San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
‘Stan & Ollie’ is bigger than a biopic
The day “Stan & Ollie” wrapped shooting, John C. Reilly, who plays Oliver Hardy, threw a party for the cast and crew on this dream project. But as he greeted his guests, the actor grew more and more disconcerted. It wasn’t his imagination. People were staring at him and throwing odd looks. He finally asked someone what the deal was.
“Sorry, sorry, none of us has seen you in person before. You,” his guest told him.
Reilly arrived at the studio each morning at 4:30 to don makeup and a fat suit long before the crew arrived. He hadn’t reckoned on how completely
“Stan & Ollie”
(PG) opens Friday, Jan. 11, in Bay Area theaters.
those items transformed him. A face well known to Broadway audiences for his roles in “True West” and “A Streetcar Named Desire” and to film audiences for a diverse body of work that includes “Boogie Nights,” his Oscar-nominated turn in “Chicago,” “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story” and “The Sisters Brothers,” he surrenders that familiarity to play the comedy great at the twilight of his career in 1953.
“I’m pretty agile and I’m strong. Even with the fat suit on, I could really flit about,” Reilly, 53, says. “I had to remind myself, ‘No, even though you can do it, don’t do it, because he couldn’t.’ I worked really hard to incorporate his size and his weight in a really organic way, so I was completely feeling it.”
It was Hardy’s physicality that was Reilly’s initiation to the role. “Stan & Ollie” captures Hardy and partner Stan Laurel (Steve Coogan) after their storied film career that stretched back to the silent era has faded, as they reinvent themselves as a stage act on a tour of England. The duo’s dance, famous from their 1937 comedy “Way Out West,” is the
show’s climax.
Working with choreographer Toby Sedgwick before filming started, Reilly and Coogan learned the dance in two ways. As the younger Laurel and Hardy filming the movie, they wanted to replicate the steps exactly. Then, as old men, they needed to adapt the dance for a stage performance and to take in the duo’s waning energy and Hardy’s extra weight.
“That was really our portal into the characters, other than the fact that both Steve and I have been obsessed with Laurel and Hardy for our entire lives,” Reilly says. “Our way into playing the characters was that dance.”
Reilly describes his introduction to Laurel and Hardy as “pre-memory.” He has no idea when he first saw them; they just always seemed to be part of his life. In the 1960s and early 1970s, when Reilly was a child, Laurel and Hardy films like “Way Out West” and “A Chump at Oxford” were part of the television landscape.
By the time he got to college, DePaul University in his native Chicago, Reilly could study Laurel and Hardy’s comedy closely with his VCR, watching scenes over and over again in slow motion and freezing frames, trying to unravel the mystery of their genius.
“People say, ‘What’s your favorite Laurel and Hardy?’ ” Reilly says. “There’s over 100 of them, and the quality level is so high. How do you pick between ‘Brats’ and ‘Our Wife’? They’re both weird, subversive things of a very high quality. To me, it’s impossible to pick a favorite.”
That deep, lifelong fandom informed Reilly’s approach not just to the role of Oliver Hardy but to the film as a whole. While the script was still in development, one thing he didn’t want to see was a standard Laurel and Hardy biopic, reasoning that with access to Google on their smartphones, an audience would have little interest in bare facts.
“What are we going to do to bring poetry to their lives and illuminate it in a way that you can’t do on your phone?” Reilly says.
Screenwriter Jeff Pope’s solution was to concentrate on that 1953 tour, a facet of the pair’s career unfamiliar to most fans. Also, Laurel and Hardy were very different people: Hardy loved the ponies and the good life, while Laurel was a workaholic. Inseparable onscreen, they led very separate lives offscreen. It was during their years touring late in life that they truly became friends.
“They didn’t have the luxury or the option of splitting up at the end of the day,” Reilly says. “They were staying in the same hotel, sitting in the same train or car every day.
“It was fascinating to me that they were not the same kind of people,” he adds. “In my mind, when Laurel and Hardy finished their day at work, they went home together and they lived the life that you saw onscreen somehow. That’s really how I thought of them, inseparable.”
Pam Grady is a Bay Area freelance writer.