by Nick Nolte
In the years between my brief meeting with Edward Norton at the Academy Awards and my original casting as his father in Pride and Glory, I had gone from being the kind of actor who is basically only offered leading roles to someone who now was primarily considered for films in which I would play a grizzled old guy of some kind—a father or grandfather or goofy uncle or something. And that was okay. It was an inevitable part of aging, I presumed, and, as always, it was the quality of the script and the meatiness of the character that continued to interest me, not the size of my role.
When Pride and Glory premiered in 2008—with Jon Voight playing Captain Francis Tierney and Ed Norton playing his son—the film struggled both critically and financially, but I didn’t take any pleasure in that. Tropic Thunder, on the other hand—the movie that Ben Stiller had worried was too out-there to get made—became a huge hit when it was released in the summer of 2008. The movie grossed $188 million worldwide and I was happy for Ben and company, but I was focused instead on beautiful little Sophie at that point and on the delights and complexities of becoming a father for the second time at age sixty-six.
GAVIN O’CONNOR MIGHT HAVE DECIDED NEVER TO HAVE anything to do with me again—and if he had I would have accepted his response, because I stuck by my decision to leave Pride and Glory. The film’s production company, I noticed at the time, wove a story about my leaving because of the flare-up of an old knee injury—and I didn’t care. It would have been utterly fine with me if they had cited “creative differences” between Ed Norton and me—it just didn’t matter.
Yet it was cool that instead of being pissed off at me, Gavin stayed in close touch. He kept my message telling him I had to leave the film to avoid killing Ed Norton on his phone, and occasionally he would play it for me for fun. And he wanted to talk regularly, too, as he and his writing partner Cliff Dorfman began to conceptualize a new film. Gavin is an exhaustive kind of filmmaker. He researches and researches, casts, rewrites. I was told they were writing the father character specifically for me.
The guy they were creating was an aging father, too, and when Gavin finally let me read their completed screenplay, I was blown away. It was just brilliant. I knew it was excellent material right away. I wanted in.
Warrior is about an ex-marine, Tommy Conlon, played by Tom Hardy, who returns from the war in Iraq to ask his estranged father to help him train for the biggest event in mixed martial arts history. Tommy’s brother, an ex-fighter turned teacher, played by Joel Edgerton, also returns to the cage in a desperate bid to save his family from losing their home. With the help of his father—a once-terribly-abusive recovering alcoholic—Tommy is pitted against his brother in the event final, and, as they fight, the two brothers face their childhoods, their father, and the forces that long ago pulled them apart.
My character, the boys’ father, Paddy Conlon, is a supporting part, yes, but it’s a powerful role, and I was thrilled to play it—and to work under Gavin’s direction at last. Neither son fully wants to reconcile with his father, and my character’s terrible guilt, isolation, and pain are almost impossible for him to bear and he begins to drink again in despair.
It’s a very powerful story—one that includes some redemption, too—but I wasn’t thrilled with the MMA fighting. I wasn’t a fan, I didn’t watch too much of it, and it looked awful brutal to me. I hoped Gavin would consider a rewrite that would make both sons boxers instead.
“I know it’s ugly and violent,” Gavin responded, “but you’ve really got to find out what it’s about. Go to some of the matches, meet some fighters, meet their parents, their girlfriends, see their life. And you’ll see it’s not about violence.” And he was right, I ultimately discovered. The violence inside the cage is as brutally real as it can be—but the men and women who become MMA fighters, I came to understand, are seeking a sense of purpose in their lives, self-respect, and the opportunity to provide for their families.
Gavin was up-front in telling me that he had based several elements of Paddy Conlon’s character on my own life. My reaction was to embrace it. I had never been silent about my own addictions, and playing the role of Paddy helped me further explore and come to understand who I am. I had firsthand experience with addictions—how destructive they are and how difficult they are to overcome—and I appreciated Gavin’s belief in me as an actor. He told the press when Warrior premiered that he hoped my role as Paddy would remind both the industry and filmgoers of the kind of work of which I was capable, work that I’d been doing for decades. Gavin said, “I hope this brings him back and gets him the recognition he deserves as a national treasure.” I don’t know about all that, but coming from Gavin, I’ll take it.
I GOT ALONG VERY WELL WITH TOM HARDY. HE’S A BRILLIANT actor. He likes to tell tall tales as much as I do. He’ll give you a story that’s full of shit. Once he claimed he was a low-class Englishman, yet he actually comes from extreme wealth. He told me, “My dad, man, I used to beat the shit out of him outside of the house. I’d just bash his head into the car, you know.” That was likely all the testosterone talking. I replied, “Well, Tom, I couldn’t reach my dad to hit him. He was six foot six. All I’d get was air.” So I bullshitted him back.
It was one of the few times we would hang out, as I thought it best that I didn’t socialize much with Joel and Tom off-camera. Gavin thought that was right because when actors fraternize between takes, all the work you do preparing for the on-screen relationship is ruined. All the tension must be rebuilt. And that whole film was built on the tension between us three.
WARRIOR WAS ONE OF THOSE PICTURES THAT HAD A WIDE range of responses from critics when it was released in September 2011. It was either “cathartic” and “beautiful,” or a film with “a lunkhead plot.” A few opinions fell somewhere in between, but the movie ultimately failed to earn back its budget. However, I was honored to receive my third Academy Award nomination for the role as Paddy Conlon.
I’d assumed that at age seventy-one, my days of receiving award nominations were long over. Thirty-five years before, I had received a Golden Globe nomination when I played a young boxer struggling to bond with his brother and his parents in Rich Man, Poor Man. My first Academy Award nomination had come fifteen years later for my role in The Prince of Tides, in which I played a man haunted by his upbringing and desperate to find a way to be the father he wants to be. I had been nominated for a second Academy best-actor award six years later for my role in Affliction, playing a man crippled by all that his father failed to offer him.
I’d won a number of awards in the U.S. and abroad over the years. But I figured I was too long in the tooth now. So I was truly surprised when the Academy nominated me for a best supporting actor Oscar for my role in Warrior.
I appreciated the recognition, yet I continued to believe that the idea of “best” when it came to acting was a very mistaken one, and I wasn’t surprised when the winner that year was the wonderful Christopher Plummer, who won for his role in Beginners. The Academy voters preferred, in the end, a far more redemptive character than Paddy Conlon could be, yet at the end of Warrior, Paddy has much to still live for as well. And I knew in my own heart that some kinds of recognition are far more meaningful—and truly important—than others.
WE SHOT WARRIOR IN PITTSBURGH, A CITY I’D GOTTEN TO know well over the years and liked a great deal. During the shoot, I befriended an ex–narcotics cop who was my driver and whom everyone knew as simply Jimmy from Pittsburgh. Jimmy was a poet and operated gyms for the city’s underprivileged kids. He and I forged something special during our days together.
I remember getting a phone call from Jimmy one morning, and he sounded like a man with a plan. “First thing we got to do is this Saturday, we’ve got to go to the Steelers stadium at eight o’clock. There’s a local campaign against gun violence and the leadership will run a scroll of all the people who have been shot with handguns in the city in the last five years. There are going to be about ten thousand people in the stadium. The mayor is goin
g to talk, and then a priest will talk, and then I’m going to talk for about five minutes, and you’re going to talk for twenty minutes about nonviolence.”
I said, “Sounds good, Jimmy, let’s do that.”
Yet when I came down from my room that Saturday morning and met Jimmy in his car, he was visibly shaking and something clearly was very wrong. I said, “Are you going to tell me what the fuck’s going on?”
“Yeah, some horrible events, and they’re still going on,” he replied. “So far, since last night, three cops have been killed. They went through a door last night, and they walked in on a kid who had an AR-15 and an ammunition stash. He shot the first five through the door. The rest of the cops surrounded him, but he still won’t surrender. This speech at the stadium has turned into a huge thing. Now it’s going to be the governor, the cardinal, some bishops. I am still going to talk for five minutes and you are still going to talk for twenty and we will keep the crowd updated on the situation as we go.”
I didn’t respond with anything more than, “Okay,” because this was fucking tragic. The murder of three cops was untenable. I was as shaken as Jimmy was, but somehow that day I found words about choosing cooperation and nonviolence to share with what must have been a hundred thousand people. Most of Pittsburgh was there.
It was one of those things that just empties the life and hope out of you. Fifteen kids were orphaned that night. They had been proud of their dads, but now their dads were gone forever. After the program, Jimmy suggested that he and I visit some precincts, to say hello and show our support, and as we did, we heard repeatedly that hundreds of surviving cops’ kids were now terrified that they would lose their dads, too. Just seeing their dads in uniform freaked them out now.
“Well, bring them into work with you, for sure,” I suggested to the cops with whom we spoke. And then I had an idea. “Let’s get lots of kids, the kids who’re scared and even some of the kids whose dads died last night, and let’s get them into a station on National Take Your Child to Work Day. We’ll get television reporters and cameras here, too, and we’ll help the kids have some fun, if just for a minute or two.”
Hundreds of children arrived at the precinct within a couple of hours, and every television station in the city filmed our impromptu afternoon. I just winged it, and Jimmy and his brothers in blue helped me pull off something none of us could have imagined doing. Black kids and white kids of every age joined us and we did have fun, goofing for the camera, sending the message that all of us have no choice but to care for each other as we fumble our way into the future.
Gavin was at home and he saw me on the TV with the kids. Everyone saw me on TV, and because I had a mug that lots of people recognized after thirty-six years in film, when I was walking down the street, the Pittsburgh bus drivers and cab drivers would stop and say, “Hey, Nick, need a ride?” They were appreciative. And it was one of the most memorable days of my life.
I HADN’T APPEARED IN A TELEVISION SERIES OR MOVIE SINCE Rich Man, Poor Man, but by 2011, TV had emerged as the medium in which the best storytelling and acting were currently taking place. Shows like Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Shield, The Sopranos, and The Wire were considered to have ushered in television’s new “golden age,” and it was an exciting time.
I certainly wasn’t one of those actors who ever thought it was beneath me to appear on television, and when an opportunity arose for me to secure a recurring role in a series developed by the legendary writer-director David Milch, I leapt at it. Milch had cocreated NYPD Blue and was the creator of HBO’s Deadwood, which many now consider the finest television drama ever produced. Deadwood’s brilliance left many of us presuming that everything Milch touched would inevitably turn to gold.
It was Milch’s next show for HBO that included a character who was right for me, he believed. This new series would be about a bunch of intersecting lives in the world of horse racing. Milch pitched me his whole concept for Luck when he came to see me that first day. He had it well in hand. My character was a much-traveled and guilt-ridden horse trainer named Walter Smith. Our ensemble cast would be anchored by Dustin Hoffman in the lead role as an aging con who is released from prison as the series begins.
The cast of Luck was incredible. Hoffman was pretty relaxed. He’d stumble around in rehearsals, but when it was showtime, he would be right on point. When a scene flows naturally, that’s the juice us actors live off. Anyone far enough along in this profession knows to just let it loose and trust the moment. Hoffman has that.
In order to get the show green-lit, Milch had had to agree to HBO’s demand that director-producer Michael Mann would direct the first two episodes, so that Milch himself could focus entirely on the writing, but the two men clashed mightily right from the outset. On our very first day of shooting, I bumped into David outside my trailer, and he pointedly asked, “Nick, what do you think of this motherfucking cocksucker Michael Mann?”
And I answered, “Well, David, you know, I don’t think I can afford to have an attitude about him because I’ve got to go and suit up, you know?”
“Oh, shit,” David responded. “That’s right, you’re shooting. Oh, fuck. I’m sorry. I’ll get the fuck out of here.” And he was right. It wasn’t good for me to see him so angry at the man who would be directing me. I knew what my immediate goal had to be, and that was simply to fully embody my character—and let David be the brilliant, brilliant writer he can be.
Despite the tension on set, we had the makings of a fine series. I watched the episodes, and they were excellent. Yet much of the drama was carried by the horses, and I knew we couldn’t depend on the races themselves for our storylines time after time. During the same period we were filming, a horse fell, severely breaking its leg, and had to be put down. Then a second horse was injured and had to be euthanized during the shooting of the seventh episode.
HBO had renewed us for a second season already, but with the outcry from PETA and the unfortunate death of a third horse, HBO canceled the show. The agency that officially oversees animal welfare in film and on television is the American Humane Association. They had been working closely with us, but regardless, there are unforeseen accidents that can happen. It was not only tragic but a deeply disappointing and abrupt end to our show. But we were professionals, too, and we understood the complex dynamics that led to the decision.
In my seventies now, who knew if I’d ever return to television again? Acting is as big a gamble as horse racing is, and at least my time spent shooting at the Santa Anita racetrack led to a special reunion for me personally. When my high school football teammate and good friend Steve Priborski—a farrier working at the track whom I had met a million years before at Omaha’s Benson High—heard that I was working on Luck and came over to say hello, the two of us were able to renew almost instantly one of those kinds of friendships that can survive the decades and just don’t ever die. Deep friendships with people from outside of the industry can ground an actor profoundly. Equally valuable, but somehow always harder for me to keep up, are friendships I’ve developed inside the acting world. Luckily, the prospect of a great project creates enough pull to lure me out of hibernation and reconnect me with folks like Robert Redford.
BOB AND I WENT WAY BACK—NOT AS FAR BACK AS OMAHA, but we’d been working in the same small industry for many years and we had always respected each other. Just three years before, I’d said yes to a small role as Bob’s character’s old comrade and fellow aging radical in The Company You Keep, a political thriller he had directed and starred in. Although we’re good friends, Bob and I have always approached our careers a bit differently.
Back when we were both represented by lawyer Gary Hendler, I remember Gary telling me that I needed to shape my career like Bob’s. “He does a couple of studio movies and then gets to do one for himself,” Gary said, as if to encourage me to do the same. And I laughed. “Gary, I’m doing one for myself now, and next I’m going to do one for myself, then after that I’ll do another for myself, too,
” which pissed Gary off, but at least he understood my unwavering position on the matter.
When Bob wanted to talk with me about A Walk in the Woods, I went into his office in Santa Monica, where he asked, “Do you want to do it?” I answered, “I’d love to do it.” And the deal was done. Bob had originally wanted to cast his dear friend Paul Newman in the role, but the timing had never been right and Paul had passed away before they could realize that dream. Now Bob wanted to hire a new writer, and he included me in the process. We met with several writers, had a couple of versions of the screenplay rewritten, then did a read-through. We really worked at it, and it took us about a year, during which Bob went off and did the film All Is Lost.
Bob is only five years older than me, so we’re basically from the same generation, but in reality, he belongs to Newman’s generation, in part because he started working in films very young and celebrity came early to him, and I was an unknown actor until my late thirties. Bob’s generation wasn’t quite as hip as mine was—or perhaps as wild—but he and I have always seemed to share similar principles.
When I act, I’m trying to create an archetype, a general feeling for audiences that allows them to experience something outside themselves when they watch me at work. It’s much larger than me, and it’s something I simply must do to survive. I don’t know how to do anything else. I’ve played these archetypes for more than fifty years now. If I ever run out of stories that mean something to me, then I won’t tell them anymore. But I have to risk making mistakes. Life is full of blunders, but they are our teachers. You pay attention, and you simply figure things out along the way.