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| Feels like spirited teen At 14 years of age, Emile Hirsch packed up a successful TV career to seek serious movie roles. At 17, he's proving it was a mature decision. By Renee Graham / The Boston Globe AFTER FOUR YEARS as an actor, Emile Hirsch had compiled an impressive set of acting credits. By 1999, he'd made appearances on such television shows as ER, NYPD Blue, and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, and played a young Harry Houdini in a TV biopic. Yet at a time when most young actors are eager to accept every offered role, Hirsch decided to stop. Though only 14, he already had a clear sense of how he wanted to manage his career. "I felt like I'd tasted what television had to offer, but I'd never done a movie," he says. "A lot of the younger actors I'd admired like River Phoenix and Leonardo DiCaprio, when they were around my age, they had these cool, breakout roles that I felt were really good movies, like This Boy's Life and Stand by Me. And I thought I could try to take that route, and get that cool breakout role. "To me, it wasn't like I was doing something that new. I was just waiting for something, and I didn't want to get sidetracked by becoming a regular on a series," he adds. "There was just a certain path I wanted to take." That path led Hirsch to his first big-screen role in the well-received drama, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, which was released earlier this year. After a half-dozen auditions, he landed a role opposite Jodie Foster and Kieran Culkin - and gave a standout performance as Francis Doyle, the most thoughtful member of a rowdy group of Catholic school friends in the 1970s In his latest film, The Emperor's Club, he again plays a 1970s schoolboy, but Hirsch's Sedgewick Bell is a far more complex character. Sedgewick arrives at prestigious St. Benedict's and clashes with school traditions, as well as his professor, Mr. Hundert, played by Kevin Kline. Between Sedgewick and Mr. Hundert, there is more affection than acrimony, but it is a vexing relationship, which unfolds over more than a quarter-century. "This movie is about the paths people take, and how they get there," says Hirsch, now 17, during a recent visit to Boston. "Sedgewick is complicated, and that made it fun to play him." Playing it cool The Emperor's Club, which opens Friday, is based on Ethan Canin's short story The Palace Thief. Sedgewick, the charming, cunning son of a U.S. senator, comes off like a cross between Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke and Steve McQueen in The Great Escape - he even bounces a ball off his dorm-room wall like McQueen's Cooler King. A natural ringleader, he's the kid who smarts off in class, is more inclined to connive his way through a situation, and never passes on a chance to challenge authority - especially Mr. Hundert. In explaining Sedgewick's relationship to Mr. Hundert, Hirsch compared the wily schoolboy to a hawk, and the straight-laced professor to a swan. "It's like a swan trying to teach a hawk how to become a swan, but in many ways, if a swan doesn't live up to the virtues of being a swan, then the hawk can never become a swan." Done with his ornithological comparisons, Hirsch pauses, then smiles. "Wow, that's so abstract. I'm sorry." Then again, Hirsch is accustomed to abstract ideas. By film's end, Sedgewick is a corporate giant with political aspirations - imagine a taller, better-looking Ross Perot. He's also 40 years old - but the boyish Hirsch made a pitch to director Michael Hoffman to also play the adult Sedgewick. Next Page --> |
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