‘Dinner’ talk
Steve Coogan and Richard Gere star in political drama ‘The Dinner’
f you’ve seen “The Trip” movies starring Steve Coogan, you know that the British actor is a master at impressions. Over the course of the film series, he’s delivered spot-on impersonations of everyone from Liam Neeson and Stephen Hawking to Michael Caine, Peter Sellers and Richard Gere.
There have been a few times when Coogan has come face to face with the folks he’s poked fun at and it’s been, well, a bit awkward.
“It’s funny because when you’re in a certain universe, you feel you can mock people that you’re unlikely to encounter . ... But there have been people in the U.K. who I’ve come across and they’ve said, ‘You said that thing about me.’ I’m, like, ‘Hey, it’s all just to be funny, and I don’t mean anything by it.’”
None of Coogan’s encounters with British actors, though, prepared him for meeting Gere, with whom he co-stars in “The Dinner,” which opens shortly in area theaters.
Coogan says that during the pair’s onscreen fight scene, Gere connected a little too powerfully with a right hook to Coogan’s jaw.
“He punched me!” says Coogan. “He grabbed me and we did it about five or six times and then when I dodged my head [on the last take], I was a little late moving, and he hit me on the side of my face, very hard, so hard that I was momentarily stunned. I saw stars.
“He went, ‘Oh my God. Oh my God. I just hit him.’ Then we stopped filming and I was like, ‘No, carry on. Carry on.’ Even though I was [in so much pain] …I got a little black eye the next day. Not a big one, but they had to cover it with makeup.”
After the fight scene, as Coogan sat on the sidelines with a cold compress on his face, Gere strolled by and whispered something in his ear.
“He walked over to me and said, ‘That’s for doing an impersonation of me in ‘The Trip,’” says Coogan. “You don’t think I’d let you get away with that.’”
For his part, Gere insists he’s never even seen the infamous impersonation.
“The director [Oren Moverman] told me that he was trying to find someone who was believable as my brother to cast in the movie,” recalls Gere.
“He said, ‘How about Steve Coogan?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. Does that work?’ Because I know he’s really good, a wonderful actor. And Oren said, ‘Yeah it’ll work. You should see this impression he does of you.’ So Oren told me about it, but I never saw it.”
As it turns out, the tension between Coogan and Gere works wonders for the movie, which pivots on their characters’ mutual distrust.
A drama based on a bestseller by Herman Koch, “The Dinner” takes place at a fancy restaurant where two couples have come to discuss a deadly crime perpetrated by their sons.
Gere plays a lawmaker who is about to become governor and Rebecca Hall is his trophy wife. Coogan is his resentful younger brother who’s always lived in his sibling’s long shadow. Laura Linney co-stas as Coogan’s wife.
In the movie, Gere believes the teenagers should turn themselves in while the women argue that the boys’ lives would be ruined forever if they were sent away to prison.
When the film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, it netted rave reviews. Variety called it “riveting,” adding that is a “portrait of the hidden muck, and even the quivers of insanity, that can run through the most ‘normal’ of families.”
While Coogan has appeared in several dramas, most notably “Philomena” with Judi Dench which he co-wrote, he’s best known for such comedies as “Trisham Shandy,” “The Other Guys” and “Night At the Museum.”
When Coogan was approached about “The Dinner,” he was pleased to be given a shot at a hardcore drama.
“Oren called me up to have a conversation with me about the script, and it looked pretty demanding to me, so far outside my comfort zone,” recalls Coogan, 51. “But if you have a shot to do something different, then I think you should take it. That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning. And to feel excited about what I do, you have to risk failure.
“Oren saw me in ‘Philomena’ and then maybe some Michael Winterbottom films and thought, this guy’s interesting. … I think I was the most risky choice in the casting. With Rebecca and Laura and Richard, you knew they could do this. But my character was odd, so it made sense [to cast me] as well.”
Coogan’s character is, indeed, the most unbalanced of the quartet and, by the end of the film, is revealed to be suffering from many mental health issues.
Before filming began, Coogan read some psychology books and delved deep into his imagination in an effort to nail down his challenging character.
“Mostly, I just imagined myself if I didn’t have an editing switch.
“I will look at something and get angry and then five minutes later I’ll be laughing because I don’t want to dwell on it and we all have to get through the day.
“But [in playing this role] I thought what would it be like 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 it just gets worse and worse and worse and eats me up and I feel impotent.
“And what if the people around me don’t seem to be as angry as I am, so I want to direct my anger towards them, and it makes things more destructive and I get more contempt back at me. So it becomes this unhealthy, cyclical state of mind.
“So you just try and bury yourself in that.”
At the heart of the movie, Coogan argues, is a look at the difficulty of doing the right thing.
“Principles are sometimes things that are just a privileged [notion] that we can have intellectually,” says Coogan who’ll next be seen in a biopic about Laurel and Hardy which he’s shooting with John C. Reilly. “We never actually have to apply them.
“This film is about that problem, how we square that circle. It’s about the fact that we have these tribal loyalties, which are very understandable, and then we have our principles, and how do we square those things?
“Because sometimes protecting the welfare of people next to you, people you love, might harm the welfare of someone else’s child, through a chain of events.”