‘If someone chewed too loudly, I’d explode’

Ed Harris talks to Chris Harvey about America, disillusionment and how his childhood rage can surface ‘in a second’

Ed Harris emerges from a side-door at the Trafalgar Studios in Whitehall. This is a different Ed Harris from the charged male presence who has given an edgy driving force to films from Apollo 13 to The Truman Show – winning him four Academy Award nominations – and who has recently been frightening the androids in HBO’s Westworld. The hewn-stone angles of his face are overgrown with thick, grey beard, those piercing blue eyes are watered-down by glasses and that sculpted bald head is covered by a beanie hat, pulled low.

This Ed Harris has, since December, been playing the frail, disenchanted Dodge, a Midwest patriarch whose farm and family have fallen into ruin, in Sam Shepard’s play Buried Child. It’s the 66-year-old’s first time on a British stage – he embodies Dodge’s hollowed-out self and cankered wit with deep understatement; and the character appears to have seeped into his bones. He even chooses to hold our conversation on the old sofa around which the play’s action takes place, despite the fact that he has to spend three hours per night on it and has done so eight times a week for 100 performances (and counting).

As soon as he opens his mouth, though, and I hear his deep, sonorous burr, my original preconceptions about the actor resurface. Which is closer to the real Ed Harris – Dodge or the characters he more usually plays, always on the brink of violence?

“I’m not a fighter, I never have been, but I put it out there, don’t f--- with me, and part of that is because if you do, I don’t know what will happen,” he replies. “I had a violent temper when I was a kid. I’m surprised my parents didn’t kick me out of the house because I would get upset about the most mundane things, my jeans weren’t dry or somebody was chewing food too loudly, and I would explode.” And he can access that when he needs to? He laughs. “Any given second.”

I mention that he famously didn’t get along with Titanic director James Cameron while

‘Don’t mess with me, because if you do, I don’t know what will happen’