Pitt Fires Up His Funny Side

By MAL VINCENT

By Mal Vincent

The Virginian-Pilot

TORONTO

OUTSIDE the Royal York Hotel, crowds of Canadians, as well as tourists, waited for a glimpse of Brad Pitt – the blond movie star who has played a hero from ancient Greece and other noble characters.

Inside, Pitt, with a spiky hair-cut, searched for his inner knucklehead.

“I play a fool. There’s no getting around it,” he said proudly when contemplating the role of a frantic personal trainer from Hardbodies Fitness Center in the Coen brothers’ new comedy, “Burn After Reading.”

Chad Feldheimer, the character he plays, is a gum-smacking gym teacher who bops to the tunes coming from ever-present earphones in his head. Joel and Ethan Coen, the Oscar-winning directors of the dour “No Country for Old Men,” wrote the part just for him.

“I’d been wanting to work with the Coens for years, so I was delighted when I got the script. Then, I read it, and my mood changed. This is the role they wrote for me? But I like it. I like it.”

He added that, “I’m not the leading man here. George What’s His Name is, I guess, if there is a leading man. I don’t have to carry the movie. The leading man is always the guy who has all the answers and can figure things out and defuse bombs in seconds and is all experienced. All that’s pretty good for the ego, but, let’s face it, it’s more fun to play the guy who makes the wrong choices. This guy has to deal with the fact that he’s an idiot. That’s funny.”

Asked whom he used as a model for Chad, the empty-headed character, he said, “That was all me in a former day. Actually, I’m not sure where he came from, and I’m disturbed by it all, and Angie is disturbed by it, too. Maybe I played him too well.”

Yes, Angie, his partner, who has helped him to become more famous as a movie star than as an actor. His liaison with Angelina Jolie, one of the last of the movie-star divas, created Brangelina, the couple known, and pursued, all over the world. After a dangerous street riot last year in Toronto in which their car was surrounded by hundreds of fans, Jolie chose to stay back at home in the south of France during this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. The couple’s newborn twins are also there.

Pitt and Jolie met when they filmed the hit action movie “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” Subsequently, he divorced his actress-wife, Jennifer Aniston, the sweetheart of TV’s “Friends.” There were rumors that she wanted a film career to follow her television stardom before having children.

Pitt noticed that Jolie could well manage a movie career, motherhood and a series of charities around the world. He and Jolie are the parents of twins, Vivienne Marcheline and Knox Leon, born in July. They also have another biological child and three adopted children.

As far as making another movie with Jolie, he said, “We’d like that to happen, but Angie and I work together all the time – every day – so there’s no urgency.”

His next film will be “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” an adaptation of an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story. It reteams him with his “Babel” co-star, Cate Blanchett.

An iston was also in Toronto, to promote her romantic comedy “Management,” and festival officials reportedly scurried to keep their schedules separate. Reports hit the wire services Tuesday, though, that they met briefly for cocktails at the Park Hyatt Hotel for what appeared to be an amicable discussion. No fireworks. No public reaction has been released from the south of France.

Joel Coen, the older and more serious-looking of the brothers, said he wrote the role of the frantic fitness trainer with Pitt in mind.

“What we have here are a group of characters, not a real plot. These people have no clue as to what goes on around them. They are not silly people. Quite to the contrary, they take everything too seriously. That’s the essence of their comedy. They all think they are involved in an international plot that may mean the end of the world. As for Brad’s casting, we don’t think in terms of comedians vs. serious actors. An actor can be funny if he’s playing a humorous part. We’d rather not have stand-up comics.”

Clooney is cast as a womanizer who is having an affair with Linda, another gym trainer. She desperately needs money to pay for all the cosmetic surgery she wants to make her look beautiful. The part went to Frances McDormand, Ethan Coen’s wife, who won an Academy Award for her role in “Fargo.”

Joel, the younger and more outgoing brother, said, “We just wanted to make a spy spoof. This is not a real satire on Washington and the mess inside the Beltway. Maybe we thought of Linda Tripp or Donald Rumsfeld at times, but these are just characters.”

The carrot-topped Tilda Swinton, who plays the cheating wife of a CIA agent played by John Malkovich, confirmed that a Coen script is not makeshift.

“You change a word at your own peril because they wrote it, and they know every word. The actors are encouraged to be playful and to contribute, but the script is the Bible,” she said.

“It is a matter of setting boundaries, like on a football field,” Ethan Coen said. “You can play around within the field, but if you go over the boundaries, you have to be pulled back.”

Swinton is a tall woman with an ultra-pale look – an odd sort for Hollywood stardom. She won her own Oscar this year for her supporting role in “Michael Clayton,” also with Clooney.

“I don’t see where the Oscar has meant anything,” she said. “All the roles I’ve done since, I would have been doing anyway. I remember it as a nightmare – a night when I had to get up in front of millions of people and accept an award. I would have been happier if they could have delivered it to me in the mail.”

Ethan Coen says “Burn After Reading” most resembles the Washington thriller “Seven Days in May,” which co-starred Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas and Ava Gardner.

“Even our music is like ‘Seven Days in May.’ Big and bombastic and important-sounding, but, in our case, it’s all absolutely meaningless,” he said.

“All our characters think they are involved in a great international conspiracy. We wouldn’t want them to know any better.”

That goes, too, for the fitness trainer played by Pitt. Now that he’s had his holiday with silliness, he’s back in France as the new father of twins. At least, that’s where we think he is.

Mal Vincent, (757) 446-2347, mal.vincent@pilotonline.com

‘Burn After Reading’

This dark spy-comedy, the latest Coen brothers film, stars from top right, clockwise: John Malkovich, George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt. According to Joel and Ethan Coen, far lower left, all the characters “think they are involved in a great international conspiracy” and don’t know any better.

Originally published by BY MAL VINCENT.

(c) 2008 Virginian – Pilot. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.