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He may not be a household name, but Richard Jenkins has been a familiar presence in American cinema for more than 20 years. And now taking the lead role in The Visitor, may yet turn the 61 year old into a star, as FOCUS discovers.
There are a few actors whose presence in a film brings with it the promise of increased enjoyment, performers who add value to the piece in a few scenes before leaving the stage. These character actors are, often, familiar faces even if their names elude all but the most dedicated film buffs.
Occasionally their reward for the fine work in the service of big movies headed up by big, well paid movie stars is a plum role in an independent movie. Sometimes that's all they need to go on and take their career to a whole new level, and that's what the eminently recognisable Richard Jenkins might be about to experience.
A favourite actor of the Coen Brothers, in recent years he has appeared in films as diverse as Fun With Dick & Jane, North Country and The Kingdom, gleefully stealing the show from better known names.
Cast in Thomas McCarthy's touching, and politically potent film The Visitor, he proves himself perfectly capable of taking the responsibility of a lead role. He plays a jaded professor forlornly coasting through life since the death of his wife, unexpectedly rejuvenated by the friendship he develops with an immigrant couple.
Initial suspicions between Walter (Jenkins), Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and Zainab (Danai Gurira) are soon replaced by the bonds fashioned from a shared love of music. But these are troubling times, and the illegal status of the couple threatens their American idyll, forcing Walter to address the injustices of a flawed system.
For Jenkins this was the role of a lifetime, but for all his experience it came with a few concerns.
"That's exactly what it is," he nods, "it's a role in a lifetime. Yup. That's it, you know. It fell in my lap, it was a gift, it was hard to believe. When we started to open the film in LA I started to get nervous in a way that I never really did when I was making the movie. I'd never had a part like this in film, I had on tv and on the stage, but it was when we opened it that I got really nervous."
Even if it hadn’t worked out so beautifully it's doubtful that Richard Jenkins would have been out of work for too long, such is constant the demand for his services. Since making The Visitor he has clocked up appearances in the Will Ferrell comedy Step Brothers and the Coens' Burn After Reading. But still, the glowing reviews he has garnered for his current film have doubtless pleased him.
"You hope that it will connect with an audience because, after all, that's why we do it. We don't do it in a vacuum, we do it to share it with other people. It's not complete until you guys see it and respond to it. Or not. So while you act like you don't care the truth is you really do, because if you do something you believe in when nobody else does it can be a weird feeling. You think 'where am I going wrong here?'."
The one thing he will have to get used to is people being able to put a name to the face they know so well from the dozens of films he has appeared in, which has not always been the case.
"The other day somebody said to me 'is your name Larry?'. I said 'no,', he said 'you sure?'. I said I was really sure. He said he knew me from somewhere. He said 'you've got to be Larry!', and I said 'no I don't'. Other times I've had 'what have I seen you in?', and I say 'I have no idea what you’ve seen,', and then you get people who say 'tell me some of the movies you’ve been in,'.
"And you don't want to do that because if you start doing that you'll name a movie and they'll say 'no,' and you'll name another and they'll say 'no,' and another and they say 'I saw that but you weren’t in that,'. Then when you do name a movie you were in…..I had one woman say to me 'why would I ever see something like that?'. So I stopped doing that."
While he admits that for his generation Marlon Brando remains the acting icon, Jenkins is generous in his praise for a wide range of performers including Michael Caine, Gene Hackman, Meryl Streep, Tom Wilkinson and Viggo Mortensen. This is the kind of company he would be justified in keeping, particularly if the gentle hum of Oscar buzz around his performance builds into a crescendo some time next year.
"It's not a world I'm familiar with," he smiles shyly, "but it's really nice that people are responding to this movie, it's a relief because if they hadn't it would have been my fault."
ANWAR BRETT
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