Paul Wal­ter Hauser: ​‘We have to hold peo­ple in pow­er accountable’

After steal­ing scenes in I, Tonya, BlacK­kKlans­man and Late Night, Paul Wal­ter Hauser takes cen­tre stage in Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jew­ell, a typ­i­cal­ly knot­ty polit­i­cal dra­ma cen­tred around the 1996 Cen­ten­ni­al Olympic Park bomb­ing, which left one per­son dead and over 100 more injured.

As the epony­mous real-life secu­ri­ty guard accused of mas­ter­mind­ing the attack, Hauser gives one of the per­for­mances of the year – although for the time being he says he isn’t in it for the lit­tle gold men. LWLies caught up with Hauser in Lon­don recent­ly, where he was film­ing Disney’s Cruel­la (in which he plays de Vil’s bum­bling hench­man, Horace), for a chat about work­ing with a liv­ing leg­end, and why this sto­ry is more rel­e­vant than ever.

LWLies: Did you grow up watch­ing Clint films?

Hauser: I’d be lying if I said that I grew up on a diet of Clint East­wood. I watched a lot more com­e­dy and sil­ly stuff com­ing up, but one film that was at the fore­front of my view­ing was The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. That film was on tele­vi­sion like every week when I was grow­ing up. I have this vivid mem­o­ry of Clint wear­ing that cap and hav­ing a lit­tle stoke between his teeth smok­ing. To me he’s this icon, like John Wayne or Elvis. Plus the fact that he had an act­ing career that went from TV west­erns to film west­erns and action films to dra­mas, the occa­sion­al com­e­dy, and then direct­ing and play­ing the piano, and doing the score for movies. He real­ly is a bit of a renais­sance man.

He’s done it all. And to be still doing so much at 89 is pret­ty amazing…

You know what I’ll be doing at 89? Noth­ing. I will for sure be dead. I’ll be dead as Dillinger.

How was the audi­tion process for Richard Jewell?

So the sto­ry goes: I was in Thai­land film­ing a Spike Lee movie, and I got a call. They say, ​‘Hey, we have this TV lim­it­ed series, some­one made you an offer for a role. Do you want to do it?’ I said, ​‘Of course, this sounds awe­some.’ Then two days lat­er I get a call say­ing, ​‘Clint East­wood wants you in his new movie,’ and I thought, ​‘Are you sure?’ And they said that it was real, the movie isn’t set up, but they know that you have this TV offer, and they’re ask­ing that you would decline for sched­ul­ing pur­pos­es because if the movie mate­ri­alis­es, they want you to be the main guy. So I turned down this TV offer, while not know­ing if the movie with Clint was going to happen.

The Clint movie was with Fox, Dis­ney bought Fox, so then the movie was at Dis­ney. But Clint’s film­mak­ing home was Warn­er Bros. So it was this whole thing between stu­dios and lawyers and all that type of junk. So I was just wait­ing around, but I found out that appar­ent­ly he had seen I, Tonya, he had seen BlacK­kKlans­man and he had liked my work in both, but that wasn’t real­ly at the fore­front of his mind.

What was at the fore­front was that Geoff Miclat and Jes­si­ca Meier, his pro­duc­er and cast­ing direc­tor, they print­ed out a pho­to of me and put it next to a pho­to of Richard Jew­ell, and they like sta­pled it onto a cork board or what­ev­er. And they said, ​‘Hey Clint, is this your Richard Jew­ell?’ Half-kid­ding, half-seri­ous – they just want­ed to see how he would react. And he goes, ​‘Yeah,’ he kind of squints, [imper­son­ates Clint squint­ing] and says, ​‘That’s the guy.’ So he just had an instinct, I don’t think my act­ing wowed him so much as he saw that I was capa­ble of going the dis­tance and com­mit­ting. And I cer­tain­ly look like the guy.

In Marie Brenner’s orig­i­nal Van­i­ty Fair sto­ry about Jew­ell she talks about the Jay Leno remark­ing that Jew­ell looks like Shawn Eck­hardt, who you played in I, Tonya.

How weird is that?

We like to think as human beings we’re unique and there’s only one per­son that looks like us. It’s like the dop­pel­gänger theory.

Oh, it’s bizarre. It exists! I get it all the time where peo­ple post a pho­to of some­body in an air­port or in a shop­ping mall and they’ll go, ​‘Were you in St Louis, Mis­souri last week­end?’ And I’m like, ​‘No?’ And they say, ​‘Well this guy was!’ The worst is when it doesn’t look like you and it’s just like some­one who looks like maybe worse than you and you’re like, ​‘Oh, that guy had his pants up to his naval and he’s just spilt mus­tard from his hot dog on his t‑shirt.’

You’re like, ​‘Uh, thanks…’

Yeah, thank you so much! Nev­er lose my number!

How did the first meet­ing with Clint go?

I was ner­vous. I took this pho­to of myself on the Warn­er Bros lot before I walked in to meet Clint and it was just me kind of freak­ing out. Clint put me at ease pret­ty quick­ly though. He’s just a nor­mal guy – he’s a film fan and a sto­ry­teller and a father and he just car­ries him­self in kind of a clas­si­cal old-timer way. He can be self-dep­re­cat­ing, he doesn’t mind being the butt of the joke, he makes fun of him­self sometimes.

What was the process like work­ing with him?

It’s pret­ty organ­ic. I don’t think it’s pre­med­i­tat­ed or strate­gised that much. I’m sure the film­ing of it is strate­gised, the look of it and what he wants and the inten­tion­al­i­ty of how the cam­era moves, the com­po­si­tion visu­al­ly. But, as far as the act­ing goes, he’s pret­ty hands-off. He’s not telling you how to steer, he’s telling you what speed we’re going. So he’ll tell you to step on the gas or he’ll tell you to let your foot off the pedal.

One thing that sur­prised me, he would some­times watch you like the­atre. He wouldn’t look at the mon­i­tor, he wasn’t in video vil­lage, like eat­ing shrimp cock­tail, look­ing at his phone while film­ing. He was very engaged, sit­ting as far away as you are from me, three or four feet, watch­ing me do the scene. Though it was jar­ring at times, to have Clint East­wood star­ing at you while you’re doing a scene, there was some­thing very warm and ten­der about it too. And you saw how much he cared every sin­gle day, every sin­gle scene.

Richard Jew­ell passed away in 2007, so you couldn’t go direct­ly to the source. What was your prepa­ra­tion for the character?

I prepped it the way I would prep for any char­ac­ter. I don’t think my method­ol­o­gy or strat­e­gy changed much. It’s always: read the script two to four times and get a feel for the envi­ron­ment for the film, the tonal­i­ty and the ener­gy. And then look at the key moments and think about what I want to do with this. Then lit­tle by lit­tle, you find all those small things. I bet when you’re a par­ent, you go into it think­ing, ​‘Okay, I’ve got to feed this thing, I can’t let this kid die, I’ve got to love it, I’ve got to give it a name, got to get it its shots, take it to the doc­tor, it’s got to go to school.’

You’re doing all the base­line things. And then there are the nuances, like a mom who writes a note in her kid’s lunch that says ​‘I love you,’ just for the sake of say­ing it. There are moments as an actor where you go, ​‘What is my ver­sion of the note that I leave in the lunch bag?’ The things make it spe­cial and real. Some­times you don’t do those things for the whole audi­ence. You do them for the five peo­ple out of 20 who are going to notice it. I think this is a movie where I was enabled the oppor­tu­ni­ty to put on those lit­tle nuances and idio­syn­crasies and try to make it real.

How much did you know about Richard Jew­ell before you came to work on the film?

I think I was nine and a half when it hap­pened, the sum­mer of ​’96. It was a big sto­ry but it just didn’t reg­is­ter with me because of my age at the time. And years lat­er you would hear minute accounts or abbre­vi­at­ed accounts of the sto­ry, but it was kind of like the I, Tonya sto­ry too, peo­ple don’t remem­ber if Nan­cy Ker­ri­g­an was blud­geoned by Tonya Hard­ing, or what hap­pened. So with Richard Jew­ell, peo­ple are like, ​‘Wasn’t he that ser­i­al killer?’ I mean, it’s like a game of Phone right? I tell you, ​‘The squir­rel ran up the tree,’ and you tell some­one else, then by the fifth or sixth or sev­enth per­son it’s, ​‘There are curls up in the brie.’

The Richard Jew­ell sto­ry has been blovi­at­ed and worked into some­thing it’s not. And what’s nice about a film or a doc­u­men­tary is that you get a chance to give clar­i­ty and iron those things out. I’ve been want­i­ng to be in a movie like this for a long time. One of my favourite movies, like in my top five, is A Few Good Men. So this is total­ly up my alley as a movie­go­er. And as an actor you dream of get­ting to be a small part in a movie like this, let alone the tit­u­lar character.

‘The tit­u­lar Richard Jewell’!

Yeah, it’s crazy! I’m not numb to it. When I get a text from Spike Lee or when I get invit­ed to par­take in a movie like this, those things still bog­gle my mind, they’re not nor­mal yet.

Espe­cial­ly because this is your first lead role. Was that exciting? 

No, it was scary! I’m through being cool. I can’t do it, I’ve tried it, it doesn’t work. Not for me. My ini­tial reac­tion to this was that I felt hon­oured. Then I felt scared. And then, after meet­ing Clint and meet­ing every­body and see­ing that they’re all nor­mal peo­ple – they’re not weirdos or Hol­ly­wood elit­ists with big egos, they’re just cool sto­ry­tellers – I was like, ​‘Oh, maybe I’m okay… I have sup­port.’ So it end­ed up pret­ty per­fect, but embark­ing on a jour­ney like this to play a real guy in a big, splashy Warn­er Bros movie, it’s crazy.

The idea of a tri­al by media has only become more preva­lent now with social media. Do you feel like this is a con­tem­po­rary story?

This is an ever­green sto­ry that unfor­tu­nate­ly will always be rel­e­vant. Peo­ple are fal­li­ble, they make mis­takes. But you hope that the height of their prob­lem­at­ic behav­iour is at the mis­take lev­el. This was not the mis­take lev­el, this was not a mis­take. These guys knew darn well that Richard couldn’t have done what he did with­out an accom­plice, and him hav­ing an accom­plice super­sedes the ​“lone-bomber” pro­file they claim to put on him.

They clear­ly were in the wrong and kept pro­ceed­ing with busi­ness as usu­al. This hap­pens all the time, whether in a high school set­ting or at the height of the FBI. I don’t think it’s a polit­i­cal state­ment as a film, but I think there are polit­i­cal impli­ca­tions and we have to be aware of them. This is just bad behav­iour on the part of peo­ple in pow­er. We have to hold them accountable.

Richard Jew­ell is released 31 Jan­u­ary. Read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review.