It’s nice to have friends in Hollywood who will call you up to offer you a great script, even in the middle of the night.
Christian Slater has one of those — his name is Emilio Estevez, who rang Slater while he was in London at a reunion party for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” to offer him a part in “Bobby,” Estevez’s movie about Robert F. Kennedy’s last day.
In his defense, Slater probably should have asked more questions.
“I would have been happy to deliver coffee on the set. Instead, I got to play the racist [jerk],” Slater says during a recent promotional stop in Washington.
“Thanks, Emilio! Thanks a million, buddy! Perhaps I should have read the script.”
If he’d done that, he might even been more attracted to his character. One of several big names in the cast, which includes Anthony Hopkins, Martin Sheen, Demi Moore and William H. Macy, Slater stars as Timmons, a kitchen manager at the Ambassador Hotel in L.A. who looks down upon his minority employees and refuses to let them have time off to vote in the 1968 California Democratic primary — most likely for Kennedy, a presidential hopeful who was popular among all the races before his assassination at that same hotel.
Born in 1969, Slater missed RFK’s legacy but he’s heard all the stories about the Kennedys, their legend and their ways to improve the country. “They certainly made politics very romantic, very sexy, very passionate,” he says. “They were able to ignite people and get them really excited.”
Slater’s character represents the part of the population back then that didn’t agree with the concepts and ideas for which Kennedy stood, though he does find a sense of redemption.
“Kennedy was all about tearing down the walls of segregation. My character is happy with where they are,” Slater explains. “He likes people in their place and in their position and perceives people in the way that he does. But Kennedy was such a powerful man, of course, that even a character like mine was able to be permeated by the words he spoke and a bridge was able to be built between the races.”
It wasn’t until he saw the premiere at the Venice Film Festival (“Taking a gondola to a screening was cool. That’s always nice”) that he understood why a movie with all these storylines and people involved was called “Bobby.” “It was a wonderful way to represent who Bobby Kennedy was because he was a man of the people and this is a movie about people and where we’re at and where we were at one particular time,” he says.
And Slater quickly forgave his friend for not telling him all about Timmons from the start.
“He played it very well,” Slater says. “He kinda told me some of the people that were involved — he didn’t tell me I’d be playing the racist [jerk].
“That’s the great thing about getting to be an actor: getting to know yourself, being able to separate the difference between who you are and the person you’re playing. I certainly would hope to be a nicer boss than this guy. It felt like an important role and provided a certain kind of balance to the movie. Otherwise, it would have been a little too whoop-de-doo, la-dee-da, everybody’s happy.”
In addition to Venice, “Bobby” has taken him to New York, Toronto and Atlanta, where he ran into “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle” star Kal Penn (“I was very excited about it. I really liked him. I mean, it’s Kumar! He’s a cool guy”) but the last few years he’s spent mostly in Europe, doing plays like “The Glass Menagerie” and “Cuckoo’s Nest.”
“It was like a rock concert every night,” Slater recalls. “I did sort of did a stage diveon the last performance. It was great! Somehow, these English 70-year-old ladies managed to catch me and carry me around the theater so that was pretty good and impressive. They have strong upper-body strength in Europe.”
All in all, Slater is enjoying the celebrity lifestyle of jet-setting and hobnobbing more now than he did 10 years ago.
“There’s certainly a little bit more embracing of everything right now and certainly appreciation,” he admits. “I think just a basic greater understanding of what I get to do. It is a lot of fun and it’s a real gift to perform and play these characters and absorb myself into these characters.”
Someone to ‘Love’
Christian Slater is looking to direct his first film, an adaptation of the William Viharos pulp romance “Love Stories Are Too Violent for Me.” He’s adapting it now, and will also star. “Yeah, I’d have to,” he says. “I couldn’t have anybody else do it. Otherwise, I’d have to kill ‘em.”
