He goes ape crazy in ‘Square’
Terry Notary, who has played Kong, bounces and pounces CG-free for art-world satire.
If you’ve seen Ruben Östlund’s wonderfully abstract sendup of the art world, “The Square,” which is up for a foreign-language Oscar, one scene stands out. It takes place at a formal dinner gala with billionaire museum donors, an atmosphere of quiet desperation and a shirtless man impersonating an ape.
“Ruben called me up and said, ‘I want you to come in and be a movement artist and an ape impersonator and terrorize this group of donors at this very fancy gala,’ ” says actor and movement coach Terry Notary, who plays performance artist Oleg in the film. “And I’m like, ‘That sounds fun .... Let’s do it!’ ”
On set, the motion-capture actor and teacher was given relatively free rein. After all, playing an ape wasn’t new territory for Notary. In addition to his work on “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” “Suicide Squad,” “Avatar,” “The Hobbit” films and more, he played displaced alpha chimp Rocket in the “Planet of the Apes” reboots and the ultimate great ape in “Kong: Skull Island.”
Even so, there was an element of uncertainty for Notary had to deal with in “The Square,” mostly by design. He knew that the scene would last between eight and 12 minutes and wouldn’t include any dialogue. But, he admits, “We didn’t really know what we were going to do when we got there. There was an empty room with a bunch of tables, and the next day there were going to be 300 extras in there.”
But about those extras — Östlund had his own surprise for Notary.
“He didn’t tell me that all the people in the room were actual billionaire donors, gallery owners, artists and very well-to-do bourgeois art scene people,” Notary says with a laugh. “It was only after the third [and final] day of shooting [that he told me].”
Once the extras arrived on set, Notary tried to elicit authentic reactions by keeping his plans organic.
“I didn’t want to go in knowing, ‘I’m going to do this to this person and that to that person,’ ” he says. “I wanted to go to all the people that didn’t want to be picked. Because there were some people that would come up to me in the scene and go, ‘Hey, pick me, we’ll do a little fight if you want.’ And I thought, ‘Hmm, no, I’m not going to pick you. I’m going to pick that lady over there that doesn’t want to be picked. She’s been looking away from me all day.’ Because then you get the real reactions, the real tension.”
After sizing up the extras, he began to formulate a course of action in his head.
“I knew that I wanted to win their hearts in the beginning,” he says. “And then gang up on the alpha male in the room, kick the alpha male out, become the alpha and then turn on everyone else who ganged up on him with me and say, ‘OK, who’s next? Now it’s time to teach you what it feels like to be bullied or to be scared.’ ”
In the scene, Notary’s character Oleg quickly identifies the alpha as a fellow artist named Julian, played by Dominic West.
“So Dominic, I’d never met him before,” Notary says. “We did that take twice, and they chose the second take. The first take, when he went up the balcony, he actually picked up a vase full of flowers and water and threw it at me. And it shattered all over the stage, and I thought, ‘That’s got to be in the movie, that’s going to be the one.’ But he didn’t pick it, and I was surprised because I thought it was a better take.”
With the alpha taken care of, Oleg goes on to terrorize the rest of the guests, to disastrous results for the gala.
“Ruben said, ‘Why don’t you take over, start pointing out how weak everyone is and then breed with the prettiest girl in the room?’ ” Notary says with a laugh. “And I was like, ‘Oh, boy, OK. Now we’re going to the next level.’ ”
The film scene unfolds with such palpable discomfort and mounting tension that it feels even longer than its 12 minutes.
“The little story became its own mini three-part movie within a movie,” Notary says. “It felt like a little tiny short within the film.” That, he says, is part of the genius of Östlund.
“One of the great things about Ruben is that he really lets things play out in real time, and he lets tense moments unfold as they would rather than trying to rush them and cut in quicker bites and pieces,” Notary says. “He doesn’t try to tell the story with too many camera angles. He just allows the moment to play out and you sort of watch as a spectator.
“He almost shot it in a way that you felt like you were sitting in the audience in that gallery, you felt like you were a part of it.”
While many audience members left the theater scratching their heads at the meaning of the scene, Notary distills its purpose into a single word: complacency.
“If Oleg could speak in the scene,” Notary says, “he would say, ‘How far do I have to go to get you off your butts and out of your complacent state in order to do something and to take action?’
“I think we’ve all felt that at one point in our lives. Like, you’ve been picked on or taken advantage of and you didn’t say anything. And half an hour later you go, ‘God, I wish I would’ve said this,’ or ‘I wish I would’ve done this or that.’ Well, we should learn from these things, and we should speak out when things are not right, or things that are not what you believe in and stand up. So that’s what it was for me.”