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
