Almost 20 minutes into our conversation, Paul Bettany jokes that maybe he really is a “glass half empty” person. It’s been less than a week since Joe Biden was anointed the President-Elect of the United States, but the British born Bettany, who was just able to vote as an American citizen for the first time this year, is far from overjoyed. As excited as he was to cast his ballot, he has doubts that anyone can turn the ship a hard left from the collective horrors of the Trump era.
READ MORE: “Uncle Frank” features an outstanding cast but…[AFI Review]
“I’m sure that the Romans thought that when Caligula died,” Bettany says. “They got Nero. And they got two thousand years of the Dark Ages. I’m super anxious about it. I just think autocracy is on the rise everywhere. And you know, maybe the next person we get isn’t going to be as dumb as f**king Trump was. And that would be very frightening.”
Bettany has two major projects set for streaming release over the next two months. The first is Alan Ball’s “Uncle Frank,” a 2020 Sundance Film Festival premiere which Amazon Studios will release on its Prime Video on Thanksgiving. That drama will be followed by the highly anticipated “WandaVision,” Marvel Studios’ first streaming series for Disney+ which finds Bettany reprising a character that was seemingly killed off in the 2018 blockbuster “Avengers: Infinity War.” Despite a career that spans a multitude of cinematic genres, “Uncle Frank” is a relatively rare prestige and/or indie role for Bettany.
“I think that there is often this fantasy, this idea that actors are sort of curating their careers,” Bettany says. “And the truth is, I don’t know one of them, actually.”
He pauses and then adds, “Well, you know, maybe Robert Downey. Maybe Chris Evans. But I certainly have never been in that position. My wife has never been in that position. You tend to do what you’re offered you know? And so, this idea of sort of carefully crafting a career is for other people. I haven’t been there. If you get offered great work, you do great work. If you get offered bad work, you’ve still got to pay the bills, you know what I mean? You try and make the best of it.”
Once again, we’re reminded that that particular topic is one that actors really don’t want to discuss at the moment. Especially during a pandemic when productions are starting and stopping due to positive COVID-19 cases and many in the industry are just desperate to get back to work any way they can.
“I love making big movies with lots of toys on them,” Bettany says. “And I also love making small intimate movies with, you know, crews of a size that you can actually get to know because there are not hundreds and hundreds of them.”
Set in 1973, “Uncle Frank” finds Bettany portraying Frank Bledsoe, an East Village college professor who has crafted a life markedly different from his Southern roots. When Frank’s niece, Beth (“It’s” Sophia Lillis), movies to the city begins taking classes at the school he teaches at, she quickly discovers that he’s not only gay but has been with his boyfriend Wally (Ball’s husband Peter Macdissi) for a decade. The death of Frank’s father (Stephen Root), forces him to confront decades of resentment from a family patriarch who did everything to break him down but disown him.
When Bettany’s agent told him there was a script from Alan Ball for him to consider, he immediately was worried it was going to be “the one s**t Alan Ball script,” as he’s a huge fan of the “Six Feet Under” and “True Blood” creator. Again, he’s sort of that “glass-is-half-empty kind of chap.” And upon actually reading the screenplay he was delighted that it wasn’t s**t.
“I thought it just punches you in the gut,” Bettany says. “Then I got on a phone call with Alan, and started asking him questions like, ‘Should I play this part? I mean, is it O.K. that I play this part?’ And let’s start talking and try and find some compelling reasons for me to do it. And ‘Can I be helpful in helping him realize his vision?’”
One question was whether Bettany, as publicly identified straight man, should play this decidedly gay character. But as the two men compared their life stories they realized they both had a lot in common. At the age of 13, Ball lost a sister in an accident and felt responsible for it because she was driving him to piano class. At the age of 16, Bettany lost a younger brother and he felt, in some oblique way, responsible. And then there was the journey of Bettany’s own father.
“I was raised by a father who was a closeted gay man and came out of the closet at 63, and then had a 20-year relationship with a man who I think was the love of his life,” Bettany says. “And then when that man, Andy, died, my father went back to sort of the dogma of his Catholicism, went back into the closet and refused to acknowledge his homosexuality. I guess he wanted to get into heaven. It was an awful thing to see. [To] watch him unable to mourn the love of his life. And it struck me that I might have a perspective that was useful to Alan in terms of realizing the vision for this character who is struggling to reconcile two parts of his life.”
When Bettany’s father eventually passed away, though, he made a painful discovery.
“My father died and I was with him, and this is sort of amazing. He died, and in his pocket, I found a vial, a glass vial, of Andy’s ashes,” Bettany recalls. “So, despite him having entirely buried this 20-year love affair and relationship, he clearly kept him close in other ways. But you know, there are consequences. There are consequences for a family, being raised by somebody that is carrying that much of a secret and is experiencing that much shame, regarding who he is.”
Bettany continues, “And, of course, my father sort of curated some really fun, funny anecdotes about his life that kept everybody at arms-length. I never really got to know him. And that seemed, for Alan and I, important. Because the film is really for anybody who has ever struggled to live authentically because of outside pressures. Either the pressures to stifle mores or the, you know, family pressure.”
That intimate connection to the material made “Uncle Frank” a more draining project for Bettany than you might have expected.
“It’s one thing to be kneeling in front of a grave with a camera in front of you and a crew there, and pretending to mourn the loss when you’re 20,” Bettany admits. “It’s something different when you’re nearly 50-years-old, and you’re thinking, ‘O.K., so now I’m going to think about the brother I lost when I was 16-years-old, and go to this really dark place, and I’m going to be in this dark place for the next five days, you know, after shooting this scene’. I mean, finding a compelling reason. You know, beyond whether it’s sort of morally right to have taken the role or not. Generating that kind of energy, I think, becomes more urgent as you get older. I’ve got a wife and children and a cat and a dog, you know. It’s like going to therapy at 50 is really different from going to therapy and talking about yourself for an hour when you’re in your 20s. You’ve got to find a really good reason to be there.”
“Uncle Frank” arrives on Prime Video on November 25.
