The unhinged life of CHRISTOPHER LLOYD
Back to the Future star has made a career of playing offbeat characters
At 5 p.m., the late-summer sun blisters. Christopher Lloyd, who created a repository of outsized characters, strides across the stage under a copse of soaring spruce. Swathed in three layers of eighth-century garb, he's tackling that summit of Shakespearean roles, the mad monarch, King Lear.
At 82, Lloyd is the same age range as Lear, “fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less.” The part is so punishing, even indoors without battling bugs and planes and epic humidity, that it is routinely performed by actors decades younger.
“I knew it was a beast, but something in my gut felt that I could meet the beast on my own terms. Out of nowhere, a light bulb went off, and I thought, `Hey, what about giving it a shot?' Certain directors, I'd say I want to do Lear, and they're going to say, `OK, Doc,'” Lloyd says the next morning, mentioning his most beloved role, as in it ain't gonna happen. But Shakespeare & Company's artistic director, Allyn Burrows, pounced at the suggestion: “Chris is well acquainted with the knife's edge when you do one of these characters.”
The long journey to Lear makes sense. Lloyd is, once again, portraying a man who has come undone.
Since his turn as the electroshocked Taber in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest — which garnered five Oscars, not bad for his first film — Lloyd has cornered the market on misfits and miscreants who exist outside the churn of society: Doc Brown (Back to the Future), Reverend Jim (Taxi), Uncle Fester (The Addams Family), Judge Doom (Who Framed Roger Rabbit).
Michael J. Fox, Lloyd's co-star and partner in what has become Back to the Future Inc., says, “It's freeing when you retire from carrying the weight of leading man to being a character actor. It's a lot more fun.” Working with Lloyd “is just different than working with anyone else. He is a genius at laying out exposition.”
Tall and lanky, Lloyd learned to dial down his natural good looks and leaned into the odd. Twitches became him. A facial contortionist, he deployed his mouth and eyebrows as comic weapons. He took easily to old. Lloyd was in his mid-40s when he first played Doc Brown, who appears to be the age of Methuselah.
Lloyd landed the laughs. He rarely landed a kiss. It took him until age 52 in Back to the Future III, he says, to score a romance (with Mary Steenburgen), that is if you don't include his intergalactic affair as Captain Kruge in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. They never meet in person. Then he blows her up.
His real life is another matter. Lloyd got the girl. And the girl. And the girl. Five wives, one stepson with real estate agent Lisa Loiacono, his partner of 17 years. He refers to her as “my present, future, all-time wife.”
He trained with Sanford Meisner at New York's Neighbourhood Playhouse, racked up 240 movie and television credits and played the circuit of the nation's sterling theatre companies: Yale Rep, Cambridge's American Repertory Theater, Lincoln Center, the Public Theater.
Why does Lloyd continue acting at his age, especially in this heat?
“Do you have a pen ready?” asks Danny DeVito, who appeared with Lloyd in Cuckoo's Nest and Taxi, the latter's tight-knit cast gathering for regular Zoom celebrations nearly four decades after the end of its glorious run. “He's an A-CT-O-R. He's like a little boy when he's working. I don't think Chris ever had to act. He wants to get out there and play with the toys. He puts every single ounce of energy into a role.”
Lloyd's career has been as wifty and out there as his characters. He collected a trio of Emmys and features in three National Film Registry treasures (Cuckoo's Nest, Back to the Future, Roger Rabbit), yet accepts roles in cinematic piffle. He's no snob. Kruge is among his favourite roles. But, he says, “I have to feel that I can do something with the part. I'm not that reckless.”
Recent projects include a Hallmark Christmas movie (Next Stop Christmas, as a train conductor with Back to the Future's Lea Thompson), animated fare, AARP rom-coms and the A-list The Tender Bar directed by George Clooney and starring Ben Affleck, scheduled for release this year.
For the last, he wasn't required to audition or test and shares significant billing as the “grandpa who mysteriously dresses in a suit Saturday night, drives into Manhattan and sometimes doesn't come back until Sunday,” Lloyd says.
“George Clooney wants you,” Lloyd was told by his agent of 45 years.
Lloyd was raised in New Canaan, Conn., on a Tudor estate named Waveny, today a municipal property available for wedding rentals. His father went to Lawrenceville and Princeton, Yale Law.
Early in his career, he wondered whether he would remain an underpaid stage performer. Then, Cuckoo's Nest, a buffet for actors. “It was a deepwater trip with Chris. He was in deep. Nobody really revealed themselves. We all thought we were that character,” DeVito says. Over time, “the movie filtered into our lives. We needed each other for the humanity they possess. Chris is just brimming with this gentle sweetness.”
Lloyd drove to California on the July Fourth weekend of 1976 in search of more jobs that paid. He auditioned for a one-time role on the first season of Taxi, a character in a permanent state of altered consciousness who officiates at the green-card wedding of Latka (Andy Kaufman) and a sex worker. For the audition, Lloyd appeared with stubble, in ancient jeans, jacket, sneakers (“belonged to one of my fathers-in-law”) and a chambray shirt, his hair a tornado.
“I've never seen a room laugh harder. It was a slam dunk,” James Burrows says. Lloyd was quickly signed to the second season. His audition attire became the character's uniform. “We'd be idiots not to have him back. Don't forget, to shine in a cast as good as Taxi, you should be nervous going to play with that team. He pulled it off. He brings 99 per cent to the dance.”