Love it or Blacklist it: James Spader is at home playing oddballs.
If you think James Spader’s Blacklist character is weird, wait until you meet him
When listening to a question, James Spader bobs his head up and down while his eyes squint at his interviewer, a trait the three-time Emmywinner shares with Raymond “Red” Reddington, the sybaritic supervillain turned FBI informant he portrays with gusto on the hit NBC series
The Blacklist.
The bob is one of several compulsions that recently earned the 54-year-old the designation of “The Strangest Man on TV” — a title bestowed after spending a day showing a Rolling Stone writer his favourite New York spots.
Recently, during an unexpectedly sweltering August afternoon in Yonkers, N.Y., Spader displayed the mannerism while making an unannounced visit to the historic 17 th-century Philipse Manor Hall estate. Dressed in Reddington’s trademark three-piece suit and matching fedora, the shorn actor took shelter in one of the historic landmark’s wooden rooms shortly after wrapping a scene for the third episode of The Blacklist’s second season.
“I don’t put a tremendous amount of stock in [magazine profiles],” he demurred. “I mean, I don’t know somebody after talking to them for a couple of hours.” (It’s no wonder an unnamed friend once told The Boston Globe, “to profile him is to describe a walnut while looking at its shell.”). Pausing for a moment to nod and squint, Spader offered, “I think one grows into one’s own idiosyncrasies. They change and evolve over time and you try to dispense with those that hold you still and try and nurture those that keep you moving forward and growing.”
In the diaspora of lauded cable and internet antiheroes, Reddington may be the last juicy, tour-de-force network antagonist, and Spader its last ornery star. Modelled after The Usual Suspects’ wiley Keyser Soze (so much so that Kevin Spacey was courted to star before Spader signed on), criminal mastermind Reddington’s introduction is more akin to Hannibal Lecter: inexplicably turning himself in to the FBI on the condition he only speak with rookie agent Elizabeth Keen (played with wide-eyed
‘I have always been drawn to characters which live in some sort of extremity’
stiffness by Megan Boone). Together they form a mutually beneficial task force, taking out mustache-twirling baddies from Red’s “list” with pulpy aplomb.
On the show, as in life, Spader’s performance is so delectably hammy it dominates everything around it. His turn can mask the frailty of the supporting cast and gauche plot points, helping make The Blacklist the only verifiable dramatic hit of last season. It also, as executive producer Jon Bokenkamp found out, can mean hours spent on the phone justifying the “truth” behind Red’s motivations — and, occasionally, tens of thousands of dollars spent in rewrites to appease the star.
“I think you carry into the room with you those attributes of a character that are accessible to you and try to fill in the empty spaces,” Spader said of his process. “I have always been drawn to characters which live in some sort of extremity.”
Pause, nod, squint: “I like that.”
A quick glance at Spader’s CV confirms that claim. From early roles in Brat Pack classics Pretty in Pink and Less
Than Zero to his trio of sexually perverse turns in Crash,
Sex, Lies and Videotape and Secretary, Spader has spent the majority of his career playing high brow characters with particular afflictions. But while costars and good friends like Robert Downey Jr. were indulging in the so-called “extremities” afforded to them, Spader was at home, married with children. In the former Yonkers city hall, he explained that he didn’t “have any interest in putting my life up on the screen,” then or now.
Spader’s real life inability to save money (a trait he says he inherited from his father) has dictated the path
‘I was having a hard time finding a show that had all of the elements I wanted badly’
of his career, though. When he failed to cash in on the critical currency of Secre
tary, Spader took a part as soft-hearted legal shark Alan Shore in the last season of the David E. Kelly television series The Practice, a role that eventually landed him his own spin-off, Boston Legal, and his trio of Emmys.
When that show wrapped, he recalled, “looking for an antidote to doing an hour network drama year in and year out, so I came to New York and did a new David Mamet play on Broadway.
“It was the perfect antidote,” he laughed, pausing either for effect or by impulse, “but then of course at the end of it I was broke.”
Tail between his l egs, Spader returned to television on the NBC comedy
The Office and, soon after, took a leave to film a part in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. But when both of those projects wrapped, he once again found himself at home looking through a pile of pilot scripts to pay the bills.
“And then this came across my doorstep and I got very excited about it,” he said of
The Blacklist pilot. “I was having a hard time trying to find a television show that had all of the elements that I wanted badly: dramatic at the same time that it is funny and irreverent; that lives and shoots in a city that was exciting to live and shoot in, and also seemed to be a series that could sustain over a period of time.”
With the success of the show, Spader said he prefers not to reflect on his past. “I don’t watch my old movies. I just don’t have time. And if given time there’s always something that I would find to fill it with over that.”
Instead, he’s looking ahead; to the series’ second season — in which he will act opposite guest stars Mary Louise Parker, Krysten Ritter and, in the episode he was filming that day, Paul “Pee-Wee Herman” Reubens — and, of course, his upcoming role as another big bad man: Ultron in The Aven
gers sequel, opposite his old pal, Downey Jr.
Asked why he chose to take on such an enormous enterprise after years of toiling in independent cinema, Spader stopping his head bop for a brief moment before flashing an unexpected smile, “I just thought it would be tremendous fun.”