#Robert Downey Jr., Paul Giamatti and the THR Actor Roundtable – The Hollywood Reporter

There aren’t many places where one might encounter two Avengers, three chameleons and a hot priest. But that’s precisely who gathered in mid-November for THR’s Actor Roundtable at The Georgian Hotel in Santa Monica: Robert Downey Jr. (Oppenheimer), Mark Ruffalo (Poor Things), Jeffrey Wright (American Fiction), Paul Giamatti (The Holdovers), Colman Domingo (Rustin) and Andrew Scott (All of Us Strangers). They have among them 14 Emmy nominations (five of which led to wins), six Tony nominations (one victory) and six Oscar nominations, with each still on the hunt for his first statuette. Considering that the last Oscar winners for best actor and supporting actor first appeared on this roundtable, there’s a strong chance the best is yet to come for this starry sextet.

There are a lot of connections at this table, some of which you guys may not realize because they happened so early in your career. To begin with, Paul and Andrew were both in Saving Private Ryan 25 years ago. How is that even possible?!  

PAUL GIAMATTI Is that true?! 

ANDREW SCOTT I was “the guy in green.” (Laughs.) I didn’t even know that! And we worked together subsequently …

Ten years after that, on John Adams … 

GIAMATTI I was “the guy in the powdered wig.” 

Also 25 years ago, Paul and Mark were both in Safe Men. Any memories of that? 

MARK RUFFALO “Sweet ’stache, man.”  

GIAMATTI That’s it, that’s the best line from the movie. 

A year after that, Mark and Jeffrey were both in Ang Lee’s Ride With the Devil.  

JEFFREY WRIGHT True story. 

RUFFALO I lied about being able to ride a horse. (Laughs.) 

WRIGHT I remember very vividly walking past you. You were tied to a fence post. (Laughs.)

RUFFALO That’s right!

Ten years ago, Paul and Colman both appeared in All Is Bright … 

GIAMATTI The legendary All Is Bright. (Laughs.) 

COLMAN DOMINGO That old chestnut! 

Paul and Jeffrey were both in 2006’s The Lady in the Water and 2011’s The Ides of March. 

DOMINGO (Looking at Giamatti) You were in everything! 

ROBERT DOWNEY JR. You’re like the American Michael Caine! (Laughs.) 

Robert and Mark first worked together in 2007’s Zodiac, and then in a few movies for a little company called Marvel …

DOWNEY (Looking at Ruffalo) Yes, after I convinced you!  

RUFFALO I wouldn’t be here today without you. (Laughs.) 

And I will note that not only is Colman great in Rustin, but so is Jeffrey.

WRIGHT It was our first time working together. 

Let’s talk about a turning point that led to having a year like you had in 2023. Robert, you started out in indies, then Marvel approached you with Iron Man, which changed your career. Did you pause about signing up for a studio superhero movie?  

DOWNEY No, because anyone who knows [Iron Man director] Jon Favreau — I remember seeing Swingers, and that monologue he has, and I was like, “And he wrote this? Who is this guy?” Also, he went to Bronx Science, and he was doing the Improv in Chicago, and we’re both from Queens? We were meant to do this thing. Also, there was no real certainty that this was even going to take off. Iron Man was a second-tier hero. They [Marvel] let the lunatics run the asylum for a little while, so it was completely an indie approach to a genre movie to begin with. 

Colman, let’s go back to 2005. You were a struggling actor in New York and decided to take matters into your own hands. Talk about your one-man show that began to turn things around. 

DOMINGO Man, I was a bartender at a place in the West Village called the 55 Bar. I would do whatever play that I could do and then run across town and start my shift at 9 p.m. and go until 4 a.m. When things would clear out, about 1 a.m., I was playing music and writing about what was happening in my life. My parents were suffering from different illnesses — they lived in Virginia. I lived in a terrible situation — illegal sublet. I was just hustling. I didn’t have a great agency, so I couldn’t get opportunities. So I started writing about my life and about the music I was putting on. The owner said, “Hey, Colman, I want to do some theater projects on Sundays. Do you have anything?” I’m like, “Yeah, let me try this stuff out.” I would do weird things like serve fried chicken and put on music and make sort of a salon, and then I would read these pieces. Friends would go, “I think it’s a solo show. You’re the event.” So I started working with a director, and it became a show called A Boy and His Soul. Eventually my parents passed away, but the show was the gift that kept on giving. I found my voice as a writer and performed it at the Vineyard Theatre in New York and in London and Australia. I played my family members and myself, in conversation with the audiences. Like, “How do we do it? How do we move through grief? How do we build when there’s nothing?” People started to see me as the artist that I was, and it gave me some new footing for my career.   

Andrew, many people were taken with the hot priest on season two of Fleabag. But you’ve been acting in films and on TV for 25 years. What was that moment like for you?

SCOTT I started out really young. I was 17 or 18 when I was at the Abbey, the national theater in Dublin, and I remember being offered a part after I’d done maybe two plays, and I was like, “I don’t really want to do that.” And I was still living at home! So quite early, I had a sort of courage to go, “I don’t want to play the same note if I don’t have to.” Because it always seemed that what’s of value is to be able to play as many different notes as you could. And so all the time when I wasn’t more recognizable, I never felt like I was failing. I was always just so delighted to be working. I love the thing that Meryl Streep says — she’s a great hero of mine — which is to pack your suitcase: Even if you’re not getting opportunities, you decide what you’re going to put in your suitcase, so when an opportunity comes up, you go, “I recognize that. I’ve packed for that.” 

Paul, long before you broke through with American Splendor and Sideways, won an Emmy for John Adams and starred on  Billions, you were a guy fresh out of the Yale School of Drama, being offered parts like Pig Vomit in Private Parts and an orangutan in The Planet of the Apes. Was that frustrating? 

GIAMATTI No, that was the strange fulfillment of a deep dream. To be an ape in The Planet of the Apes? If that had been it for me, I would have died happy. I couldn’t believe I was going to be able to play a talking orangutan! My agents were like, “Don’t you want to be a human so they can see your face?” And I was like, “If you tell them I want to be a human, I’m going to burn the agency.” Who wants to be the human? And Pig Vomit? I couldn’t believe I was being allowed off the chain like that. I’d just been in a drama school, which always felt terribly confining. I mean, look at me, man, I’m not like a Shakespeare guy. I got out and got this opportunity to do something that was absolutely bananas. 

Jeffrey, you first registered on many people’s radar in the mid-’90s with Broadway’s Angels in America, for which you won a Tony, and then starring in Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat. But within five years, you’ve said your attitude really changed. Why?

WRIGHT The thing that I’ve come to value above all other things in this stuff we do is the collaboration, the people that I have the opportunity to do it with. Early on, there were some collaborations that might’ve been better. I found myself a couple of times in what I thought were some very cynical places. The way that I was able to articulate it at the time was that these were places that aspired to be dumber than what was possible within the room. I was like, “Oh wow, man, this is kind of weird.” So yeah, I kind of pulled back. But also, there were other priorities and other considerations, like, “Oh wow, there’s a human being that was just born into my life.” And there was a lot of work in Africa that drew me in — I had interests going back to college that were related to the work that we were doing.    

Mark, it sounds like you had your own period of questioning. What was going on that made you step away from acting for a while? And then what made you decide to come back to it, I think with 2010’s The Kids Are All Right? 

RUFFALO Yeah, in relation to what Jeffrey was talking about was, you have your dreams, and then those start to become realized, but it’s not what you thought it was going to be, and at some point it gets away from you, and the next thing you realize is it’s all about the business and someone else’s idea of your career that doesn’t have much to do with what your idea was, and then you lose what your idea was of what your career was going to be. I was already feeling that way, and then my brother passed away [Scott Ruffalo was murdered in 2008] just before I was going to direct a film that I’d been working on for a long time [2010’s Sympathy for Delicious], and during the course of doing that, I was like, “I don’t know if I want to go back to acting. I kind of feel much more comfortable here [directing].” And then I got a great part, the kind of part that I wanted to do, and I was like, “This is going to be my last acting gig.” And it was The Kids Are All Right. [Heading in to the film], I was just like, “Fuck it. I’m going to do whatever I want. There’s no rules anymore. I don’t have to be anybody for anybody else.” And so I just did what I wanted with it, and it was a really freeing feeling. Then I went to Sundance. The movie I directed premiered, and then two days later The Kids Are All Right premiered, and I was sitting in that audience and I was like, “This experience is so honest. This movie’s about something so important.” Coming into the world when people were voting on gay marriage, it was saying, “We’re the same and there’s no difference between straight marriages and gay marriages.” And it did it in a funny way. It was just a human story that people could all relate to. I heard it in the laughter — the laughter tells you everything. I heard everyone laughing, whether they were straight or gay or whatever, whatever their religion was, their background, everyone was all laughing at the same thing. And I was like, “That’s what I want to do. That’s why I came here.” And then no one was like, “Hey, do you want to direct another movie? Do you want a five-picture deal as a director?” (Laughs.) So I found my way. 

Let’s dive into your 2023 performances. Jeffrey, you work very selectively. How did Cord Jefferson — a terrific TV writer — convince you to star in his feature directorial debut? You play an author who is told his books aren’t “Black” enough, so he writes what he thinks they want.

WRIGHT It was clear that Cord knew his way around a story. It’s glittering, it’s satirical, it’s great. But what really drew me in was the story of this man who’s all of a sudden burdened with responsibilities of caring for his mother. My mom passed not too long before I got that script. (Chokes up.) So it was the caretaking of the one who was one’s caretaker that for me was why the story resonated. I said, “I know that story. I know that man. And I know the difficulties and sacrifices that that asks, not only professionally but also personally. I can play that music. And maybe it can be helpful to me and maybe someone else.” I think in some ways that’s the most subversive aspect of the film, because it is a portrait that I’d never been asked to be part of before: a goofy, mad, dysfunctional at times, functional, loving, frustrated but together family — who happens to be Black. So yeah, it was easy to say yes to. 

Paul, it’s been 19 years since you and Alexander Payne made Sideways. Was doing The Holdovers, in which you play a cranky boarding school professor, an automatic yes for you because it was Alexander’s movie?

GIAMATTI I mean, I would’ve done pretty much anything for the guy, but he was showing me this script as it was coming along, and he said, “I’m writing this thing for you.” I kept saying, “He smells like fish? He’s got sweaty palms?” (Laughs.) I was saying, “All of that’s wonderful.” But he was writing this for me, and it was an extraordinary thing to be able to work with a friend, and the story had a lot of resonances for me that I think he knows about because he knows me. It was drawing on a deep well of my past, which made me feel as if it wasn’t work, in some strange way. All of it’s very familiar. The thing that I thought is really amazing about it is it’s a Christmas story — it’s about selflessness, ultimately. These people all act selflessly toward one another so they can take a next step toward something. And it doesn’t get resolved. Alexander doesn’t make movies that resolve very easily. We don’t know what’s going to happen. But they get a little bit forward. 

Mark, with Poor Things, you were signing up to join director Yorgos Lanthimos, writer Tony McNamara and Emma Stone, who had all worked on 2018’s The Favourite and now needed someone to play Duncan Wedderburn, a narcissistic ladies’ man who has an accent and dance moves. Was it intimidating? 

RUFFALO Yeah! I was like, “Yorgos, I don’t think I’m the right person for this.” I tried to talk him out of it, and he just laughed at me. In the movie business, you start to feel like you’re in a box sometimes. I had never played anything like that, and I was scared. I mean, I saw his earlier movies and was in awe of them, but he just laughed at me. So I was like, “OK …” 

Robert, it wasn’t a totally different situation with you and Oppenheimer, in which you play Lewis Strauss, the foe of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Christopher Nolan has said about you: “Though a generation of kids know what a great movie star he is, they’ve not seen his subtlety and brilliance. I wanted to get him to do something completely different. Because of his incredible energy that can punch through the screen, finding the right thing for him is difficult.” What do you make of that? 

DOWNEY Well, first of all, I didn’t write that. (Laughs.) He called, and a call from Nolan is a thing, I think we would agree. He asked me to come over and read the script — on red paper with black type [so it can’t be photocopied], which was like doing Sudoku while driving — but I read it and I was like, “This is masterful.” To me, it was a logical thing from Sr. [the documentary Downey made about and with his father], going into, “What is this thing that my dad’s generation rebelled against?” The great thing was, it was like a hundred people making a watch together every day.

Colman, after appearing in George C. Wolfe’s 2020 film Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Wolfe comes to you about playing Bayard Rustin, a Black gay civil rights leader who was the principal organizer of the 1963 March on Washington. This is your first time atop a call sheet. What did it mean to you when the opportunity arrived?

DOMINGO Being in service to the story … [is] what any journeyman learns — that it’s not about the size of the role, but it’s, “How do I help serve a function?” In the theater, we all know who the Equity deputy is. It’s usually me. (Laughs.) I’ve always been the one that had to look out for the other actors and bring people together. So when Rustin came along, I knew that I had to make sure that I looked after the whole and also took a leadership role. And that role took everything I was able to give, everything in the 32 years that I’ve been in this industry, from regional theaters to off-Broadway to writing to directing, you name it — it’s in this film. More than anything, it called on my spirit that truly believes in service and trying to make sure that people feel heard and seen, because that’s what the character, Bayard Rustin, did. His life was about being in service to others, and then history put him in the shadows. It was my opportunity to really bring him out.

Andrew, All of Us Strangers is about a gay man in London who visits his childhood home and finds living there the parents whom he lost to a car accident 30 years earlier. You were basically being asked by the filmmaker, Andrew Haigh, to play a version of himself — you even shot some of the film in his childhood home. Can you talk about that unique challenge?

SCOTT I didn’t really think of it like I was playing Andrew. I felt that we weirdly kind of co-parented the character, considering that that’s a sort of theme in the film. I certainly looked to him. I feel he was a comrade in the telling of the story. But I suppose the challenge for me was to not pretend to be anybody else, but to go back to a place where I was [in my own life]. So it was a marriage between our two personalities. It was difficult because there’s two sections to the film, and one of them is about going back to childish feelings, and the other is about very adult, physical, falling in love, so how do you do that without making it boyish, gross or, I don’t know, gilding the lily somewhat? But Andrew was so generous in filming it in his family’s little suburban home with one camera — such a vulnerable thing to do — and I could tell that all the brutality that comes from within families, accidental or not, really was raw for him. And I think he sees that in me. We were very sensitive with each other, and I could tell if I was affecting him because he’s not a sentimental person. 

One of the really beautiful scenes in All of Us Strangers is when Andrew’s character gets to come out to his parents, even though he never got to do that during their lifetimes. And I want to bring up something that I think is fairly noteworthy, and sadly still somewhat of a rarity, even in 2023: Andrew and Colman, you are openly gay actors playing openly gay characters at the center of important films. Do you believe things have gotten better during your decades in this business? 

DOMINGO From the very beginning, I’ve always been exactly who I was. There was never a coming out story. But also, I always wanted to lead in rooms with my intelligence and kindness and what I do. It wasn’t really something that was actually on the table. In the beginning, you’re challenged because you look around and you feel kind of rare. Other people were sort of hiding that aspect, and I thought, “Well, why?” I remember somebody asked me years ago — I thought it was the weirdest question — after I worked with a very well-known director who is straight, some interviewer said, “How does so-and-so feel about you being gay?” It was the weirdest question.

SCOTT What the fuck?   

DOMINGO I thought, “What? He’s like my brother. What are you talking about? What world do you live in?” I just thought, “What does that matter?” And I still feel that way. I feel like being gay is just one aspect of me, but it’s not everything. And I’ve never put limitations on what I do. I’ve always believed that if I don’t put limitations on myself, this industry won’t put limitations on me. If I’m walking around with a secret and hiding something, I think you see that. I need to be my fullest self to access everything. 

Another thing that seems to be shifting in the business is the evaporation of the mid-range budget movie, the sort of movie that helped to establish many of the people at this table. It seems like those projects are now being made for TV, if at all. Does that make you more interested in doing TV than you used to be?

RUFFALO One of the good things that came out of the strike was these interim indie projects. I went out and did one. It was 10 episodes of independent television for $5 million. So that’s six hours of television for less than what we made You Can Count on Me for, or around the same. It was a grind, and I haven’t done that in a long time, but it was doable, and they were able to give the actors everything that SAG had asked for. The production company agreed to do it. It wasn’t impossible. What happened with streaming was, we all ran to do it because it was another kind of freedom, but it just created a vacuum in the indie world. And now I feel like there’s a chance to have a resurgence of that. Now I’ll look at an indie picture much differently than I did two or three years ago. I know we made a good piece of television, and I know it wasn’t because of the budget, it was because of the story, it was because of the heart, it was because of the commitment to it. So you don’t need to make a movie for $60 million or $70 million for it to be good. I didn’t mind taking a cut, I didn’t mind working SAG low-budget. I mean, I can afford it. But I didn’t mind it. 

DOMINGO I think the model has to change. Just recently, my partners and I produced a film called Sing Sing, and it premiered at TIFF. We kept the budget very low, but we made sure it was equitable for everyone. 

OK, let’s close with some rapid fire. What was the worst audition you ever went on?

DOWNEY I went in for a Dr Pepper commercial. They came out in the hallway and they said, “OK, you’re the pied piper and everybody wants to be like you.” And I just stood up and walked out of there. 

GIAMATTI I auditioned for a musical once, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. You’re supposed to burst into song. I just started laughing and I couldn’t do it, and I walked out of the room.  

Which living actor whom you’ve not worked with would you most like to work with? 

DOMINGO Immediately, I think of Emma Stone. I can feel that she’s inventive and kind and generous and quirky and weird, and she’s going to just give you a gift every day. 

RUFFALO Yep. Good call. She’s a precious artist.

GIAMATTI I wish I could’ve worked with Robert Duvall. (Looking at Downey) You worked with him. He’s very old now. But I wish I could have.  

WRIGHT Dustin Hoffman. He was the guy, from Papillon to Midnight Cowboy, transformative roles. 

If you hadn’t become an actor, what would you be doing today? 

GIAMATTI I wanted to be an animator. 

DOMINGO I got into Johnson & Wales University to be a chef, actually. That’s what I wanted to be. But I’m thinking that for the third act of my life, I want to investigate architecture. I’m an architecture nerd, and I’m always thinking, “Maybe I’ll go back to school to learn that and do that at 70.” 

RUFFALO I started taking sculpture classes at the Art Students League in New York City, and I really love that. It gives me a lot of what I get from acting. And if that was a possibility, I would throw off. That’d be a good second act. Or teaching. I’d love to teach. 

SCOTT My mother was an art teacher. I got my first film when I was 17; it was a little Irish film. On exactly the same day, I won this bursary [scholarship] to educate myself as a painter for five years — a big bursary — and I chose fucking show business.

DOWNEY If I wasn’t an actor, I would be doing hard time. (Laughs.) 

WRIGHT If I wasn’t doing this, I’d be a lawyer — maybe, I don’t know, maybe a criminal lawyer. I’d be Robert’s lawyer. 

DOWNEY It’s a growth industry. 

This story first appeared in the Jan. 10 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.