In a Broadway Bed With Bruce Willis
It might seem strange for an action star like Bruce Willis to be on Broadway and in a mattress- bound role that he describes as “85 minutes of being in that bed and just a few minutes of being out of it.”
Yet it was off Broadway, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, that Mr. Willis began his career, and at 60 he is happy to be back on stage. “It’s exciting,” he said. Mr. Willis is rehearsing for the role of Paul Sheldon, a romance writer menaced by a crazed fan in the Broadway adaptation of “Misery,” the 1987 Stephen King chiller.
The play opens at the Broadhurst Theater on October 22. Laurie Metcalf will play Annie Wilkes, Paul’s psychotic captor.
With the exception of a revival of Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love,” which he produced in Idaho in the 1990s, Mr. Willis has mostly stayed offstage for three decades.
But the playwright Dennis Watlington, who directed a young Mr. Willis in “Bullpen,” set in a police holding cell, remembered “a working- class guy from New Jersey who could play it tough and be believable.” Though Mr. Willis required a fair amount of direction, “he took it well.”
Mr. Willis caught a bigger break when he joined the replacement cast of “Fool for Love.” In one of his more expansive moments, Mr. Willis called that play “raucous and violent and funny.”
Mr. Willis has played plenty of writers on film, like the TV writer in “The Story of Us” or the boozing journalist of “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” Even Bombay Brian, the Kevlar-tough mercenary he plays in the coming Barry Levinson film “Rock the Kasbah,” is shopping around a memoir. Brian braves an attack by a rival warlord because he is told it will make a good ending.
In Mr. King’s novel, Paul describes himself as a writer of two kinds of books — “good ones and best sellers” — and he considers it an injustice that people more or less ignore his quality material in favor of the bodice rippers featuring the nubile orphan Misery Chastain.
Similarly, Mr. Willis has always alternated moneymaking franchise work with roles in artier, independent films, like the recent “Looper” or “Moonrise Kingdom.” Like Paul, who makes periodic attempts at gritty realism, Mr. Willis has occasionally shown a desire to stretch himself as an artist, to become more than just a purveyor of wisecracks and ammunition. Audiences have not always sympathized.
But many of his best sellers are quite good (the early “Die Hard” films, for example) and a few of the independent good ones have gone on to be best sellers, “Pulp Fiction” particularly. For his part, Mr. Willis claims not to differentiate between big projects and smaller ones. He chooses films, he said, not because of the tickets they’ll sell, but because he likes the director, the co-stars, the crew, the story.
Paul feels oppressed by his fans and their expectations, the readers who feel that they know him and his fictional creations personally. “You must be a good man, or you never could have created a wondrous, loving creature like Misery Chastain,” Annie burbles.
Plenty of people t hink t hey know Mr. Willis, too, by having seen him on screen. He has endured any number of uncomfortable fan encounters, though he said that he didn’t pay much attention to them. So much for the similarities. Now here’s the big difference: While Mr. Willis often gives still, almost taciturn performances, he has never played a character quite so immobilized. You’d have to look to Beckett plays like “Endgame” or “Happy Days” to find characters with a lesser range of motion than Paul, who begins “Misery” with both of his legs shattered by a car accident. Under Annie’s maniacal ministrations, he acquires new and worse injuries, particularly in a gruesome scene of hobbling, the mere mention of which can still excite shivers from those who saw the 1990 film version with James Caan and Kathy Bates.
Watching a man who often does so much forced to do so little is one of the great draws of “Misery.” “It’s because he’s so brilliant as an action star that audiences are going to want to see what he does when he’s forced to lie in bed,” William Goldman, who adapted the script from Mr. King’s book and his own screenplay, wrote in an email message.
Paul “is stuck onstage — literally,” said the director, Will Frears. To play that part, “you need an athlete,” he added. “You need somebody who wants to be jumping off a skyscraper. When you don’t let them, all of that passion and life gets forced into the language.”