Paul Bettany channels Unabomber’s mind
NEW YORK — To prepare for his role as Ted Kaczynski in the miniseries “Manhunt: Unabomber,” Paul Bettany spent time alone in a remote forest home, unplugged from technology, reading books.
But please don’t take that the wrong way.
“This story has begun to take on a life of its own, which is me, like Daniel Day-lewis, in the woods,” says the rangy actor over lunch at a Greek restaurant near his home in Tribeca.
Bettany wasn’t exactly roughing it: “It was a lovely, chic little cabin,” he clarifies.
Nevertheless, the experiment left an impression on the 46-year-old Brit. Without the constant distraction of technology, “There’s lots of time in the day when you’re not endlessly in contact, not endlessly checking what Trump said now,” he says. “It was great.”
The eight-episode series, airing Tuesdays on Discovery, focuses on the unorthodox investigation that finally led to Kaczynski’s capture.
FBI profiler Jim Fitzgerald, played by Sam Worthington, believed the Unabomber’s distinctive writing style could help track him down and pushed to have his 35,000-word, anti-technology manifesto published in The Washington Post, which in the process helped pioneer the field of forensic linguistics.
“Manhunt: Unabomber” also complicates the popular perception of Kaczynski as a crazed, disheveled hermit scribbling away at an unhinged manifesto. It presents a more complete understanding of what led the Harvard-educated math prodigy to become one of the country’s most notorious domestic terrorists.
Particularly illuminating were the books Bettany read — the same titles found in the 10-by-12-foot shack in western Montana, where Kaczynski, whose homemade mail bombs killed three people and injured 23 others, lived for two decades until his arrest in 1996.
His reading list was “really, really, totally cliched, like if I was writing ‘Crazy Man Living in the Woods,’ ” Bettany says. “It was like Conrad’s ‘The Secret Agent,’ Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment,’ ‘Darkness at Noon’ by Arthur Koestler.”
Bettany also turned to an unpublished autobiography by Kaczynski for more insight.
“What I came away with, more than anything, is he just felt furious and alienated and there was no place for him in the world. He didn’t fit into it, and it made him angry. And he saw other people move through the world and navigate all that with elegance, and he just couldn’t. And it made him just really, really hurt, and really, really angry.”
The series gives particular weight to Kaczynski’s experiences at Harvard, where he enrolled at age 16 and was recruited as a research subject in humiliating psychological experiments conducted by his professor Henry A. Murray.
“It allows you to go back in time and see this man who did monstrous things but who monstrous things also happened to,” Bettany says, noting the poignant detail that Kaczynski’s code name in the program was “Lawful,” because he was so obedient.
Bettany makes a distinction between sympathizing with Kaczynski and having empathy for the child he once was. He marvels at Kaczynski’s brilliance — “He was making the epoxy out of the hooves of animals!” — and sees in his choice to target relatively obscure individuals a desire to inflict personal pain.
“Look, he’s got an IQ of 168. He could go and sabotage the system, blow up the Hoover Dam, whatever the (expletive) he wants to do. He’s that bright. But he doesn’t. Why?
It’s peculiar. And I can’t square that circle without thinking that part of him got really, really hurt.”
Aside from Bettany’s tinted glasses — a touch reminiscent of the pair depicted in the famous Unabomber composite sketch — the man who plays the Vision in “The Avengers” appears to have little in common with the reclusive Kaczynski.
He is warm and open, heartily recommending his favorite meatballs and a bottle of stout, and chatting with the staff of the restaurant, where he’s a regular. There’s nothing misanthropic about him — though he does have a charming irreverent streak.
Like when he’s talking about plans to vacation with his family, which includes wife Jennifer Connelly and three children ranging in age from 6 to 20, far from the reach of paparazzi.
“Once you know they’re there, you start sucking it in. You’re trying to shout at your kids like any other parent and the cameras are there,” he says. “Terrible — especially the not being able to shout at your kids part.”