Stuhlbarg takes a studious approach
Michael Stuhlbarg, lately on TV’s “Fargo” (as the ill-fated Sy Feltz) and soon to be on the nation’s movie screens in “Call Me By Your Name” and “The Shape of Water,” keeps a composition notebook, 9.75-by-7.5 inches, with the familiar black-andwhite marbled cover, full of color-coded details regarding the performances he’s readying at the moment.
His handwriting is pretty stunning. As a kid, the actor, now 49, learned calligraphy from his mother. The book contains keys to his working methods and his personal mode of preparation.
For example: “Call Me By Your Name.” The actor plays an American-born art history and antiquities professor in Italy whose 17-year-old son experiences first love with a visiting American scholar. The professor’s story, one of them, at least, remains a stealth element for most of the film (adapted by James Ivory from the novel by Andre Aciman). Then, near the end, Stuhlbarg delivers a long, searching, reflective monologue, and it’s so beautifully and simply acted that “Call Me By Your Name” becomes not just a tale of painful newfound romance but of other characters, other stories and distant roads not taken.
“I’ve always written things down longhand,” he tells me. What’s the advantage? “It goes all the way through you when you write something down longhand. You’re entering what’s written into your brain, through your hands, into your mind. You’re touching on every moment textually that’s on the page for you. It lives in you, in some way. The work becomes not just intellectual but metaphysical, and putting it down on paper seems to be the beginning step.”
In another a crucial supporting role, that of a Russian-born scientist in Guillermo del Toro’s Cold War-era monster movie “The Shape of Water,” Stuhlbarg had to learn to speak a fair amount of Russian. So out came the notebook, and in went detailed phonetic breakdowns of each word and sentence. “Quite a complicated process,” he says. “And you get help from a tutor, if you’re lucky.” Full of drawings and sketches in addition to words, the notebooks serve as “laboratories for ideas.” They’re a way of preventing Stuhlbarg from, as he says, “getting lost.”
After many years in New York, acting off-Broadway and on, Stuhlbarg was auditioned by Joel Coen for various roles in “A Serious Man.” He ended up with the lead: Larry Gopnick, a Joblike survivor of domestic and ethical calamity in 1967 suburban Minneapolis.
Now Stuhlbarg is an officially familiar face, thanks in part to long-running TV gigs such as “Fargo” and, earlier, “Boardwalk Empire.”
If there’s any justice, “Call Me By Your Name” should garner him his first Academy Award nomination.
The movie, he says, was shot mostly in sequence, “so there was a lot of time to get to know each other, build relationships with each other. We were there near Crema (in Italy) about seven weeks making it. That gave me plenty of time to let that last scene sort of … brew inside me.”
The itinerant actor’s life has its challenges, he acknowledges, and it’s often, as he says, “a very private practice. It can become a kind of ...” Stuhlbarg closes his eyes and thinks a few seconds. Then: “I submerge myself in it as much as I can.” Nov. 5 birthdays: Singer Art Garfunkel is 76. TV personality Kris Jenner is 62. Singer Bryan Adams is 58. Actress Tatum O’Neal is 54. Singer Angelo Moore of Fishbone is 52. Singer Ryan Adams is 43. Guitarist Kevin Jonas of The Jonas Brothers is 30.