Consumed by anger
Coogan takes dark role in family drama ‘Dinner’
BERLIN — Steve Coogan doesn’t go for laughs in “The Dinner.” Famously funny, the versatile English veteran plays Paul Lohman, a seriously disturbed sibling, husband and father in an intense family drama.
Lohman is the unsuccessful brother of an ambitious senator (Richard Gere) and dependent in many ways on his caretaker wife (Laura Linney).
“He’s angry at the world, and then he lashes out at people around him. I understand that anger, but what I don’t do is let it consume me,” Coogan, 51, said.
“Because healthy people, mentally healthy people, might get concerned about things but they learn to turn the page of the newspaper. Or close the newspaper and get on with their lives. He’s someone who stares at the newspaper and doesn’t know what to do.”
Coogan was surprised when writer-director Oren Moverman (“The Messenger”) first called.
“Oren saw me in ‘ Philomena’ and then maybe some Michael Wi n terbottom films” — his comical “Trip” series has its third entry this month with “Trip to Italy.”
“It’s what would come under the heading ‘creative casting,’ but my character was odd, so it kind of made sense as well.
“And, yes, it was outside my comfort zone. If you have a shot to do something different, you should. That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning. You have to risk failure.” Coogan’s research? “A lot of reading and I just imagined for myself the editing switch that we have. When I look at something and get angry, five minutes later I’ll laugh, because I don’t want to dwell on this. We normal people have to get through the day.
“Then I would think, What if I couldn’t have that laugh? If I couldn’t escape that thought of something negative? A thought about something that makes me angry and I can’t escape from it?
“And it just gets worse and worse and worse. It eats me up and I feel impotent, and the people around me don’t seem to be as angry as I am, so I direct my anger towards them.
“That makes things more destructive and it becomes this unhealthy, cyclical state of mind. So to do Paul Lohman, you just try and bury yourself in that.”
(“The Dinner” opens Friday.)