Chris Cooper
Interview By: Damaris Olivo
DamarisOlivo@TheCinemaSource.com
From growing up in a rural Missouri community to being one of the most respected actors in Hollywood, Chris Cooper has a list of credits that leaves one wondering how he's found time in his lengthy career to eat or sleep. Having won an Academy Award for his role in the film Adaptation (2002), he has since played a wide variety of roles, often associated with the government or the military.
In his latest incarnation as Robert Hanssen in the film Breach he plays an FBI agent who is secretly a spy for the Soviet Union. Alongside Ryan Phillippe who plays Eric O'Neill, the man who finally gathers enough evidence to catch Hanssen, Cooper, once again, shows us what spectacular acting chops he's really got. Yet this was not a simple role to play, even for a seasoned thespian such as Cooper.
'I enjoy the research and just imagining the creation of this character as much as the performance.' After reading various books on the spy, and studying every piece of available material that would shed more light on the type of character he would be playing in Breach, he found it useful when a meeting was set up for him and Phillippe to meet with the real-life Eric O'Neill. 'Eric had a lot of stories about how irritating Robert Hanssen was to deal with. He really loved to play psychological games and knew how to press people's buttons. He didn't keep that proper social distance that people instinctively do.'
Although, he could not meet with Hanssen, himself, he found the availability of O'Neill to be essential in the creation of his character. 'He was the greatest touchstone to Robert Hanssen's character because all that we could dig up was the fifteen seconds of video tape just before Hansen was apprehended by the FBI, there was no audio tape. To this day Hansen caused so much trouble that I think he may well from time to time still be interrogated - so he wasn't available certainly.'
Of course, being Chris Cooper, he pulled it off without a hitch. 'Now Eric, having seen the film, says in a couple of scenes it's very creepy how close it came.'
Always very meticulous, he bides his time in his personal life as well as in his career. Having only done theater for 15 years before he broke into film, Cooper says it was a personal choice he made in order to better prepare for a long-lasting career in film. 'I had been approached to do television when I was in New York, and I'm sure I irritated the hell out of my agent, because I just simply said I don't feel like I'm ready to do film work. And that was 10 years before I did make one.'
Becoming an actor was also a carefully considered choice for Cooper, 'My mother was trying to steer me toward medicine,' he says, 'my father was a doctor, but I looked at my father's life, and I wasn't about to live a life like that.' Besides medicine, Cooper also seriously considered a life as a cattle rancher. 'I thought seriously about that as a life, I loved that. But looking back on it I realize what a hard and very physical life that was, and I'm really happy I made this choice.'
Just how does the actor relate these two professions that seem to be polar opposites' 'They seem at pretty opposite extremes,' he confesses, 'I loved the solitude of the farm life or ranch life, but on the other hand it has served me well in the life experience that I could bring to the different characters that I've played.'
An extremely intelligent man, he hopes that the story of Robert Hanssen will remind America of recent events that have been easily forgotten. 'Hansen was in 2001. How many people remember that' If we could reiterate in entertainment form how vulnerable and how open this society is, then I think its worth reiterating.'
He also thinks Americans could learn from films like this so as to not repeat the mistakes of the past. 'I keep saying that this is such a young country. When I talk to my friends in the UK I'm astounded at how they remember their history. They remember their kings and their queens. We have a very short memory here. We don't have a tendency to learn from our mistakes,' he says, 'but we don't like to admit our mistakes.'
Cooper seems to enjoy what he does, and to be doing it for the right reasons. 'If I'm going to spend my energy creating a character, I want to walk away from the job satisfied with myself,' he confesses, 'that I've put as much energy and given the best performance that I possibly can. That's just doing your job, that's the fun of this business, that's why I enjoy it so much.
Breach, a brilliant film directed by Billy Ray, is in theaters now. As always Chris Cooper hopes audiences will be educated by this film. 'I hope we can enlighten and inform people in an entertaining way.'
