"Chicago's made for me. The Bulls, the Cubs. I spent most of my growing up in Chicago and the Chicago area. I have to say I extendd my sympathies to all Cubs fans everywhere in Chicago and around the world. (laughs)And the Bulls -- they will return. Just don't watch TV for about a decade and we're going to be fine. You know what? We could all do with a break from TV for about 10 years, so it would be a good thing for all of us." The color of Aidan Quinn's eyes have received more press coverage than his acting talents. No other set of baby blues have been awed over as much except for Mel Gibson's and, of course, Paul Newman's. When the articles run out of adjectives to describe his deep, stirringly blue eyes, they ponder the question: why isn't Aidan Quinn a bigger star? This is a man whom Susan was desperately seekng, a sex symbol who proved himself to be a versatile and solid actor. Yet directors relegate him to playing second fiddle to Brad Pitt (Legends of the Fall) or Liam Neeson (Michael Collins) or being the token male love interest (Practical Magic, In Dreams).
"It's probably all my fault, but it makes me feel better to be bitter and blame other people," he laughs. Quinn has never been in it for the money, he's always been in it for the work even if the work that should be his hasn't always come his way. Even when it has, he'll let it go because he's a family man and family comes first. (He and actress Elizabeth Bracco, Lorraine's sister, have two kids -- Ava, 9 1/2, and Maya, 11 months -- "Every decade we're going to have one.") "What am I going to be on my deathbed saying -- ‘Gee, I wish I took that part' or ‘Gee, I wish I'd spent more time with my kids?'"
The frustration over the quality of his roles is evident. This is, after all, an actor you can depend on but one who can't depend on studio executives to cast him in substantial parts. Brad Pitt lobbied to have him cast in Legends of the Fall, but Pitt can't give up his day job to act as Quinn's agent. "I'm as good an actor as any of those other guys. The older I get, the more impatient I get because I feel like I've paid my dues enough to not have to go through as much as I do. It's frustrating to me when I get sent a script by a director who wants me to do the part and the studio says no and he has to pick a lesser actor. That happens quite often. That's frustrating to me."
This is where Quinn's latest feature, This Is My Father, comes in. Based on a tale his mother heard when she was growing up in Ireland, it is the story of the doomed love between Kieran O'Day, a shy farmer, and Fiona Flynn (newcomer Moya Farrelly), a feisty lass who dreams of escaping the country. Their story is told in flashbacks as their grown-up son (played by James Caan) attempts to find and meet his father. The film was shot by Declan Quinn, who served as cinematographer on Mike Figgis's Leaving Las Vegas, among others. It was written and directed by Paul Quinn and it stars Aidan Quinn as Kieran O'Day.
Little brother sent big brother the script and declared, "You're going to play the part and you're going to help me make this movie." Big brother, who feared not liking the script, put off reading it for about two weeks. Then he read it and was "knocked out by it, I was bawling my eyes out. I called him and told him I'd do anything to make it with him." So the brothers embarked on a four-year-long odyssey of pitching the script and trying to raise financing. They went to work on the script, whittling it down to a two-hour movie. "[Paul] had written a three and a half hour movie," Quinn explains. "We needed to get it down so that we could have a chance to retain creative control and also a chance to get it made. Frankly, who's going to give a first-time director money to go off and make a three and a half hour love piece about grief and death?"
Quinn sent the script to friends like Brendan Gleeson, Stephen Rea, Colm Meaney and John Cusack, all of whom make brief appearances in the film. "They wouldn't be signing on to do these small cameos if they didn't love it, and it was really the power of the script that got them all. I just got through the agents. That's all I did. Sometimes it's very hard to get an actor. . .it's very hard to get me to read a script because I just read so many bad ones that. . .you [just] want to know if it's good or bad or if it's an offer. I could spend my whole life just reading scripts and never work a day."
The shoot itself took a mere 37 days and the brothers found working with each other to be an enriching and sometimes trying experience. "We get along very well, we're good friends, we also bug the shit out of each other," he reports with a smile. "We don't exactly mince words so it automatically lent to a deeper experience artistically from all our different departments. We didn't have to worry about, ‘Oh, I'm just meeting this director and I don't want to hurt his feelings.' Or ‘I'd better say it like this and be politic.'"
The result is a film of enormous grace and power with Quinn's performance -- heartbreaking, resonant and award-worthy -- the jewel in its crown. Friends, critics and audiences are united in their praise for the film. In Ireland, where it was expected to run three weeks and pull in an optimistic figure of 100,000 pounds, it has been running for 16 weeks with receipts totalling over 600,000 pounds. This amount on a mere 15 screens with no advertising, just pure word of mouth. Mama and Papa Quinn "can't stop watching it. You have to kick them out of screenings and premieres. They're over the moon." Quinn, himself, still bawls when he screens the film.
Quinn put on 30 pounds and learned turfcutting for a part he calls one of the two best roles he's had in the last eight years. The other is The Assignment, an espionage thriller in which Quinn did double duty as an elusive killer and the doppelganger who is recruited by a CIA operative (Donald Sutherland) in an effort to capture the assassin. Quarantined from his wife and child, he trains to be like the assassin in all ways and finds the coldhearted killer's psyche merging with his own. It was released around the same time as two other political thrillers -- The Peacemaker with George Clooney and Nicole Kidman and The Jackal with Richard Gere, Bruce Willis and Sidney Poitier. Critics found The Assignment the best of the trio but the film had been unceremoniously dumped by Sony, whose division Triumph had shepherded the film into production. Triumph folded during the film's post-production.
Quinn is still rankled by what happened. "The Assignment was a great experience for me and I rue the day that. . . The people that run this movie business really don't know a lot about actors' talents and what they're capable of doing. That was a film where I got to do all sorts of characters and play all these different roles and I thought it was a really good film. I thought the director [Christian Duguay] did a wonderful job and it was just completely dumped. It was just dumped and that's frustrating because I don't get the opportunities to get that many great roles, and that maybe would have given me a chance to do more of them."
Quinn will next be seen in a supporting role as Meryl Streep's boyfriend in Wes Craven's 50 Violins, a true-to-life drama about Roberta Guaspari-Tzavaras who runs a violin program in Spanish Harlem. It would have been interesting to see the onscreen reunion of Quinn and Madonna, who was originally cast as Guaspari-Tzavaras. The film also stars Angela Bassett and Gloria Estefan. Quinn found Craven "terrific. He's very precise. Usually I don't like to receive a lot of direction. Usually for me that's a sign of disaster. A sign of someone that's insecure. But he directs a lot. Gives a lot of notes because he has a very specific vision of what he wants."
Quinn, who recently turned 40, and his family live in upstate New Jersey. His little girl Ava isn't particularly aware that Daddy is Aidan Quinn ("She's in her own private Idaho.") and that Mommy still acts every now and again.
PAMELA'S FILM AND ENTERTAINMENT SITE (PV): Will you and your wife ever be in films together, do you think?
AIDAN QUINN (AQ): Over my dead body. No! I want to work with her and she's always said, I'm not working with you. No way! Uh, uh. You're going to get critical of me and then--And I say, "Honey, I won't I promise, you know. But what are you wearing there? (laughs) Why are you wearing that?" But, um, so, just recently she said maybe we could do something together sometime.
PV: How critical does she get of your performances? Or your onscreen love scenes?
AQ: I think your family or your spouse, in particular. There's nobody that can bring you to your knees quicker. Both me to her or her to me. As someone says, because they know you so well. They know your vulnerabilities and stuff. But she's not critical at all. She's very supportive of my work as an actor.
PV: What does she think of your onscreen love scenes, love affairs?
AQ: That's not so easy. It wouldn't be for anyone, I don't think. You know, I don't blame her. But she's gotten really much better about it.
PV: So no more Clark Gable School of Kissing any more?
AQ: What's that?
PV: I don't know. I read somewhere where she said, he should go to the Clark Gable School of Kissing because he seems to put so much passion in those onscreen kisses.
AQ: Who? Elizabeth said that? My wife?
PV: I read that--
AQ: Yeah, she used to say, Why can't you kiss like they did in the 40s? They just put their faces together. I said, Hon, the realism of the movies, you can't do that any more. It's just, you can't. You can't get away with it. (pauses) Besides, it feels better doing it the other way. (laughs) I don't say that part.
- Aidan Quinn
