Rebel

by Nick Nolte

  That lesson, that truth that life isn’t worth shit unless you’re willing to take some risks, was something which seemed inherent to me in Bill Bryson’s memoir A Walk in the Woods. Bob had recognized that element, too, and I remember his telling me that the biggest reason he bought the film rights was because no other book had made him laugh so hard in a very long time. Bryson told Bob to go ahead and do it, and have fun. With that blessing, Bob proceeded.

  The book is the true story of Bryson’s decision to hike the entire two-thousand-mile length of the Appalachian Trail, despite the fact that he’s in his sixties and not much of an outdoorsman. His wife—played by Emma Thompson in the film—thinks he’s crazy and insists that he find a companion to join him and help keep him alive, but all his friends are far too logical to join him, except for his old buddy Stephen Katz. Overweight, out of shape, and the kind of fellow who has always held his life together with nothing more than baling wire and a handful of luck, Katz was a character I knew I could have a very good time with.

  In a way that seems quite real to me, Katz admires his friend Bill’s literary and financial success as well as his stable and supportive marriage. Bryson, in turn, is drawn to Katz’s freedom, his ability to live each day exactly as he chooses, his willingness—no, his need—to take significant risks. The two men respect each other, but they challenge each other, too, and each is a bit jealous of what the other has. Katz says, “Look at what you’ve got. You’ve got a home and a wife, a steady kind of thing.” But Bryson feels stifled and prematurely finished. The two men represent a dynamic tension that almost all of us have to deal with daily—especially as we get older. And for me personally, no matter how attractive the settled and secure life appears sometimes, I’ve never been able to do the safe thing. Never. I’ve always done stupid things, or I’ve been brilliant. It’s been one or the other.

  One of the great pleasures of making A Walk in the Woods was that it got us out into nature. Bob and I were both too damn old to rough it and camp out, but we had a ball nonetheless. I try to spend as much time in the woods and fields as I can. I don’t do well in cities, and that’s why I’ve chosen to live in a secluded compound in Malibu for so long, one where I can spend as much time as I want hermiting in my big gardens, growing vegetables and eating food that’s as fresh as it can be, getting my hands dirty and working up a good sweat. It’s something that connects me to my childhood, of course, and the quiet, rural life has always kept me sane. Sane-ish.

  I loved shooting on location up and down the Appalachian Trail, where the story takes place. I was in lousy shape—which was perfect because so is Katz. At the end of the day, we were beat. We were really roughed up from shooting the scenes. There was none of this movie stuff of “I’m going to my trailer”; there were no trailers. We were exposed to the elements all day. That took a while to get used to. We walked a lot. I replaced my hip right after the film to match my fake knee. I’m becoming bionic. Early sports injuries and years of ignoring my body’s aches and pains had turned me into something of a geezer. But A Walk in the Woods is a geezer picture, of course, so all was well.

  There is something about wildness that appeals to me. I’m enamored of the craziness that lies somewhere deep inside each of us, because we are each uniquely made. I like that, and it appeals to me to express the truth—onstage and in front of the camera—that inside each of us is a unique and wild entity. Each of us is part of a universe that is comprised of both the inescapable rules of physics and the infinite chaos of stellar explosions and imploding black holes.

  But the universe gets along fine, despite its inherent absurdity. And we, as part of the universe, attempt to make the world we inhabit rational and coherent and predictable, when it’s really highly random. Think about it for a moment: the universe says to us, “You get to live, but the catch is that you have to die.” Who in the world would take a deal like that? Well, I believe each of us does.

  Every one of us struggles to make life livable somehow, and my way of making my own life palatable has always been to just bite it on the ass, to take big risks, then find ways to either celebrate or survive them. I’ve always loved a Cervantes-inspired quote, one that I’ve often hung on the walls of my film-set trailers: “In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd.” I’ve actually achieved the impossible a time or two—at least in some deep part of me I believe I have—and chaos has always followed me like a randy dog. I’m just as ridiculous as I can be sometimes, and that’s why I was so drawn to a character like gruff and grizzled old Katz and his enthusiastic inclination to join his pal for a two-thousand-mile walk through the woods.

  THERE IS SOME IRONY IN THE FACT THAT ALTHOUGH I WAS determined as a kid never to study much in school, I’ve loved my opportunities to mentor young people over the years. Always a lousy student, I think I’ve been a pretty good teacher. And the truth is that I would never have gotten anywhere in this business if I hadn’t been eager to learn from some wonderful mentors, too, legends like Kit Carson, Allen Dutton, Helen Langworthy, Alan Rudolph, Paul Mazursky, Mike Medavoy, and many, many others.

  Some of my assistants over the years have primarily focused on helping me clerically or personally, and others have wanted to glean as much from me as they could about the wildly complex and unpredictable industry in which we work. Twenty years ago, when I met twenty-four-year-old Greg Shapiro, who had joined me as my assistant on the film Mulholland Falls, I asked him on the first day we worked together, “Do you have any idea what this is going to be like?”

  “Well, I hope it’s going to be everything!” he responded with a grin and great enthusiasm.

  I liked his response, and I met it with some eagerness of my own. “Yes, exactly. And you know, in this first film I strongly suggest that you get experience in all these areas. Go through preparation, into production, as far as into casting and all of that as they will let us, and then work every day on the film. Don’t focus on getting me cigarettes when I have a whim, or a shot of tequila, or whatever. Watch on the monitor all the scenes I’m doing, because we’ll plot them out, and maybe there will be some things you catch. And then watch the dailies, too, and the next day you can tell me how the dailies were. Or, if there’s something that really alarms you, call me, and I’ll take a special look at them.”

  Greg dove in headfirst and did a terrific job, soaking up the facets of filmmaking like a sponge. After some time, he wanted to take the next steps for someone eager to make a career out of film, hoping I’d agree for us to form a production company called Kingsgate Films and start making our own movies together. I told him I was way too busy and focused on acting to head up that kind of effort, but when he insisted that he’d do all the work, I made sure he knew what he was getting into.

  “Okay,” I told him, “it will mean you’re going to have to meet writers, established writers and up-and-coming writers, foreign writers, get a huge collection of stories, figure out what you want to say, and then, after the material’s written, shape it into movie form and follow it all the way through to production, including hiring a director—at which point your work will only really get started.” I looked at him hard. “To be a great producer, you’ll have to be the core of all of this, the heart of this particular kind of storytelling. You. It will all depend on you.”

  Greg said, “Yes, Nick. That’s what I want to do.” So, off we went, with Greg initially working out of my property in Malibu for two years. Greg then recruited an ambitious young friend, Joel Lubin, who now is co-head of Creative Arts Agency’s motion picture talent department, to join our company, and we soon got a deal with Fine Line/New Line and had an office on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. That deal was a result of Mother Night, which was a Fine Line film. When that deal expired, we moved to Phoenix Pictures, which was Mike Medavoy’s office. I had just done The Thin Red Line for Phoenix Pictures and Mike and I had been interconnected through the years, working on many films together all the way back from the Heart Beat
days.

  In the end, Greg and I produced five or six films together. Our first film was Simpatico, produced by my company Kingsgate Films, based on a Sam Shepard play, which starred me, Jeff Bridges, and Sharon Stone. Next came Neverwas, which was directed by a talented young fellow Greg connected with named Joshua Michael Stern.

  I watched with pride as Greg built his repertoire with projects that both interested him and possessed real juice—even if they weren’t big moneymakers—which is exactly what, beginning a long time ago, I had tried to convince him was important. Greg’s impressive producing chops earned him an Academy Award in 2010 when The Hurt Locker was named best picture of the year. Then a few years thereafter, Greg had a new concept for a TV series that brought him, Josh Stern, and me back together.

  Greg took his idea to Josh, hoping they could collaborate. But Josh was focused on his preparations to direct the 2013 biopic Jobs, starring Ashton Kutcher, and he turned the proposal down. When at last the time was right, the two spent a year creating the show, writing the pilot, and finding a home for it at Epix, a new premium cable channel.

  Graves is an original television series in which I play a former president of the United States who sets out to undo the many wrongs of his administration, while dealing with the political ambitions of his wife, played by Sela Ward. The storyline that the former president’s wife is running for the U.S. Senate is one that came from me. I didn’t want the show to be built around stock kinds of characters who lack that “juice” that’s so vital to a series. I wanted each one to have a strong arc and tension on their own. It was also important to me that Graves and his wife are partners of equal standing. The show is set in Santa Fe because it’s a real place and it’s not New York or L.A.—where so many shows are set—and because New Mexico is not only gorgeous but one of those states that offer tax incentives to encourage film and television production. We have a great cast and some fine writers, and I’ve enjoyed two epic seasons back in television again after Luck got very unlucky.

  But more than that, at seventy-six I’m starring in Graves, and that’s my great good fortune. Lots of actors my age, men and women alike, only are offered window-dressing kinds of roles, grandma or grandpa parts that are often very two-dimensional—characters who are either sweet and lovable old codgers or who are so damn ancient and mean that no one wants to come near them. In this case, I was offered a multifaceted character to play specifically because Greg Shapiro and Josh Stern imagined me at the center of a show like this.

  Our several-month shoot in New Mexico during the winter and spring of 2016 was hard on me. I had a new titanium hip, as well as a new knee, and I was postponing laminectomy surgery on my back in order to get the first ten episodes shot. I was in constant and sometimes excruciating pain. To make matters worse, a complete set of dental implants that were on order weren’t finished in time for the shoot, so I had to use dentures—appliances both my tireless assistant Denise and I despised as they inevitably wiggled their way out of my mouth and she would have to chase them back in.

  But being in Santa Fe was a true pleasure, as always. The front-desk kid at the La Fonda hotel didn’t quite know what to do when I asked him whether the hotel staff had ever found my father’s wooden leg.

  Graves has run for two successful seasons so far, and once again—despite my seventy-six years, or maybe just because of them—I received a Golden Globe nomination, for my performance in season one. Jacqueline Bisset made a guest appearance in season two, bringing back my boyish shyness from my younger days on The Deep. Her beauty still transcends, but who am I kidding? I’m ancient. Critics seemed to agree, commenting repeatedly about my getting damn old, one of them claiming, “Nolte’s voice sounds as though he’s just gargled with glass shards. Moreover, his physical appearance resembles a totaled car.”

  Big surprise! I was seventy-five and hurting. I looked and sounded like I was in Graves condition, pun intended, but it’s something that happens to everyone if you stick around long enough. I had worked for over a full decade in regional theater, and then, beginning with “The Feather Farm” on The Wonderful World of Disney, I had appeared in ninety-nine credited roles in television programs, television series, and feature films between 1969 and 2017. I had been very busy telling stories, and I’d had an extraordinary run by anyone’s measure.

  By turns, I had been brilliant and had fallen flat on my face; I had become father to two tremendous children and they were both proud of and embarrassed by their dad. I had taken big risks along the way, and loved a number of women powerfully and sometimes poorly. I also could claim friends like Gerardo Resendiz, an immigrant from Mexico who for nearly forty years has been my carpenter, gardener, Rock of Gibraltar, and dear and steadfast friend.

  Playing the role of a former president who looks back on his consequential life has encouraged me to do the same thing. In the second season, my character even writes his memoirs! I realize this is a new irony; all the times in which I have relied on my art form to help infuse my life with purpose and now the art mimics my real-life ponderings. Sometimes, these ponderings have brought a bit of pride; at other times I’ve winced, and even occasionally wished I could crawl into a hole. But regardless, my story will soon join all the tomes in my tree house library that have informed my journey. Among those books are the threadbare ones that saved me a lifetime ago in that little room in Phoenix.

  At seventy-six, I really must begin to address the question of dying, and it’s something I’m doing without undue fear because I’ve always had to face fear and the crippling anxieties it brings. Many of my contemporaries are gone by now, and I suspect I’ve got five years or so before I, too, get to head “elsewhere” to be rebellious and cause more glorious havoc.

  When I reflect on all of the roles I’ve had—as a corn-fed Midwestern kid trying to make his parents proud, a football player, an actor, a lover, a father—it feels like it’s a meaningless exercise unless it offers something to the present moment, to the present act in which I encounter myself and the world around me. Like it or not, I’ve led a public life, and reflection also inevitably rubs the public and private versions of me together in ways that are sometimes abrasive, yet at other times the two seem to meaningfully connect.

  When you act, the audience or the camera puts you in a self-conscious place, a condition you must try to get over, even though you never can, and it’s a condition that’s related to death in some ways. You step over a line, and you have no idea what will follow, but you know you must take the step forward. No one can go backward.

  As an actor, you become a student of people, and that process of observing them is, in a way, a psychological relief from having to live your own life. You may die five or six times onstage or on the screen, and you think it teaches you something about dying. But it isn’t until mothers, fathers, friends start dying that you truly do begin to make sense of the way in which death rather miraculously gives meaning to life. So it’s curious—an actor like me can portray a thousand men over a lifetime, but away from the lights and cameras, I’ve had nothing but my own personal experience to turn to, and real life, as I’ve written, has never been easy for me.

  Yet here’s the thing: it’s a rare and precious opportunity to live profoundly in the moment—something that very few people get to do. It’s an opportunity to give everything you’ve got to your imagination, and I’m one of those people who believe that imagination is reality. I don’t make a distinction between unreal and real. I don’t say that acting is not living. It is living! In fact, it’s entirely possible that I am never more truly alive than in the moments and hours when I’m imagining and immersed in a character. I’ve believed for so long that real life causes me trouble that I failed to recognize that acting is conscious living at its most profound.

  Whether onstage or in film, it’s impossible to play a character who is exactly the same on two different days, just as our brains never return to precisely the same state twice—not ever. Acting and living are proc
esses that require constant flexing, changing, growing, evolving. It’s our nature as human beings to be adaptable and pliable, and to be self-aware and self-confident enough to let yourself come truly alive in your imagination is a tremendous feat. My mother would be proud that I gleaned that from her.

  Yet you should acknowledge, I think, that you can’t live in that state always and forever. And because you can’t, you do your best to keep a sense of humor in your pocket, to stay in the present, to read and continue to learn, and to really love the people you love. You stay active in the moment—in the garden, walking in the woods, and constantly, if silently, chanting your gratitude for everything that you have and all that you’ve encountered during the years you’ve searched for yourself.

  While I acknowledge that death will arrive for me before too many more years pass, I want to prepare for it without giving it too much conscious thought. We are all terminal cases, after all, and if you can still take breaths, you should feel lucky. I’ve had a wonderful time living, and I look forward to a good time dying. In the meantime, I hope to return to Santa Fe to film the third season of Graves, and to my renewed opportunity to imagine that I’m President Richard Graves again, letting all my life that I’ve lived ’til now help me step once more into that wonderful realm of imagination where I’m most at ease and at home.

  And I’m sure I’ll stop by the La Fonda again to see, damn it, if we can’t finally find Dad’s wooden leg.

  AFTERWORD