Michael Stuhlbarg: ​‘Acci­dents are what keep art alive’

The first time we see Michael Stuhlbarg in Shirley, he’s smil­ing broad­ly, slight­ly ine­bri­at­ed, and wear­ing a lau­rel wreath. To the ancient Greeks, these ornate head­dress­es were a sym­bol of strength and viril­i­ty; the Romans used them to dec­o­rate com­man­ders fol­low­ing a suc­cess­ful mil­i­tary cam­paign, gar­lands for great men.

It’s with some irony, then, that Stuhlbarg should be adorned with one here – its glo­ri­ous con­no­ta­tions belie the seedy nature of his char­ac­ter, the promi­nent lit­er­ary crit­ic Stan­ley Hyman, whose tumul­tuous rela­tion­ship with Shirley Jack­son is the sub­ject of Josephine Decker’s sub­lime fifth fea­ture. Though as Stuhlbarg explains, the real-life Stan­ley – and the task of play­ing him — was far more com­pli­cat­ed than even the film suggests.

LWLies: Whose idea was the lau­rel wreath?

Stuhlbarg: That was mine. We want­ed to con­vey the hys­te­ria of cre­at­ing a par­ty and the games that were meant to be going on, and per­haps wel­com­ing a young, naïve, intim­i­dat­ed cou­ple into his lair, so to speak. I thought it might be fun to wear a lau­rel wreath. I even want­ed to take it as far as wear­ing a toga or some­thing like that but even­tu­al­ly we threw that idea away.

You’ve played a fair num­ber of real-life his­tor­i­cal fig­ures. When you’re not nec­es­sar­i­ly hav­ing to hew too close­ly to the truth, does that give you more free­dom to find the character?

I guess it depends upon the actor who’s approach­ing the sit­u­a­tion. Me, hon­est­ly, I thought going into [Shirley] that we were pre­sent­ing who the real peo­ple were, and then over the course of my prepa­ra­tion I learned, ​‘Okay, it’s based on this nov­el; the nov­el is a fic­tion.’ And this sto­ry even takes a step fur­ther and does its own kind of thing. Plus, Josephine has a very inter­est­ing vocab­u­lary, visu­al­ly, so she was going to see the sto­ry from a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive as well.

I guess there’s a lim­it to how much of the truth one can know about those who actu­al­ly loved, and this cir­cum­stance allowed me to find as much of the real per­son as I could. Even when a char­ac­ter is placed in an extreme­ly odd, fic­tion­al, almost dream-like sit­u­a­tion, I’ll try to keep in mind what I know about them and apply it. What it does allow you is, it’s okay if some­thing comes out feel­ing false, I sup­pose. There is a pock­et­ful of irrev­er­ence that we each bring with us.

Is there a dan­ger that you can get too close to know­ing your sub­ject? You might find out some­thing about them that you maybe you don’t like which could colour your per­cep­tion of them.

Josephine con­stant­ly remind­ed us that we weren’t pre­sent­ing the real peo­ple. And as much as I had delved into who the real guy was, it was impor­tant to me to pay atten­tion to both sides of what we were doing: pre­sent­ing as much of the real guy as I thought this ver­sion of him might have been, com­bined with what Josephine’s vision was. There were aspects of the char­ac­ter I played where I’ll nev­er real­ly know if Stan­ley was real­ly like that; how­ev­er, I did hear some things and there is his­tor­i­cal evi­dence for some of his behav­iour that one can see in the film.

My favourite moment in the film is when you say, ​‘So you think it might be that good?’. I love Elisabeth’s reac­tion. Was that work­shopped at all or did it just come in the moment?

I think it was just play. We didn’t real­ly plan how that scene would end up because it’s in between a lot of things. It’s kind of the cli­max of the sto­ry up to that point; frus­tra­tion on Stanley’s part with Shirley and her sit­u­a­tion and why she’s cho­sen this par­tic­u­lar sub­ject [for her next book]. So there’s some exas­per­a­tion there but there’s always love under­neath their bick­er­ing, and a deep appre­ci­a­tion for each other’s gifts. And maybe it was a moment of under­stand­ing, for him. I kind of love the idea that it felt like as much as it seems they were just argu­ing again, he under­stood how much this meant to her as well.

There’s a ring of ​‘Who’s Afraid of Vir­ginia Woolf?’ to it.

Yes, well, we drew not specif­i­cal­ly from that text itself but from the leg­end, the iconog­ra­phy, the mem­o­ry of those per­for­mances in the film of that sto­ry. It was very much a colour of the nov­el as well as the screen­play, and it influ­enced how I sought to speak the lan­guage as well. I’d been want­i­ng, just for the fun of it, for the group of us to get togeth­er and read the play out loud, but we didn’t have time. They seem cut from the same cloth, shall we say.

Are you some­one who prefers to real­ly soak your­self in a char­ac­ter before film­ing, or do you try to keep as much of it fresh for when you get to set?

It varies between each project depend­ing on how the direc­tor approach­es things. Dan­ny Boyle, for instance, allowed us a rehearsal peri­od for each por­tion of the Steve Jobs film I worked on. We had two weeks of rehearsals for each sec­tion of that sto­ry, until we could run it like a play. That was sin­gu­lar for me, unlike any oth­er expe­ri­ence I’ve ever had.

I think a lot of film­mak­ers are afraid of rehears­ing because they don’t want to wear out a moment that might be found by an actor, they don’t want the actor nec­es­sar­i­ly to know what they’re gonna do before. Some­times it’s nice to have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to expe­ri­ence some­thing for the first time on set. To be present on the day, you can allow your­self to be wide open to what you’re receiv­ing, and that can be just as much of a mys­tery or a sur­prise because you don’t know what’s going to come at you.

For instance, say a char­ac­ter of mine has to watch a piece of video­tape and have an hon­est reac­tion to it. That hap­pened to me on a film I made many years ago called After­school. I didn’t want to see it before­hand – I want­ed to just go up on the day, think about where the cam­era was, prac­tise the cam­era move­ment, and then actu­al­ly watch the video for the first time. That’s what we end­ed up using in the film, which was an hon­est reac­tion, to some extent. That’s only some­thing you get once. I love that about film, because ide­al­ly what keeps the art alive are those acci­dents, those moments where you don’t know what’s going to happen.

Would you ever be put off by a direc­tor who made you do a hun­dred takes?

No, that would be won­der­ful! I had five days on a Rid­ley Scott film where I was prac­ti­cal­ly play­ing the small­est char­ac­ter in the movie, Leonar­do DiCaprio’s lawyer – I just had to pick up the phone and say some­thing like, ​‘She wants that car as part of the divorce’. And he had me do it I don’t know many times, over and over until I wasn’t act­ing any more. He real­ly knows how to get peo­ple out of their head, into their body and the sit­u­a­tion; not think­ing, just doing it by instinct. So it doesn’t look like anybody’s act­ing, I guess. That’s thrilling, for me. So no, I don’t think I’d ever be thrown by what a direc­tor want­ed, unless it involved some­thing dangerous.

Shirley is released 30 Octo­ber. Read more in LWLies 86: The Shirley issue.