Anthony LaPaglia likes playing angst-ridden souls, 
so it seems as if he was made for the film 'Lantana.'

Los Angeles Times
Saturday, December 15, 2001
By Hugh Hart

     "Here's the good news and the bad news. I'm 42," Anthony LaPaglia 
declares. 
     The Australian-born actor, flipping an omelet slice onto a piece of 
toast at a Brentwood coffee shop, is trying to explain the basis for his 
fiercely intense performance in the film "Lantana." "The bad news is, it's 
not good to get old in this business. But the good part is that, by the age 
of 42 you've experienced enough life, enough failure, enough loss and 
frustration to understand that guy." 
     That "guy" is Leon Zat, a Sydney detective seething with rage who cheats 
on his wife, yells at his children, bullies witnesses, beats suspects and 
isn't even all that nice to his mistress. Then, a missing-person 
investigation draws Leon into the overlapping private lives of three other 
couples whose marriages are every bit as dysfunctional as his. 
     Said LaPaglia, "At one point Leon says, 'I'm numb. I can't feel 
anything.' So he tries to jump-start his life, he has an affair, he has these 
bouts of anger because he doesn't know where to put any of this stuff. 
There's a complexity in the writing that makes Leon a really great 
character." 
     The Australian film industry clearly agrees. LaPaglia earned that 
country's version of the Oscar last month when the Australian Film Institute 
named him the year's best film actor. In an unprecedented sweep, the 
institute also singled out "Lantana" as best film and named Kerry Armstrong 
best actress, and gave Vince Colosimo and Rachael Blake supporting actor 
honors. In America, LaPaglia is emerging as a possible dark-horse Oscar 
contender. 
     Commercially, "Lantana" remains a top 10 box-office draw nine weeks 
after its theatrical release in Australia. Word-of-mouth buzz there has 
turned the psychological thriller into something of a pop culture phenomenon 
akin to the stateside indie success story "Memento." 
     "I've never been in a situation where I couldn't walk down the street," 
LaPaglia said. "Now, I get approached by people who are just so moved by the 
film." 
     He thinks the reason is simple. "'Lantana' caters to an audience that 
has been completely neglected. There's this huge population of people over 30 
who want to go to the movies if you give them something to see. 'Lantana' 
somehow reflects their lives, it gives them characters they understand." 
     Referring to the film's deliberately ambiguous final scene leaving the 
future of Leon's marriage unresolved, LaPaglia said, "The movie respects the 
audience and lets you figure things out for yourself." 
     Among the issues to puzzle over: What exactly is Leon's problem? His 
wife Sonja (Armstrong) is beautiful, intelligent and sensitive; his 
dope-smoking teenage son only moderately bratty. He has a job; his colleagues 
respect him. Yet Leon is miserable. 
     "You know what this guy's problem is?" LaPaglia said. "Most people live 
lives of unfulfilled ambitions. When you're 15, you're gonna be a fireman or 
whatever your dream is. Suddenly you're 30 and not doing what you thought 
you'd be doing at 15; suddenly you're 35 and you've got a bunch of 
obligations and commitments you hadn't conceived of before. Leon is all about 
waking up one day at the age of 40 and going, 'How ... did this become my 
life?'" 

* * *
     "Lantana" offered LaPaglia a welcome break from conventional 
movie-making. For starters, the cast performed a table reading in front of 
the entire crew so everyone involved in the production would understand what 
the film was about. Two weeks of intensive rehearsal followed. 
     "Usually when you do a movie," LaPaglia said, "you shake the other 
actor's hand and say, 'hi,' and then somebody shouts, 'action.' That's 
rehearsal. It's ridiculous." 
     Once shooting began in Sydney last fall, the usually garrulous LaPaglia 
turned taciturn. Director Ray Lawrence, speaking by phone from Australia, 
said, "As much as Anthony loves to chat, when he was on the set he didn't 
want to talk unless he was in character. I remember there was a scene in the 
film where Anthony has to break down. We had a technical problem and I said 
we might have to do this again. He said, 'I can cry again, but I can't do 
that again.' He'd been dragging this [emotional baggage] around for six weeks 
for that. That's the kind of intensity he brought to the role." 
     In Lawrence, LaPaglia finally found a director who appreciated his 
understated style. LaPaglia said, "Movie directors are always telling me, 'I 
can't see what you're doing, can you do more?' I'm always fighting them: 'You 
can't tell what I'm doing because you're looking through that stupid little 
black-and-white monitor. Believe me, you'll see it on the dailies.'" 
     On "Lantana," Lawrence called LaPaglia's bluff, and then some. "Ray 
would come up to me very quietly after a scene and say, 'It's too much, do 
less,'" LaPaglia said. "At home my wife would say, 'How'd it go today?' and 
I'd say, 'I don't know, I just felt like I wandered around in front of a 
camera all day and didn't do anything.' It really felt that way. Ray just 
stripped me, stripped me bare." 
     Lawrence said over-the-top theatrics weren't called for because he 
needed LaPaglia to come across as an ordinary person to whom audiences could 
relate. "I hate 'aspirational' films--you're not rich enough, blond enough, 
thin enough. I deliberately wanted to confirm people's flaws. Anthony has 
this sort of emotional force field, so he doesn't really need to physically 
do very much at all. That's the trick. He doesn't lay it all out. He'd 
prepared this performance for the audience and then gave it to them in little 
bits." 
     Growing up in Adelaide, Australia, LaPaglia didn't give much thought to 
show business. At 21, while working as a shoe salesman, he tried to impress a 
date by taking her to the 17th century Restoration comedy "The Way of the 
World." By the time the play ended, LaPaglia had decided to become an actor. 
"The whole audience was like a collective organism," he said. "It laughed at 
the same place, became quiet at the same place. I wanted to be somebody on 
the stage who could control the behavior of 200 people." 
     Soon afterward, LaPaglia failed an audition for Australia's top acting 
school, the National Institute of Dramatic Arts. Plan B: He moved to New 
York, got a tattoo in New Jersey that still decorates his left bicep and 
studied acting with a succession of teachers. LaPaglia tried to find work in 
L.A., taking classes with an imperious Russian drama coach. 

* * *
     Back in New York, LaPaglia hit his stride with the late Kim Stanley, who 
taught him the essence of Method acting. "She said it's this simple: If you 
believe what you're doing, everybody watching you will believe you. That's 
it." 
     LaPaglia added, "There's no imaginary cup of coffee, no pretending 
you're a lemon, don't imagine your dead dog. It's just believing your 
circumstances. For movies, the trick is blocking out the rest of the world so 
you can create that magic in a split second of film." 
     LaPaglia made his first picture, the quickly forgotten "Cold Steel," in 
1987. For the next several years, he played cops or gangsters, consistently 
stealing scenes in movies of varying quality and prominence. 
     "When you think about it, what else is there but cops and bad guys," 
LaPaglia joked. On television, LaPaglia impressed critics in 1996 when he 
portrayed a moody defense lawyer in the Steven Bochco-produced ABC series 
"Murder One" while his younger brother Jonathan starred during the same time 
slot on Fox's "New York Undercover." 
     In recent years, LaPaglia has appeared in the period romance "The House 
of Mirth," Woody Allen's "Sweet and Lowdown" and Spike Lee's "Summer of Sam." 
Sprinkled among LaPaglia's four dozen movie characters are priests, slimy 
CEOs, Fidel Castro, a demented Santa Claus and an over-the-hill baseball 
player. 
     "People say 'character actor' like it's a dirty word," LaPaglia said. 
"You know what? I'd rather be a character actor any day of the week. You get 
to do more things, and it's far more interesting. In the American movies I 
grew up watching, the leading men were always the stiffs." 
     "Lantana," filled with twisted story arcs and thorny characters, turned 
out to be the kind of filmmaking experience LaPaglia had nearly given up on. 
"Before 'Lantana,'" he said, "I was getting all my thrills out of theater 
because I felt like it was the only place left where you couldn't fake it." 
     LaPaglia won a best actor Tony for portraying Eddie Carbone in the 1998 
revival of Arthur Miller's drama "A View From the Bridge." 
     "Most of the stuff I'm proudest of has happened on the stage, which in 
Hollywood means absolutely nothing," said LaPaglia, who lives most of the 
year in New York with his wife of three years, Australian actress Gia 
Carides. "I'd gotten a little bit jaded with film. Usually I get hired for a 
movie and they expect very little. Doing 'Lantana' was a lot more demanding. 
It reinstated my belief that movies can be a social and political and sexual 
commentary on the world that we live in." LaPaglia has three films in the 
can, including a role as Al Capone in "The Road to Perdition" opposite Tom 
Hanks. He's also producing a movie version of "A View From the Bridge" with 
"Lantana" author Andrew Bovell on hand to adapt Miller's play. 
     Like "Lantana," "View" depicts the inchoate cravings of a flawed 
everyman. LaPaglia recapped: "I'm a Brooklyn dock worker who's secretly in 
love with his niece. When she falls in love with someone else it drives him 
insane and sets him on this relentless path of self-destruction that he 
cannot stop." 
     It might not be everybody's idea of fun, but for LaPaglia, stories like 
"View" and "Lantana" offer exactly what he's looking for: deeply divided 
souls filled with turmoil, angst and heartache. "It's what I live for," 
LaPaglia said. "It's what I studied acting for, which is to make the most 
complex journey I can make in the most complicated way I can make it. That's 
what makes me happy."