Avatar’s real-life star
Chris Serico • The Journal News • March 6, 2010 • AP Photo/Carlo Allegri
The broad shoulders, square jaw and age-defying physique of 57-year-old Stephen Lang are just part of the “Avatar” star’s striking presence.
His well-timed smack of motion-capture actor Kevin Dorman during his audition for the Oscar-nominated box-office epic didn’t hurt (his audition) when James Cameron was searching for someone to play the antagonistic Col. Miles Quaritch.
“Jim says there’s point where I just grabbed (Dorman) and whacked him in the head,” says Lang with a laugh. “I probably did. I didn’t hit him hard; I just gave him a shot. And Jim said the minute I did that, I had the role.”
With parts in “Avatar,” “The Men Who Stare at Goats” and “Public Enemies” this past year, it’s been a hot streak for Lang, a longtime Westchester resident whose county roots run deep. After first spending a year in Armonk, where his grandfather had owned a farm on Byram Lake Road, Lang and his family called Bedford home for nearly 20 years until moving in 2008.
“I knew the area very, very well,” he says. “When we were starting a family in the city, and after we had our second child, we thought we’d try it up there a little bit.”
Splitting his life now between Columbia County and New York City, he is considering making the trip to Los Angeles for tomorrow’s Academy Awards ceremony. “Avatar” is up for nine Oscars — including Best Picture — but none for acting.
“You’d always like to see the great work (in ‘Avatar’) recognized,” Lang says. “Having said that, I have no doubt that all the work that was recognized from all the other films is great as well.”
He adds that the achievements of motion-capture actors, like Zoe Saldana as Na’vi alien Neytiri in “Avatar” and Andy Serkis as Gollum in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, should not be dismissed just because their work coincides with technological advances.
“Any actor who’s ever worked in performance-capture will tell you the same thing,” he says. “It is a very, very basic and fundamental acting experience. … It might be helpful (when) watching a performance to regard the blue skin and the tails and all of that as elaborate hair and makeup, and wardrobe and makeup, because that’s what it is.”
No. 4 at the box office last weekend, “Avatar” has banked more than $700 million in the U.S. and $2.55 billion worldwide, making it the top-grossing film of all time. Even with all the hype surrounding a movie that reportedly cost more than $200 million to make, Lang says he didn’t worry it would flop, especially after witnessing the public reaction to a June preview at an Amsterdam expo.
“It was so massive and magnificent, so awe-struck, that I felt, ‘Wow, maybe this is going to be something really, really special,’” Lang says. “But I don’t think anybody thought that it was going to become a worldwide phenomenon that sort of goes beyond actually being a movie.”
As a 5-year-old wanting to swashbuckle like Errol Flynn, Lang had a passion for acting realized when he was an elementary school student at P.S. 178 in Queens, where he reveled in playing George Washington.
“My (stage) daughter was saying, ‘Father, we have a new coat. Why don’t you wear your new coat?’ And my line was, ‘Dear, I prefer the ol’ buff and blue of the revolution.’ That’s the first time I hammed it up,” Lang says.
His first big break was landing the part of Happy in a 1984 stage revival of “Death of a Salesman” with Dustin Hoffman. Lang parlayed that success the next year, when he reprised the role in the made-for-TV movie adaptation.
He thrived in that environment, earning enough pay to justify taking stage roles he coveted equally. While earning stage cred, he scored a 1991 Tony nomination for best actor in “The Speed of Darkness.”
The winner that night, Kevin Spacey, would be one of Lang’s costars in the movie “The Men Who Stare at Goats.” Lang also played Col. Jessep in the Broadway version of “A Few Good Men.” Considered for the same role in the 1992 movie revamp, he initially had a hard time watching Jack Nicholson’s take on his lines, including the ubiquitous “You can’t handle the truth!”
“I’d say he’s more than adequate,” Lang says. “He’s Jack (bleeping) Nicholson!”
But only a year after Nicholson won that movie role, Lang would have one of his most successful cinematic stretches, with memorable stints as Ike Clanton in “Tombstone” and Maj. Gen. George E. Pickett in “Gettysburg.” Add his turn as Gen. Stonewall Jackson in 2003’s “Gods and Generals,” and one may understand the mutual love between Lang and 19th-century settings.
“If I could, I would be born in approximately 1845, so I could have been a youth, perhaps a drummer boy during the Civil War,” he says. “The world was such a big place back then, and I like the idea of the vast unknown and, yet, flushed toilets.”
While staging his own play, the military-oriented “Beyond Glory,” Lang caught the attention of Cameron, who finally found his Col. Quaritch.
It was somewhat of a redemptive experience for the actor, who’d auditioned for Cameron’s 1986 film, “Aliens,” starring Lang’s “Avatar” costar, Sigourney Weaver.
Lang says awards, while appreciated, don’t change his career perspective.
“I don’t measure my own self-worth or my own life by it, and I don’t measure other people’s by it,” he says. “Having said that, I hope that ‘Avatar’ cleans up.”
