Exclusive! Robert Forster interview part 1!
House Petrelli: Hi, I should tell you that if the phone suddenly cuts out it’s because the electricity went out, because we’ve had a huge snowstorm up here.Robert Forster: Well, lucky you in some sense. If I should suddenly stop talking it’s because I died.
HP: *laughs*
RF: I got a good cold yesterday, but I had a good night’s sleep and now I’m up and at ‘em.
HP: Well good! At least it wasn’t a bullet to the head.
RF: Oh, I had that too. Well look, you survive some things, other things you don’t. Now, the fact that I have been shot, and am presumably dead, maybe they don’t care what I say any more.
HP: Well, I was going to ask you, are you dead or are you not dead?
RF: Well, I think there’s no exact answer for that. Like a lot of other things in this show, things can be liquid.
HP: And there’s always flashbacks, and you know.
RF: All of that, of course.
HP: Alternate timelines...
RF: Yes indeed. I’m not sure what they’re going to be doing with all that. I’m not really in touch with the writers as much as those who are on the show for a long time are.
HP: Well, you got a whole half a season out of it, so that’s pretty good!
RF: Oh, it was fun, and has been fun! Now are you aware that I only shot a certain number? Now tell me the things I think I should be careful of, because you’re more acquainted with their policies.
HP: No, I’m really not. I’ll try and get whatever spoilers out of you I can, but I don’t want you to get in trouble. *laughs*
RF: Well in that case, see you later!
HP: No, no... the vast majority of this is not spoilers. So, welcome to House Petrelli and the Petrelli family.
RF: Thank you very, very much. It’s a pleasure.
HP: I got quite a lot of questions from the fans, so let’s get right into it. Were you a fan of the show before joining the cast, and were you into comic books at all?
RF: Ah. I have not been into comic books since... well, I can’t remember the year, but I do remember this. And this was a moment in my life, the moment at which, after having been engrossed in comic books, the ones that my mother said “Bob, why do you read that junk? Bob, why at least don’t you read classic comics?” Remember those classic comics, do they still make those?
HP: Oh, Classics Illustrated! Sure!
RF: All right. So you know, all the good literature reduced into a comic book. She considered that at least of some small benefit to me. Now, what age would I have been? Uh... eleven or something in that range...
HP: Yep, I would have guessed ten.
RF: Okay, ten or whatever age it was. I remember I grew up away from where we lived. We lived in a place in Rochester, New York, but we transported ourselves every morning some distance away where we had a small dry cleaner shop. So I grew up in a dry cleaner shop doing several chores that I hated but got good at. So that’s another story. But the idea is that when I was a kid, my mother must have told me 25 times that your comic books are terrible. There was a moment, however, that I realized that a month or so had gone by and I hadn’t looked at a comic book. I don’t think it was the moment that I started looking at girls, it was a little earlier than that, and I think that school or something... I remember thinking, “oh god, I abandoned my pile of comic books,” a stack of them.
HP: So they’re probably worth a lot of money now!
RF: Oh, I had no concept of that, and they were junk. We used them and they were all torn up and so forth. But it was a moment at which I realized I passed from comic books to something else. I can’t even think of what the other thing might have been, but those comic books were so important to me, and suddenly... they weren’t. And it was a little like when I started my career and went out of the country for a couple of seasons, and I realized they could do the NFL schedule without me. I didn’t know that they could, and I felt terrible, because I’d been away and hadn’t seen the whole season. I came back at Christmas time, I saw a couple playoff games, and that was it. But I was a fan of the Browns, and of the New York Giants, and went away in my early 20s and realized, “Ah, they don’t need me to keep going. They did it anyways.”
HP: Now, are you one of those people that thinks that if you don’t watch they’re not going to win?
RF: No, I don’t. I don’t think those kind of things. Although there was a moment I might have. But I don’t any more. So, comic books were really important to me.
HP: Which characters though?
RF: Oh Captain Marvel! And Superman, and Batman! These were the ones... you pick my age and you can probably figure out the ones I was crazy about.
HP: The classics!
RF: Well, starting maybe in 1949 or 1951, that’s when I was about eight or nine or ten, but in the early 50s, that’s when I stopped watching them. Was I a fan of this show? Initially I never saw the show. My daughter told me about the first episode, “Dad, you gotta watch this show.” And it took me a couple of weeks before I actually got to see it because we didn’t have Tivo at the time. And I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I didn’t have anybody there to explain anything to me, and I took a brush at it, but eventually slid off like a greased pole that those guys try to climb.
HP: So you didn’t start at the pilot? You came in like episode three or something?
RF: Episode three or episode four... I couldn’t make anything of it.
HP: That makes sense.
RF: And my daughter was busy with her child at the time, so I did not catch a hold of it. But... I got a call from my agent, three or four weeks before I started shooting them, and they said “They’d like to have you play a character on Heroes.” I knew well that it was a hit, a phenomenon of some sort, but I didn’t know much about it. So I had a long conversation with Tim Kring and Dennis Hammer. They had sent me some episodes in which the father was referred to, and I had a long talk with them trying to glean what kind of character this was. When I asked whether he was a good guy or a bad guy, there was a long pause...
HP: Ooooh...
RF: And little by little I realized that this was going to be a good character whether or not he was a good guy who knew what he was doing was correct, or a bad guy who still knew what he was doing was correct. So this character knows that what he is doing is the right thing for the world. He is there to change the world in a direction that he understands and knows must be accomplished. And so once I knew that, I went headlong into the action and the scenes. Which were terrific! I had a lot of fun shooting this show. It’s not like shooting a cop show. On cop shows I must have said the same dopey line 15 times in my career.
HP: *laughs*
RF: “Bring ‘em in! Arrest ‘em!” You know, all the clichés that you hear on all the shows that you’ve seen all your life.
HP: *laughs* Right!
RF: But this was not that. So for an actor... You know, I’ve told other actors, “Geez, what a great job I’ve got. What a great character. This guy does interesting, fun and assertive things. Not the kind of thing where, you know, “Arrest him and throw him away for the rest of his life.” Name your clichés.
HP: That’s great. Didn’t you have your own show for a while?
RF: I’ve had several shows.
HP: Oh, have you? Because I was looking back at your IMDB and kind of scanning back through your history and saw that you had your own series and all that. So let me ask you this – what’s the most fun you’ve ever had on a project, and what do you wish you could do over or had never done?
RF: *pause* Oh boy. Well, I had a lot of fun on this project. I had a lot of fun on Jackie Brown. See, my career had a five-year upward act, and a 27-year downward second act.
HP: Oh dear.
RF: No, that’s the way most careers are. If I could draw a line for you, the graph looks like a shot up, because with a movie, or a television show, or a play or something, you suddenly get buoyancy. Then, little by little, in ups and downs it diminishes. Then if you get lucky again, as I did with Jackie Brown, you get something else that throws you up there and gives you some buoyancy. And Jackie Brown was a big thing for me because I knew it was good. I didn’t realize it was gonna be that good, or that it was gonna get that much attention, or that much buoyancy from it. But it was good. And this guy gave me the best start I had had in a long time. And certainly one of the great parts in American movies. But I had played that part before, played that part most of my career – the white knight detective. The Philip Marlowe character from the old detective literature. And I had played it in Banyon, the 1930s detective that was done in 1971.
HP: Yeah! Banyon! That’s what I was trying to think of the name of! That was it.
RF: Banyon, the 1930s detective. Old cars. Old clothes. Old jokes. Fast women. They all lied to me. And so Banyon was the basic good guy detective character. White knight in a ’37 Packard in the case of Banyon. And that series lasted 15 shows. We got an order for 15, and during the 13th, the writer/creator/producer of the show died. Had a heart attack and passed. And suddenly the show was teetering and went dead. And so we didn’t get a second order. A couple years later I did the good guy Indian deputy sheriff in New Mexico contemporary cops ‘n robbers in the desert, Nakia. Now, Nakia was also a good guy, white knight sort of a guy, and was the television version of Billy Jack. Remember Billy Jack?
HP: Yeah, a long time ago I saw that.
RF: Billy Jack was part Indian and was a good guy, and protected the weak. So based on that character the television show was bought by CBS. And when then show was ordered, we got an order for 13, and when the pilot went on the air, Tom Laughlan who had created Billy Jack, sued Columbia because nobody had ever bothered to buy it from him. So we got a 13 order for a show that was dead on arrival. We were never gonna shoot more than 13. Then I got a fantasy show about two characters who came from the comic books. One was a superhero, with a cape, who could fly, and had superpowers, but who in the real world was just a guy and he had to do it on his own wits. The other guy, that I played, was the dime novel detective. A good guy – the same character that I had played in Banyon but a version of that. And I had the Banyon suit still, that I could fit into!
HP: Oh my god! *laughs*
RF: The guy who wrote that show liked me in Banyon, and put me in the show and wrote the character around me with the image of me in that suit, and I still had the suit and I wore it.
HP: That’s great!
RF: The suit was a little tight at the time, but the show was not as tight, and went down in... we shot six episodes, I think they showed three.
HP: Oh dear.
RF: Well, this is an actor’s career. You just have to keep on stepping out there. Never stop putting yourself out there. That’s advice that I give to actors all the time. Put yourself out there, never be afraid to get yourself out there, because if you don’t, who’s going to see you and put you in something? So get out there and keep doing it. And then I got the retired white knight detective in Karen Sisco, which was only four or five years ago.
HP: Yeah, that sounds familiar.
RF: With Carla Gugino, and she was terrific, and the show got such terrific reviews that we figured we’d last for five years. What happened... oh, something strange happened. The ratings were not good. The reviews were gigantic, but the ratings were not. And there was a strike... whatever happened, they stopped shooting them for ten weeks to recreate the show and never started shooting. We were on hold for two or three months and never started shooting the show. So that show died. So that was all of the television shows that I’ve had, all of which... you know, there has never been a single job that I’ve ever had that I didn’t like. A day’s work for an actor is one of the great things.
(This is the end of Part 1, Part 2 coming soon!)
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