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Last Thursday I was in theatre geek heaven as I got the chance to see Broadway, film and television star Malcolm Gets perform up close and personal at a fundraiser for our local chamber orchestra.
Performing for a crowd, most of whom had known him growing up here, he played the piano and told stories of the influence music had on his family (these three links are audio clips), sang songs about the after effects of being on a successful sitcom, and treated us to a variety of classic and contemporary musical theatre tunes.
The day after the concert, I chatted with this charming, intelligent, passionate artist about the evolution of his acting process, being an openly gay performer, his upcoming film roles in Grey Gardens and Sex and the City, as well as a new CD project he has in the works.
Man in Chair: You spoke last night about finding a true connection to a character for the first time when you played Mozart in Amadeus. Can you talk a little more about that first experience, and how your process evolved at Yale and throughout your professional career?
Malcolm Gets: It’s funny, I’ve done so many plays—there are plays I don’t even remember—but I remember lines from Amadeus. That’s how much I love that play.
There’s a scene in the play where we all attend the opening of The Marriage of Figaro, and I remember somewhere early in the run—I was eighteen or nineteen years old—we would just be standing there and they would be playing this recording and I remember more than a few performances, I would just start bawling. The music just got to me. That happened a lot in that show.
In the early days it was luck. It was luck, because I had no knowledge of how to…I had no technique.
So basically what happened was, I was 23 or 24, I’m in New York City, and somebody suggested I go back to school. I auditioned for Yale—didn’t tell anyone I was auditioning—and I was accepted into their Masters program.
I had a lot of great teachers—but I had a great voice teacher. Not singing teacher, but like a Linkletter voice teacher named Virginia Ness Ray. I think about her a lot. Virginia was…mystical. She was one of those really gifted teachers and she affected me on so many levels.
I live a great deal of my life in my head. I get uncomfortable in my own body, but Virginia was the first person who taught me how to stand still, take a deep breath, and start to practice being in my own body. There’s no way of harnessing inspiration. But she was one of the first people to teach me how to increase the possibility of that happening.
And now I teach. I teach part time at Julliard and at NYU. And I always have these conversations with the students, like how many times have you heard a tenor or a soprano with an absolutely technically perfect voice, and for two seconds you’re dazzled and then a minute later you’re trying to remember if you left the refrigerator door open.
And then you hear Tom Waits, or Bette Midler or Carol Channing—people whose voices are damaged, or they have five notes but they have the most compelling, interesting sound.
And it’s something I always have to remind myself too—I can get very self conscious about what I sound like, and I just try to tell myself, “No, just tell the story.” Because ultimately I think that’s what the audience wants. They want to have the experience.
MIC: You talked about being more comfortable in your head than in your body, and it seems that a lot of the musicals you are known for—Hello Again, Amore, A New Brain—are a little more heady, more dark or edgy. How much as an actor do you choose what you’re in and how much is just how you are cast?
MG: Well, it’s interesting that you say that because in the last few years, I actually have done a lot of lightweight projects, albeit short runs. The Apple Tree at Encores, Boys of Syracuse at Encores, Finnian’s Rainbow. It was a lot of fun at first, but now I’m realizing I think people are starting to pigeonhole me that way, as this sort of Danny Kaye lightweight song and dance guy.
Even recently they had lost a director at NYU for a Shakespeare project in the program I work in, so I went to the head of the program and I said “Hey, what if I direct the project?” And he was like, “Have you ever done any Shakespeare?” And I thought “I won an Obie for Shakespeare. My first two years out of school I did Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Moliere.”
So the business very quickly can forget what you did five, six, seven, ten years ago. Another thing I say to the students—because I know it’s true for myself—is you have to every now and then “re-remind” the business of what you can do.
If I just sit back and let people tell me what to do, I’ll never ever do anything different. I’ll keep doing the same thing over and over and over. So it’s challenging but you have to somehow find a way to keep reinventing yourself. If that’s what you want. If you want to have a varied career, which I certainly do.
MIC: And you certainly have.
MG: I have, but it’s interesting that we’re talking about this now because I feel like I’ve come to that point again, and so I actually just said to my manager, “What’s up with Shakespeare in the Park?” I’m really putting that vibe out there again because I feel like it’s time to take a break from the song and dance thing, just for a little while.
It’s twofold. First of all I want to remind people that I can do the other things, but also creatively I want to do some things like that again.
MIC: One of the songs you sang last night, Way Ahead of My Time by Peter Mills, has sort of become one of your signature songs, about a fictional caveman who makes several allusions to the fact that he might be gay without quite saying it.
MG: Well, he doesn’t know that he’s gay, because there’s no word for it.
MIC: Have you felt like that caveman in your career, having to talk around the issue, or have you always been fairly straightforward—so to speak—about being gay?
MG: I was always out. I was out when I was in high school. So I never hid who I was. I’d always lived my life openly, I always took my partner to the big Hollywood events, everybody knew my partner. It was not a big deal.
But the difference comes once you talk about it in print. There is a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in the industry, so a lot of actors and actresses are gay or bisexual and have partners and the industry knows about it but they just don’t talk about it with Regis and Kelly, you know I mean?
Once you talk about it on the public record, then you run the risk of, for the rest of your life being labeled as “out gay actor Malcolm Gets.” And I didn’t do that until 1999 or 2000 when I was playing Edward II at ACT in San Francisco, and I just wanted to talk about it in print.
I’ll admit there were a couple of years after that when I felt like the only auditions I was getting were for very clichéd effeminate gay men. And so as a result I wouldn’t even go on the auditions. I think I pissed off my agents because 99 percent of them, I was just like “I’m not going.”
I was really angry. And I still get angry about it. There was a piece in the New York Times recently saying “why is homosexuality still the fodder for such really cruel humor?” Like the Ben Affleck and Jimmy Kimmel video that’s so popular. There’s this huge comedic response because people are grossed out at the idea of them being boyfriends.
So for two years I didn’t go on a lot of those auditions, and then somehow it just went away. It still happens sometimes but I’m grateful that it sort of died down. And I would like to think that in television and film now, we’re getting more multidimensional portrayals of gay and lesbian people that are not so stereotypical. I think that’s happening more and more.
MIC: You just finished filming a new version of Grey Gardens, based on the original documentary, playing George “Gould” Strong. I don’t remember him being in the documentary. Was he?
MG: They talk about him. There’s a section where they’re playing Big Edie’s album and Little Edie says something like “Mother dahling had the most wonderful accompanist. His name was George Strong. We called him Gould.” And then Big Edie goes “He was the most brilliant man I ever met. He was more brilliant than Mr. Beale.”
MIC: It’s sort of intimated in the musical, Grey Gardens, that he was gay. How did you handle that aspect of the character in the film?
MG: When I auditioned, there was one scene that was a confrontation between Big Edie and I, and she said something in the scene about some “friend” of mine in New York City, and I get really defensive about it.
After I got the part, I met the director, Michael Sucsy, and they had cut those lines. He said to me, “Gould may very well likely have been gay, or bisexual, but back then he could never have been open about it.”
And he said, “Besides, I think it’s more interesting, too, if he and Big Edie probably had a physical relationship even if Gould then eventually left her to go off to live a life with another man somewhere.”
I think the thing we were all interested in was not making him a clichéd character. I mean, there’s a real connection between Gould and Big Edie and whatever their situation, it served them both.
I guess that’s a long winded way of saying it should be pretty subtle. But c’mon, we have a party scene and I’m wearing better clothes than anyone else in the room….
MIC: What was the script based on? It doesn’t sound like it’s based completely on the documentary.
MG: There were two writers, but the main writer/director is Michael Sucsy, and Michael was obsessed with the documentary.
Michael just started researching everything he could about that time period. He met everyone who’s still alive. I wore a ring that belonged to the real Gould because Michael had interviewed Gould’s nephew.
Ben Bradlee, who runs the Washington Post, owns Grey Gardens now, and he and his wife have restored it to the way that it probably was, so Jessica Lange (Big Edie) and Drew Barrymore (Little Edie) and Michael actually went and the Bradlees had them stay at the house for a week—which I really envy.
Michael had researched everything and written a script based on that. Our film covers 1936 to 1980. It goes back to where they first moved into the house all the way through after Big Edie died.
MIC: When’s it coming out?
MG: I think in the fall. You know, I’m not sure. Sex in the City is coming out in May, I know, because the posters are all over town.
I also can’t imagine Grey Gardens being a summertime movie. It’s just too dark.
MIC: In the multiplex with Indiana Jones.
MG: Can you imagine?
MIC: Who do you play in Sex and the City?
MG: The movie begins with Sarah Jessica Parker and Chris Noth engaged and looking to buy an apartment. I play a real estate agent showing them a series of various Manhattan apartments.
The hilarious thing about those two movies was we started Sex and the City and my hair was longer than it is now. We shot for three or four days and then I had a six week break.
I got Grey Gardens and they chopped off all my hair. And then it became all about my hair. It was like, both production companies were screaming at each other. Sex and the City was saying I couldn’t cut my hair, and we had to cut my hair for Grey Gardens. So they did cut my hair and eventually they had to make me hair pieces for the second part of the Sex and the City filming.
MIC: Yesterday you mentioned a new CD in the works. Any definite plans for that?
MG: Yes. I had started a CD with Wally Harper, who was my dear friend, and one of the greatest musicians I knew in New York. We started it eight years ago with Peter Matz orchestrating it. And then they both died. Literally within twelve or thirteen months of each other.
After they died, about a year later, I was doing Amour on Broadway, and the copyist for the show gave me these boxes of orchestrations of the numbers on my album that Peter had done. So I had the orchestrations for about a year, and they’d never been played.
Four months ago, I did a one-night benefit of Falsettos, in Los Angeles, with Jason Alexander and Vicki Lewis. John McDaniel, of The Rosie O’Donnell Show, was conducting it.
He asked me if he could look at the orchestrations, so I showed him and he said, “We have to finish this album.”
So we are finally doing my CD. John is the music director, and Tommy Krasker, who owns the P S Classics label, is producing. I think we’re going to start in the studio this summer.
It’s definitely going to have a sort of fifties/sixties flair to it. I want to make an album that would have been the kind of record sitting in my parents’ living room. It’ll probably all be Broadway music, but Broadway music from that era. I’m not trying to give the kids from Spring Awakening a run for their money. Mine’s gonna be old fashioned.
MIC: So there won’t be any Way Ahead of My Time on it?
MG: It’s so funny you say that because that is the only thing that I would break my conceit to put on there because I love the song so much and it would be so fun on the CD. So I don’t know. We might have to bend the rules.
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Congratulations for getting a great interview!
Thanks, Steve! Malcolm is a really nice, very articulate guy, which makes for a great interviewee.
It sounded like a wonderful meeting, thanks for being so open with Malcolm, and so knowledgeable about his career and the upcoming events! I love Man in Chair!
You ask terrific questions. I knew Malcolm when he was growing up so I especially enjoyed hearing about him customizing his practice sessions for his family. (The John Denver bit really made me hoot). Again, insightful questions made for deeper, more insightful answers. Keep up the good work and enjoy Hogtown.