing self-regard), moving his ursine frame around the interrogation room gracefully, even camply at times, while speaking just above a whisper. It's surprisingly compelling stuff.
He's not moving around a lot today, but the soft-spokenness is present and correct in this dimly lit room in the Covent Garden Hotel. Outside is one of London's chicest boutique shopping areas; just a stone's throw away is Sam Roddick's upmarket sex shop Coco de Mer, nestling in between pricey clothes stores and restaurants. D'Onofrio hasn't been exploring, though. Since arriving from Monaco, where he was also on press duty, he's been cocooned in the hotel catching up with the latest trends in British comedy (he's just been watching The Office, and apologises at one point for a particularly David Brent-ian mannerism; after I leave he's got a League of Gentlemen DVD to watch). More importantly, though, he's been catching up with his rest: "I only got off work a few days ago and I'm just dying to get some sleep."
It's unclear whether his just-about-audible murmur of a voice is natural or for actorly effect, but it is complemented by a nervous cough every time he starts to essay an opinion. He's by no means a difficult interviewee, but it seems he doesn't enjoy the experience. He says he is uncomfortable with the whole idea of celebrity. All actors say the same as a matter of course, but for once it sounds convincing. D'Onofrio says he can talk about his work – "I have to play the game" – but it doesn't come easily. He is not, he says, a social animal. "I'm able to talk about what I do for a living because it's what I do. If we were talking about something else you might not think I was such a great talker – or you might not think I was able to talk at all, for that matter." (Maybe this also explains the 45-year-old's rather arrested teenage vocabulary.)
He's certainly never pursued a high profile. "When I had a press agent, before I realised I didn't need one, I never asked him to do magazine covers or late-night talk shows," he says. "Look, right now I have one of the most popular dramas on television and I have never done a late-night talk show and I won't do one – and I like those shows. I have friends who go on those shows who I find hilarious, like my friend Vince Vaughn. He's fantastic on them, and when he's on them I can't stop laughing. There are certain guys who can do that shit and girls who can do that stuff. I can't do it, man. I'll embarrass myself and everyone else involved in what I'm supporting. I have a hard enough time walking down a red carpet and keeping a smile on my face."
Which, some might feel, would make his choice of acting as a career a curious one. It's a profession for show-offs, isn't it? "I think a lot of people see it as that," he replies. "I'm able to have a pretty acting career – more than half of my life now – and I'm still able to mind my own business, you know. You haven't seen me on the cover of magazines or at any Hollywood parties have you?" I don't go to too many, I have to confess. "No, but you haven't seen me in those magazines and doing all that kind of crap. I have as simple a life as one could have, doing what I do."
Acting, he says, is a form of escape. Escape from what? "Life, everyday life." Does that mean he is better at acting than living? "I am, I am. A lot better."
His personal CV backs that up: he has had two marriages and two divorces. He also has two children, one of the more successful by-products of his love life. "They're an escape from life too," he says, smiling. "My daughter's 12 now, and thank God she wants to see me more often because she's older. Last year she came six times to see me, for a couple of weeks each time. That's a lot of quality time to be spending with your daughter and it's 24/7 because she doesn't have school when she comes. She comes and PAs on set and hangs out with me. My son's four years old, and when I see him he's with me 24/7 as well."
Leila, his daughter, lives in England with her mother, the actress Greta Scacchi. D'Onofrio met Scacchi on the set of Robert Altman's film The Player. Their relationship was by all accounts a rather torrid one, and ended badly. Six months after Leila was born, D'Onofrio walked out – or at least that's Scacchi's version of events. She's still burned by the whole thing. In an interview towards the end of last year her anger was still obvious 12 years on. "It was a massive betrayal," she told the interviewer. "This wasn't a child I'd had against his wishes. This was a child he persuaded me to have. Then he changed his mind."
Today D'Onofrio is rather more circumspect about the relationship, and certainly rather more sanguine. "That was an intense, wonderful relationship and we got a beautiful daughter out of it," he says. "I don't think I can handle anything as wonderful and intense as that again."
It's easy to fall in love with somebody that you're in love with in a movie, he adds, but one relationship with an actress was enough. "I've been interested before, that's for sure, but I'm not sure I'd do it again. I think one was plenty." He looked outside acting for his second wife, the model and photographer Carin Van Der Donk, who is mother to his four-year-old son Elias. Unfortunately that one didn't last either. "Since my divorce, work is the main thing in my life. I was hoping it wouldn't be and then I got divorced, so when I'm not with my kids, yeah, work's the main thing."
(part 1 of 2)