Bettany explores being Warhol in play
Paul Bettany has long been an admirer of art superstar Andy Warhol, from a distance, like an art lover wandering a favorite gallery. But when he was initially offered a chance to get much closer and play his hero onstage, he declined.
“I don’t know how you get underneath the wig and the glasses and the carefully curated public persona. I don’t know how to do it,” Bettany recalled thinking. “I think there might be a reason that Andy is always a cameo in films.”
Persistence on the part of a producer and reading Warhol’s diaries convinced Bettany that he might at least try. Now he finds himself on Broadway eight times a week underneath a wig, wearing glasses and making the very art onstage that he long admired.
Bettany stars in “The Collaboration,” Anthony McCarten’s fictional account about the real period in the mid-1980s when Warhol was compelled to work with new sensation and potential rival of the New York art world, Jean-Michel Basquiat, played by Jeremy Pope.
They were different men — one white, one Black; one older, the other younger. Warhol, 58, was a conceptional artist whose Pop Art explored household brand objects like Campbell’s soup cans and celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, while Basquiat, in his late 20s, was a neoExpressionist, concerned with colonialism and racism.
The work explores what may have been their dynamic as both men try to figure the other out and visit each others’ studios, and deals with race, commercialism, police
brutality, addiction and the artist’s soul.
Bettany is filled with praise for his subject. “If Warhol hadn’t existed, it would be like the Beatles not existing. Music would just sound different now and things would look different — magazines would look different, the posters would look different, design would look different,” he says.
One thing Bettany shared with Warhol was that the play shows the artist gingerly returning to painting after 25 years of making reproductions — roughly the same time Bettany has been away from stage work.
In the meantime, he has been noticed for playing android superhero Vision in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Bettany, 50, earned an Emmy Award nomination last year for his role in “WandaVision.”
Doing theater at 50 is very different from doing
it at 25, he says. When he was younger, he’d finish a play and be so buzzed he’d be unable to sleep, winding down in a club or a pub until the wee hours.
“Now I’ve got kids. Six o’clock in the morning, I’m up,” he says laughing. “By the time I’ve left the theater … I’ll get home at 11, and I will have electricity running through my body. All I want to do is be with people and get it out of me. So I’m not sure it’s the healthiest thing in the world for me, frankly, but I love the doing of it.”
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