Vincent D’Onofrio: ‘I really did get mugged by a monkey’
“First of all, let me preface what I’m about to say with this: that other than actual writing itself, which does take up a big part of my life these days, the whole ‘monkey situation’ is not something that’s on my mind daily,” actor, writer, poet and artiste-of-alltrades Vincent D’Onofrio says to the Guardian. “Though I do find aspects of monkeys a little crazy and daunting, from time to time.”
When the star of Full Metal Jacket and Men in Black makes reference to the “monkey situation”, he’s talking about the 22-tweet screed he posted in early 2019, recounting harrowing runins with impish simians over the years in Florida and Rio de Janeiro. With grand dramatic language, he paints a vivid picture of the “poo” that “squirted down upon the visitors” and “the screams” that “changed [his] life” 140 characters at a time. “Liars, basically,” he tweeted of his primate nemeses. “Beastly liars, all of them.” He claims not to think about his vendetta against monkey-kind every day, but something in there was important enough that the whole tragicomic soliloquy merited reproduction in full for his new book of short-form writing, Mutha: Stuff and Things. One nudge, and he’s railing against the chimp menace once again.
“Have you ever gone on YouTube and searched ‘monkey steals jewelry, money’ et cetera?” he asks, during a discursive chat over the phone from his New York home. “There are a few videos where we see a monkey robbing an ATM on its own, grabbing the cash once someone has it dispensed. They’re devious … I really did get mugged by a monkey in Rio. The back of my hand made contact with him before he could make off with my personal items, but my point is this: people’s minds go to ‘mischievous’, like monkeys are just devious. They’re robbers and thieves.
They’ll go in your house and destroy it. They’re motivated by greed. There’s a lot to talk about, where monkeys are concerned.”
This is a relatively normal example of what it is like to talk with the 61-yearold D’Onofrio. Regardless of the topic of conversation, there’s no off switch on the gravitas developed through the parts of his career spent on the stage. Of pigs, he declares: “Everyone thinks they’re cute, and they are, but they’re not normally that size. They’re starved, to stunt their growth.” He clarifies the recurrence of “poo” in his compositions as “a device, to grind people down to their baser urges. That’s eating, shitting, loving, striving, feeling lost and worthless.” Though unlike most people who’d conduct a casual back-and-forth as if they’re treading the boards, he never gives the impression of taking himself too seriously. “The poo brings the reader to a more primal level, yes, but it’s also there because poo is funny.”
It quickly becomes apparent that he could deliver an order at Burger King with the same lyrical intensity he’d bring to a Shakespearean monologue.
Just as quickly, one realizes that none of this has been meant as a put-on, that he really does have a soul-deep connection to subjects like animals and their feces, two major organizing motifs in the eclectic book. Through his eyes, art can be everywhere and everything, so it’s only fitting that we’d discuss it all in those same lofty terms.
In the pages of Mutha, readers can view the quotidian and the extraordinary alike through his singular vantage, in which there’s hardly a difference between the two. He writes with the same spirit of curiosity that’s brought him to everything from Ed
Wood to The Cell to a nearly decadelong stint on Law & Order: Criminal Intent. His process is largely free-associative, translating his daily doings and other musings into a clipped stream of consciousness marked by a raw sort of intimacy. “I’ll get a crazy idea that should never, ever be taken seriously, but I’ll just start writing about it,” he explains. “Patterns of thinking, repeated words, the cadence at which it should be told – it all falls into place. When I write, I think of it as if I’m speaking the words, though I don’t actually speak them.”
His verse replicates his inimitable voice with an uncommon directness, in part because that’s the only way he knows how to write. He’s candid about drawing inspiration from freer spoken-word sources, such as his live readings at hallowed Manhattan performance space Joe’s Pub, or the journaled monologues he and his “brother” Ethan Hawke would recite with the cast while working on a production of Brecht’s Baal. Like any actor, D’Onofrio’s highest aspiration is simply to let it all out. “I’m severely dyslexic, and it’s not just about reading and arithmetic, your brain just not catching words,” he says. “It’s all sorts of things, and it does, eventually, when you’re young, lead you to think in different patterns. The easiest way to explain it is a bunch of apples in a bucket, and each apple is a thought. Instead of taking apples one at a time, the whole bucket gets poured on your head. That’s how I write. All the apples.”
He can’t halt his creativity, only channel it into a succession of new projects. He finalized Mutha during the early days of quarantine, having since taken the spare time of lockdown to complete another book of short poems, along with a children’s storybook. This fall, he will appear as the notorious Jerry Falwell in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, a dramatization of sordid scamming within the televangelist biz during the 80s also starring Jessica Chastain. He’s itching to get back out there and bring art to the masses, and he hopes that yearning for public experiences will beget a renaissance among his peers.
“It’s gonna come back,” he says. “It’s all gonna come back. My God, yeah. That’s the thing about artists, whether it’s musicians or poets or actors: they’re all raring to go. Everyone’s starting to show what they’ve gotten ready over the past year. That, along with the advances in diversity we’ve seen in the arts showing us lenses beyond white perspectives, could make for a new boom. We’ve started to see history for what it is. Once New York gets its shit together, it’ll be a really exciting time.”
Until then, he’ll stay industrious as distancing closes off the communal, theatrical environment he calls home. He’s accepted this with grace, as he seems to do with all things. (Including having Sean Penn for a son-in-law, his daughter Leila George having recently tied the knot with the man nearly her father’s age. “I used to father her, and now, she daughters me,” he says. “It’s enlightening, it’s incredible, and Sean has a lot to do with that.”) His only impulse is to do, to forge ahead and worry about the results later. As he explicates the philosophy that’s powered his life’s art and made art of his life, for the first time, he sounds more like another guy than an aging, tragic king.
“One thing everyone I admire has in common is that when actually producing art, they’re aiming to fail,” he says. “I’m the same way. We’re not aiming to succeed. We’re aiming to reach the mindset where you’ve learned something, rather than had something affirmed, so the goal must be to fail. You forget that failure is the thing that keeps you going, not the thing that stops you. If I’m on a set, take by take, I aim to fail. I go all the way. It doesn’t mean ‘big’, just that whatever my plan is, I do not think, ‘I’m going to get it this time.’ I don’t give a shit. That’s how you get it. If that makes sense.”
Mutha: Stuff and Things is out on 18 May