Who is your favorite Duvall? Kilgore in Apocalypse Now? Maybe Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird? Some might say The Great Santini. Others would claim Bob Hodges in Colors or Mac Sledge of Tender Mercies or Sonny Dewey from The Apostle. Then there’s Frank Hackett in Network. Max Mercy in The Natural. And don’t forget Augustus "Gus" McCrae in Lonesome Dove. Me? I’ll always take Tom Hagen, consigliere to, and adopted brother of, Michael Corleone in The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II. A man of sensitivity, honor, and loyalty—and a man struggling to make his way in a corrupt, fallen world.
I spend an hour with Duvall, at a suite in the Four Seasons Hotel in Manhattan. When he enters the sunny room where I sit on the couch, waiting, he waves and says "Ahoy." He’s wearing jeans, cowboy boots the color of cinnamon, a tan shirt, and a Patagonia fleece vest. He’s in town to talk about his new movie, A Night in Old Mexico, a smallish but good Western in which he plays an old man who has lost his family’s ancient homestead on the Texas plains and, looking for one last whirl, goes down to Mexico with his grandson.
Duvall is 83 now. The blue eyes are just as wet and radiant. The hair is thin and mostly on the back of his head. When he talks, he jiggles his feet ever so slightly. (And there’s a curious thing, too, sitting across from him: There are moments when he looks exactly like Robert De Niro. The squint. The mouth turned down, as it contemplates a question. Really, take a look next time you see him on screen and tell me if I’m wrong.) These days, Duvall is happily married to his fourth wife, Luciana, who is 42. He was born in San Diego, but grew up mostly in Annapolis, Maryland, near the Naval Academy; his father was an admiral. He went to a small college in Illinois, did a tour of duty during the Korean War, then made his way to New York in 1955 to study acting. Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman and James Caan were among his classmates. His big break came in 1962 when he got cast in Mockingbird.
I’ve been told he has trouble hearing, which is why this quiet suite has been chosen for our interview. He sits down knee-to-knee with me. It feels a lot like going to see an old, flinty relative, maybe a great uncle, who you have never met but only heard tales of. And while I would like to say that I got time with Tom Hagen, I will tell you instead that Robert Duvall at age 83 is just about the closest thing there is to going to see an aging Gus McCrae from Lonesome Dove.
Robert Duvall: What do you mean, "why?"
Well, this year probably is as good a year as I’ve ever had in my life. This year, I have The Judge coming out with Robert Downey, Jr. Quite the movie. But [A Night in Old Mexico] has been in the making for a long time. It’s a great character and William Wittliff’s a wonderful Texas writer. He did the adaptation of Lonesome Dove. But he had this in the works before Lonesome Dove, even. Thirty years ago.
Well, almost. Right after Lonesome Dove, we said, "It’s too soon. It’s too soon." Then, every few years they’d try to get it off the ground. Dennis Hopper was going to direct it. I like the character a lot. Like, almost like a descendent of those guys in Lonesome Dove.
Well, yeah, I think everybody has vulnerability. Even when I played Stalin I found vulnerability.
I don’t know. I have to think about it. A series of things, I guess. Well, vulnerability: failed marriages have made me stronger; maybe this last one’s going to be the best. Yeah.
Well, not failure, just... just part of the process of life. Part of the journey.
That I’m not so great. [laughs wryly]
Maybe. You know, you run out of gas and, you know, you part company. And in this business you have options—some aren’t so great—but you’re presented with options.
Yes.
Yeah, temptations that, you know, come and go. And you try to find something that’s the most stable. Sometimes what you think is the most stable is something you should have run from. I mean, you’re not dealing in absolutes. When I met my current wife—she’s much younger than I—we met in Argentina on the street, by chance. I figured, why not? I mean, it worked out, so.
Oof. I don’t know, I mean, go with your instincts, but sometimes your instincts aren’t good. Sometimes you’re just drawn to the wrong thing anyway. I don’t know. Just lead with your head and keep your fingers crossed. It’s a gamble. It’s funny because you don’t love at the end the way you did at the beginning. It’s a love-hate kind of idea.
Well, I mean, people end up hating each other at the end of a relationship, it seems. That’s my observation and experience.
Oh, mother, to a point. My father was somewhat. But my father was a military sort; he was away a lot. One time he came home after a long period at sea, and he spoke sharply to my younger brother, and my younger brother said to my mother, "Tell that man to go home." Because, you know, he didn’t connect.
I don’t know... Maybe a certain kind of strength, certain kind of being opinionated too much, sometimes. She was like that too: opinionated sometimes.
Oh yeah. Yeah.
Contradictions? I don’t know. I have to think about that. Well, you get idealistic in one way and then you go the other way, you know.
You don’t follow your instincts.
I don’t know, things like picking what I want to do. Sometimes I go against those instincts and people talk me back into it. I didn’t want to do this thing [The Judge] with Robert Downey, Jr. at all.
The character. He’s an incontinent guy, shit all over himself, had cancer. And then I was talked into it. And sometimes when I go back a second time, it goes better.
Well, one of my oldest friends went behind my back once, so I won’t get into that. My oldest friends are, I don’t know, my wife, my new wife. We do a lot together. So we’re very close friends. Yeah. So I don’t have a lot of friends outside the family. The smallest family circle.
Yeah.
The longest in my life... oh, I guess my brother, but he’s in Milwaukee; he’s getting old and senile. So, I don’t know, who really knows me? My wife knows me well. She knows me as well as anybody, I guess.
Citizen Kane?
It’s been a while since I’ve seen that movie. It’s a very well-made movie. A lot of the old movies I don’t like much.
I just don’t like them.
The Searchers I don’t care for.
Because it’s not acting. Except for John Wayne.
And Monument Valley’s not west Texas.
To a point. Not nearly as good as Brando, for me. Not even close. But I think the young actors now are better than ever.
Oh, there are a lot. I never saw Montgomery Clift come close to what Matthew McConaughey did in this movie.
Great. Great. And there are others, you know. Many others. Because the field is open now. Black actors, Spanish actors... I mean, it’s an open field now.
I’ll tell you exactly what I learned. I did The Chase with him. He was sitting there on the couch, mumbling and they said "You’re on, action." They said "cut," he went back to mumbling. There was no beginning. It was all the same. Here, acting, action, cut, there. It was all him, extended.
Yes. Yes. It was great to watch that, yeah.
Yeah that was Godfather 2, wasn’t it?
I believe, yeah. I forget that, yeah, that’s right.
I don’t remember it.
He said what?
"You’re out, Tom. Why do you hurt me, Michael?"
"I’ve always been loyal"—oh yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a beautifully made movie, but the second day of Godfather, this guy—he was a makeup guy—came in, and said, "This guy’s playing a kindly old uncle." So there wasn’t any real mafia in there, you know? Yeah, so, they were beautifully made movies, the first two, but I don’t know if you ever get that sense of, these aren’t great guys. And they’re capable of stabbing each other in the back.
My friend Louis Concertina lived in East Harlem, where Carmine Tramunti was one of the five families in Manhattan. He talked about this one guy who used to go around and hold his chair for him, light his cigarette for him, get food for him. Like a gofer. Like the secret service. And I said, "Yeah, I’m in the position of a gofer, but you better not—anybody—make light of that." So that’s kind of what I was, like a professional gofer to Brando.
Not so much. Not so much.
He never saw him again?
His mother burned up in a house, didn’t she?
Wow. He always had a lot of the guilt, you know, when he was married to his first wife, Faye. Leaving, you know, he had guilt.
I think so. I would never discuss that with him. When I sent him an email, he never got back to me. But we were always good friends, way back. I busted my pelvis on a horse, was laid up, and he offered me his last $300, which I didn’t take. He was good like that.
Hoffman, me, my brother, three or four other actors and singers had a place on 107th and Broadway in Manhattan, uptown. About a year or so. But Hackman pal-ed around, because he knew Dusty—he introduced me to Dusty when Dusty moved here.
It was so stupid of me, and it didn’t work. We’d just fid up our apartment, and, I’d say, "Come up to our apartment, we just put new linoleum on the floor!" I think Dusty quoted that recently. He got more women than anybody, Dustin Hoffman. More than anybody. I had one floor, he had the other, and I came down one day and he had a naked girl up on the table. He had told her he was a painter; he was painting. Funny.
No. I should, but it’s a strange business. England is different, everything is close. English actors stay in touch. But this country is so big. People here, there. And once you make it, it’s kind of a fickle—it’s strange. You work together and then, yeah.
But, if I would see him—somebody gave his number to call, I’m going to call him—you pick up right where you left off years ago. Me and Hackman are the same way. But, you know, I haven’t seen Dustin. We have different worlds. Different worlds.
Yeah. Well, no. I like a good Hollywood party. But, you know, we live in Virginia. Periodically, we go to L.A. I have more friends in L.A. than back East actually. But, you know, you can dip it in the boat. You can dip into all that. I kind of have my own world. But I always liked hobbies. A young actor once said to me, "What did you do between jobs when you were young, go nuts?" I said, "Hobbies, hobbies, more hobbies keeps you off the dope."
No. No, everybody’s just got so many friends. I go to a function with all these friends; I say, "I don’t have this many friends." Yeah, me and my wife are both loners, kind of. She’s cut off from Argentina. She doesn’t like Argentina; that’s where she’s from. I like Buenos Aires a lot. I just do, something about it. I told Giuliani, "You keep New York; I take Buenos Aires."
Who do I want to work with now?
I’ve tried that before; it didn’t work out.
Well, you want to work with some actor and it doesn’t work out. But I don’t know who I want to work with now. I’ll find somebody.
I don’t even know the seven.
I guess I can be convicted of all of those. All of them. I weigh two hundred pounds. I should be, like, one eighty-five. I eat too much... Always crazy thoughts go through your head: thoughts of wrath, here and there. Wrath over certain directors.
Oh, there have been a few. There have been a few. But you know, they always say, "Actors are difficult to work with." Well, directors are difficult to work with.
Well, it was good because he was, like, 25, but it was like he’d done it thirty years in the right way. You know, Lucas, he’s a real filmmaker. And then he went to become more, what? Entrepreneur or whatever? Coppola kind of did more. But with his first film, it was like Lucas had done it many years in the right way.
Yeah, still, there’s a kick there; I get hit with a certain excitement. Like, Terry Gilliam came to my farm in Virginia, wanted me to play Don Quixote. But that isn’t going to happen.
Oh, he can’t raise the money. He did a movie recently I heard went right down the drain. Why didn’t he do Don Quixote? That could have been a failure too, you know. But I thought it would have been interesting to play that character.
Yeah. But that’s not going to happen. So I don’t know what there is left. There’ll be a few left, I don’t know. If they keep sending me stuff that’s worthwhile. Then, eventually that’ll peter out. So retirement will be coming. A part of evolution, natural for you. It’ll peter out.
I don’t know, just dealing with it. Saying it’s OK. Saying it’s OK to be this age. What did Hackman say about that? What did you—what did you talk about?
Why is that?
But anyway. I think Hackman still keeps in touch with Dustin, so
Maybe. I keep in touch with Jimmy Caan.
The best advice anyone ever gave me?
I don’t know, I mean, how did Gene answer that one?
Yeah, I am. Best advice was, I don’t know, I guess, "Belong to yourself." You know: Maintain your own identity and live with it.
Somewhat. But my father was much quieter and, you know, more passive. My mother kind of ran the show. Because he was away a lot. So, you know.
Meh, you say what you say. Not a lot of regrets. He’d always say, "It’d be nice to be closer." But you know, you’re as close as you can be. As close as you can get. He was a good man, a private guy.
Not too many things. I look at pictures. A couple of books from the Naval Academy. He went there when he was 16. You know, we have those things around. A letter that he wrote my mother I keep from World War II: "Hey baby, I spent 34 cents a yard on something—" You know, everything was so much cheaper. Dad made eight or ten thousand dollars a year! You could live on that. So you know, it was interesting. Things were more, in that letter, more simplistic. More black-and-white than now. But I think times have been—everybody says, "the good old days." Maybe, maybe. I think that days today are complicated but maybe better.
Oh, yeah. They don’t know whether they’re coming or going. I mean, who are they going to put up next time?
I don’t know. I’d vote third party. I mean, they turned their back on Romney—I heard him speak the other day, very articulate guy. Very prolific, very good with money. Romney was on TV. A lot of conservatives turned their back on the guy. So I don’t know who they got. Both parties are, like... it’s hard to... My wife’s very good: Being an outsider and coming to this country and becoming a citizen, she has a problem with both parties. She calls herself a "tree-hugging Republican."
Well, it could be a reaffirmation. Like, for instance, almost all the conservative women I know believe in pro-choice. I mean, you know? But you don’t hear that in the news. So many people on the left are very talented, so you work with people; you overlap, you work. That’s it.
What?
A motto?
Well, maybe I’ll come up with one.
No, no tattoos. My wife and I thought of getting one, but we never did.
Her initials, maybe. Yeah. I said to Billy Bob Thornton’s 6-year-old daughter, "Tell your dad not to put any more tattoos on his body." He’s covered. He’s covered with tattoos.
Yeah, my epitaph, I don’t know. "Ashes."
"Ashes." No, I don’t know. I don’t need a gravestone. Cremation’s fine with me.
Thank you; I appreciate it. I been thinking, you remind me of someone. Canadian actor.
Can’t think of his name. It’ll come to me.
I thought of it.
Ryan Gosling.