Julianne Moore and Matt Damon in George Clooney’s “Suburbicon.”
Grant Heslov and George Clooney have been friends for 35 years. The struggling actors met in a scene study class during Heslov’s summer break from the University of Southern California. The Los Angeles native was 19 and Clooney was 21. Heslov loaned Clooney $100 for his first head shots. They slept on each other’s couches. And they started writing together, even as they both began to work regularly.
Clooney hit the lottery, his role as Dr. Doug Ross on “ER” serving as a launching pad into the stratosphere. Heslov, however, realized that an actor’s life wasn’t for him. Although he takes a small part from time to time — his last credit was in 2014’s “The Monuments Men” — writing and producing, including sharing screenplay nominations with Clooney for “Good Night, and Good Luck” (2005) and “The Ides of March” (2011) have become his life.
“I love acting,” said Heslov, 54, in conversation at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, where his and Clooney’s latest film, “Suburbicon,” made its North American premiere. “It’s so much fun, but it’s a tough life for a character actor. In the scope of that world, you just don’t know when your next job is. There is a lot of uncertainty. What you don’t really know when you’re an actor, until you do it, you don’t realize how little your part is within the whole.”
Heslov describes “Suburbicon” as “a little bit of alchemy.” It is also a wedding of sorts, a marriage between his and Clooney’s original idea to make a film about the first black family to integrate Levittown, Pa., and a 20-year-old satirical murder mystery script by Joel and Ethan Coen.
“The Coens wanted George to play the insurance investigator that Oscar Isaac plays now,” Heslov says. “They never made that film for myriad reasons, but it always stuck with George. We thought about the idea of taking that story and setting it against the backdrop of what was going on in Levittown at that time.”
Levittown is never named, but “Suburbicon” takes place in the late 1950s in a bucolic, heretofore all-white suburb of cookie-cutter houses. As their new black neighbors cope with harassment and nightly protests (which Heslov and Clooney re-create from the historical record right down to an outrageously racist petition demanding the family’s removal), the Lodges — patriarch Gardner (Matt Damon), his disabled wife, Rose ( Julianne Moore), their young son, Nicky (Noah Jupe), and Rose’s twin, Margaret (Moore) — are victims of a seemingly random home invasion. That is only the start of the Lodges’ problems as Nicky notices a growing closeness between his father and his aunt as a claims investigator (Isaac) noses around, making nasty insinuations.
“Trying to write in the Coens’ tone, that was the biggest challenge,” Heslov says. “The Coen brothers have a very specific tone. We weren’t trying to copy that with the film itself, but with the script you have to make it as seamless as you can.
“We knew when we started that we were going to have targets on our backs,” he adds. “The film is from a Coen brothers script and people revere them and there’s a lot of baggage, good baggage, that they bring with them. That was going to be something we were going to have to crawl through.”
And although Heslov might have stopped acting, it is the actor’s instinct he and Clooney bring to their projects that informs their work, particularly when it comes to casting. “Suburbicon” is full of unfamiliar names.
“George and I like to sort of lift up the rug and find those actors who just have great faces and that you haven’t seen a million times and that bring more to the role than we were able probably to write,” Heslov say. “The thing is George and I started off as actors. We love actors and we love to find the guys you feel like you haven’t seen before, and people that feel real.”
Pam Grady is a San Francisco freelance writer. Twitter: @cinepam