At age 84, Hal Holbrook is experiencing an exciting redirection of his illustrious career. Beginning with 2007’s Into the Wild, for which he was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild award and an Academy Award, Mr. Holbrook is now getting roles that Hollywood never thought to offer him before.
Perhaps best known for his one-man show Mark Twain Tonight (for which he won a Tony), Mr. Holbrook has appeared in over 50 films. He recently spoke to Beverly Hills [213] about his latest project, the very personal and riveting drama, That Evening Sun.
“We made the movie in 21 days. Amazing to me!,” he says with a laugh. “It was made in Eastern Tennessee, outside Knoxville, over toward the foothills of the Smokies in a beautiful, beautiful valley.”
The actor worked 12 hours a day in 90 to 100 degree weather, but it was worth it, he says.
“We had a really good story to tell and very good actors...Barry Corbin and Carrie Preston and Ray McKennon, who was a wonderful adversary for me because he created a real person with his own problems. The film comes out without anybody being a real hero; everybody had to learn a bit of real humility.”
While writing “Sun”, Mr. Holbrook says that the director, Scott Teems, was not too certain how to end the film “because we didn’t want one person coming out shinier than the other. But at the end, Ray’s character finally managed tentatively to break through this long separation between his father and himself.”
In the film, Mr. Holbrook plays the irrascible Abner Meecham, who returns to his old farm in an attempt to reclaim it. He explains how he approached the character.
“I’ve lived in Tennessee on and off for the past 30 years since I married Dixie Carter. Her family took me in and really they were the only family I ever had. My own parents disappeared when I was only two so it’s meant a great deal to me, getting to be taken in by a family in this little two-gas-pump town in Tennessee. My father-in-law, Albert Carter, was somebody who I grew to admire very much, despite our political differences. He was very much his own man. He didn’t talk much. His pronouncements, whatever they were, were brief and clear. One thing you didn’t want to do was rile Cart, because if he got riled up you wanted to get out of the room!”
“Cart” lived with the Holbrook family for over 20 years but was always considered the “head of the house.”
“I believed that’s the way it should be,” Mr. Holbrook explains. “He was much older than me and he deserved that kind of respect. But the interesting thing is that never once in those 20 years at any time or any way did he ever intrude himself between Dixie and me. He never took one side or the other no matter what happened...That was very much the core of the character of Abner Michem in Evening Sun...he had no quit in him.”
However, Mr. Holbrook didn’t try to do an impression of the man.
“The main thing my wife said to me all the time was, ‘Don’t characterize...just be yourself. Get that sound out of your voice! You’re old enough already!”
This is the first film Holbrook has done since Sean Penn chose him to be in Into the Wild, an experience that he says caused “something to happen to him.”
“To begin with, it’s amazing that Sean picked me out to give me that role because nobody in Hollywood would ever cast me in a role like that,” Mr. Holbrook says. “You know, somebody in short sleeves who lived outside and an ex-Army man. I mean, they usually make me a lawyer, a senator or some damn thing like that because basically they don’t have any imagination beyond what they saw you do the last time. Once in a great while somebody might give you some kind of chance to play somebody you really are. Sean did that. And I found working with him, I finally felt like I broke through. You know the whole experience of being an actor is you are trying to move yourself forward to something more real and more true without getting caught trying. That’s the trick: not getting caught trying.”
At an age in life where one might expect him to slow down, Mr. Holbrook still thinks of himself as a work in progress.
“So I’ve played an Army guy living on the Salton Sea, a Tennessee farmer, and an old man who was an airman in the Korean War and then just a cook in a restaurant. None of these roles would Hollywood have given me five or six years ago. Except for Sean’s movie, none of them were studio films. They’re independent films where you don’t work for much money but you get to work with really good actors on a script that is interesting.”
Besides the opportunity to expand his acting range in Evening Son, Mr. Holbrook clearly enjoyed working with his wife, who has a small but important part in the film as his character’s wife.
“It was so beautiful working with Dixie. There’s no ‘acting’ with each other; we’re just reacting. And so we didn’t rehearse or anything, we just danced around and fooled around the way we do in real life and they just put the camera on us, that’s all.”
—Adam Albright-Hanna