Interview: Christopher Plummer is Just Getting Started with "Beginners"

Christopher Plummer

In the upcoming film Beginners — one of the few movies this year to have significant gay content — Christopher Plummer plays Hal, father to Ewan McGregor's character Oliver. After Oliver's mother dies, Hal, at age 75, comes out of the closet and energetically pursues the gay life he had denied himself for three quarters of a century. At almost the same time, Hal is diagnosed with terminal cancer.

AfterElton.com recently sat down with Plummer to discuss his work on the film, his rapport with co-stars McGregor and Goran Visnjic, as well as playing a gay man dying of cancer just discovering the joys of living an honest life.

AfterElton: What was it that drew you to the role of Hal?
Christopher Plummer: Well, it was the script. It was so good. It was so economically and well written. It had such a lovely honesty about it, and a joy and wit, and it was touching and funny. I just loved it. I loved the idea of doing something totally different than I’d ever done before. All that drew me to the film. And the fact that Ewan was in it, who I admired and am a fan of. I wanted to work with him. There were a lot of positives.

AE: This isn’t the first gay role you played.
CP: Right, I did so in Shadowbox.

AE: Which was in the '80s.
CP: The '80s, yes. Way back.

AE: Obviously the world has changed quite a bit since then. Do you think the stigma of playing a gay role has changed in Hollywood?
CP: I wouldn’t know about Hollywood. I don’t live in Hollywood. [laughs]

AE: How about society in general, then?
CP: Society in general, that’s better. [laughs] I didn’t find it then at all either, in the early '80s. People had already accepted it. When was the gay rights movement? It was in the '60s, wasn’t it? All that, I thought, had vanished. Of course, there’s always the bigots of the world, who still think that it’s a disease. [laughs] I love that. Our profession has gays in it – well, every profession has gays in it! Not just the poor theater or the poor movies. It’s the poor politicians, it’s the poor everything! But I didn’t notice any kind of tension about that at all.

We didn’t concentrate on his gayness in that movie. We concentrated on the fact that he was dying of cancer. That’s what the script was about – the bravery of being able to handle that. And ironically, the same thing in Beginners. Also a man dying of cancer, but he’s being liberated. He’s liberated himself. And he dies ecstatic. It’s a very hopeful kind of film.

AE: That was something I was talking with [writer/director] Mike Mills about earlier. He said when you read the script, you said to him, “Thank God Hal has wit.”
CP: Oh, yes.

AE: He does. He is witty, and clever, and funny…
CP: He is. And I think that if he wasn’t, I might have had second thoughts about it. The fact that there was so much humor in it, which was so touching, it made him un self-indulgent. There’s no indulgence, there’s no self-pity. That’s what I loved about it. Because most people will go for self-pity and sentimentality. And so it’s refreshing to find a writer like Mike who doesn’t, who plays against that.

AE: And I think that was what was most refreshing about the film.
CP: That’s right.

AE: Can you talk a little bit about the process of creating Hal? I know that you had said that you and Mike agreed it wasn’t going to be an impersonation of his father. How much leeway would you say you were given when creating this role?
CP: Total. Total freedom. To do what I wanted with it. How else would I be able to do it? I wouldn’t have wanted to imitate his father. He was totally generous and free. Carte blanche.

Christopher Plummer and Ewan McGregor

AE: Did you and Ewan prepare in any special way for your scenes together?
CP: That was easy, because we both liked each other, fortunately, from the start. Mike sent us off to buy a couple of things together in a shop. [laughs] It wasn’t necessary, but it was a cute idea. And we did. We laughed, and I think it did break a certain tiny bit of ice that was left. But I liked him enormously. And I’m a fan, a very big fan of Ewan’s anyway, long before I did this movie. So I was dying to work with him, and had a wonderful time doing so.

AE: One of the more intriguing relationships was Hal’s relationship with [his lover] Andy [played by Goran Visnjic], in that it was very hard to decide if they were really in love, or if that was just a facet of Hal attempting to reach out and grab hold of that life he’d been denying himself for so many years. Did Hal love Andy? Was it true love, or was it …
CP: Or was it just part of the ecstasy of romance that he just discovered again?

AE: Exactly.
CP: I don’t know. I really don’t know. It could be either. He was enjoying himself so much, and I think he would have dreamed it. He was in such a high state of joy, and the cancer being present strengthened that joy, made it even more panicky and exciting. I think he could have thought anything. But certainly Andy brought it out of him. But to what extent, I don’t know. It’s interesting. He loved him the way he could love. I don’t think it was “true love,” but then what the hell is true love? [laughs] We get too deep.

Goran Visnjic with Plummer

AE: It seemed there was almost a parallel with Andy and Hal’s relationship, and then, later, with Oliver and Anna [Melanie Laurent], in that they all have their own burdens, their own crosses to bear.
CP: Yes, that’s right. That was one of the things so fascinating about the script. They all have to begin again. Which is lovely. The fact that dear old Hal has disrupted everybody’s lives. It’s so beautifully and funnily done.

AE: Near the end of his life, Hal told his friends he was “turning the corner” on the cancer, even when it was clear he didn’t have long. Was that him putting on a brave face? Or was he in denial?
CP: I think it was denial. I played it as denial, I must say. Putting on a brave face, the audience has to see you putting on a brave face, and that’s complicated. It’s better to believe it.

AE: You have an incredibly diverse resume in film and theater. Do you prefer acting in the bigger pictures, like Sound of Music, or Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus? Or do you like the more intimate films?
CP: I like them all! But I think with indies, you get a chance to do braver things, more interesting scripts. And when somebody gets behind them, it’s wonderful.

Beginners opens in select theaters on June 3rd.