An Interview with Susan Sarandon

AE: What drew you to the part of playing Doris Duke?
SS: Well, I’m always interested in love stories and here were two people who were so damaged and kind of isolated and had such different backgrounds and yet somehow had the courage to become intimate with each other even if it wasn’t necessarily in a sexual intimacy.

I felt that those of us who had heard of Doris Duke and the butler and all the intrigue knew all the big external details of her life, but we really don’t know what happened internally. So the idea of trying to investigate how these people got to the point where they were witnessing – they became witnesses for each other’s lives – I found just really fascinating. I felt that if I was lucky enough to find the right Bernard, we would work it out somehow.

And Ralph was the top of my list and he called – he was vacationing in Italy and he called me and he said, “Are you gonna do this really?” And I said, “yeah.” And he said, “You know the script needs a little work.” And I said, “Yeah, and I think we can do it, and I think Bob can do it,” and the next thing I knew, much to everyone’s surprise, we were all sitting at a table and had our $250 to do the movie. It was a very low budget.

AE: What do you think drew Bernard and Doris, a gay man and a billionaire heiress, together so deeply?
SS: Well, they were both unhappy; they were both struggling with substance abuse. He loved beautiful things and that kind of lifestyle and I think she recognized that. But finally at the end of the day, I think that what works on screen is what works in life is that you get the feeling that this person sees you like no one else sees you.

Ralph Fiennes as Bernard Lafferty and Sarandon as Doris Duke

photo credit Ken Regan/HBO

I think that they found some way to see each other, that they trusted that they felt the other person was there for them. And it was very important to me that you felt that she gave to him. That it wasn’t just this creepy obsession on his part, that she was also intrigued by him, and that she was trying to find a way to keep him in her life, not just the obvious way of him working for her.

AE: Actually he seemed like such a cipher at times that I feel like I have a better understanding of Doris’ interest in him than the other way around, so I think you achieved that part. You said that Bernard seemed to be attracted to Duke’s lifestyle and her beautiful things. He also worked for Elizabeth Taylor and Peggy Lee and this seems to follow the idea that some gay men are fascinated by powerful, iconic women. Do you think that was true of Bernard at all?
SS: I think everybody’s fascinated by power, and maybe it was easier for him to identify with a female than with most powerful men because he seems to have been pretty gentle. Most of his fastidiousness and his . . . at least the way Ralph plays him. Everything certainly had more to do with a feminine feel than what we associate with a masculine feel, but I have to say that I think everyone seems to be fascinated by people with money and power and celebrity or else all these tabloids wouldn’t exist. She was all three.

Plus she really indulged herself. And here’s this guy who is embarrassed by indulgence, who just can’t really embrace his own needs and so I felt that she kind of encourages him to be more of who he is.

As he spent more time with her, he did start to dress in a more lavish and less conservative way. His hair got longer and all kinds of things that he did do, so I think that he might have also been fascinated by the way she indulged herself. I was.