Michael Douglas: ‘I think the audience sees there’s a struggle – I’m not just a violent, nasty person’
You recently said you channel your characters through your hair. What do you mean? TopTrampA long time ago, after Black Rain (1989) with Ridley Scott – where I got this sort of Angloafro perm – my dear friend Jack Nicholson said: “What’s with your hair?” I looked at him and said: “Wait a minute. You always act with your hair.” Falling Down (1993) – I have a hairdresser to thank for deciding at the very last minute: “Let’s just go with a flat top.” On Wall Street (1987), Pat Riley, the basketball coach for the Lakers, always had his hair greased back, so I thought the lizard look would work. A lot of times, I do lead with my hair.
What societal injustices would DFens from Falling Down be raging against in 2023?WunWunWagDerWunI think the social acceptance of two people having a conversation, looking at their phones all the time. Multitasking gets me very frustrated. It’s amazing. I’ll insist my son gives me his attention and he’ll look at me as if to say: “What’s the problem?” He says he’s listening but will do two other things at the same time, which just seems rude.
Is it nice when the younger generation geek-out because they associate you with Ant-Man or is it weird? TiTeddyBearThat was one of the reasons to do Ant-Man, other than I had never done a green screen-type movie. Most of my films have been R-rated – for adults only. I get a big kick out of having these kids pulling on my jacket, saying: “Hank Pym! Ant-Man!” It’s as close to immortality an actor can get.
Would you sell your digital image so you can continue to star in movies after you are dead? LarboIrelandIt’s funny you should mention that. You get to an age where you start thinking about your will and estate. Now I’m thinking I’m also going to have to license my name and likeness so the rights go to my family rather than to the metaverse. I see what AI is doing with pictures with text. It’s only matter of time before you’ll be able to recreate any dead person at any age with the voice and the mannerisms, so I want to have some control.
What attracted you to The Streets of San Francisco (1972-1977)? Was it the opportunity to work with Karl Malden? teabags12Well … it was a job. It was early in my career; I didn’t have a whole lot of options. I started as an off-Broadway actor in New York. I did a CBS playhouse (1967-1970) on television, which brought me to Hollywood. I did a couple of unsuccessful movies, then drifted into episodic television. Streets of San Francisco was offered as an entire season: 26 hour-long episodes with Quinn Martin, a major television producer, and Karl Malden, a wonderful actor, befriended by Marlon Brando and many others, and a mentor in my life. It was the greatest opportunity I ever had, but also the hardest. We shot 14 hours a day, six days a week, for eight and a half months. I’ve never worked harder, but I learned so much about acting and producing. It was a tremendous opportunity.
Would life be much different if you had become a movie star at a younger age? ClassicMacGruberIn The Streets of San Francisco, I was still in my early 20s, and it gave me worldwide acclaim. That was followed by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I did have success at a relatively young age. Cuckoo’s Nest was a magical experience. Saul Zaentz, my producing partner, and I were naive idiots. But thank God we did the stupid things we did, like filming in Oregon State hospital in January. Everybody said: “Why aren’t you down on a stage in LA? Most of the movie takes place on a hospital ward, which you can recreate.” We said: “But it won’t have the similitude and association with actual patients.” Ignorance is bliss, and we made a really good movie.
Ever order the rabbit stew or is too awkward? Rockchick76Goat, yes. Rabbit, I seem to stay away from.
How do you portray such deeply unlikable characters in such a sympathetic and compelling manner? FussyandhonestI’d say it’s something about my persona. I was at a screening of Fatal Attraction (1988), and told this story how the night before I’d been out with Glenn Close, came home the next morning and had to rustle the bed covers so my wife at the time [Diandra Luker] thought I’d slept at home. The audience laughed and the producer Sherry Lansing said: “I can’t believe it. They’ve forgiven you already.” Maybe it’s because, in my evilness, the audience can still see there is a struggle and an ambivalence to do the right thing, so I’m not inherently just a violent, nasty person.
Which of your films make you smile the most? SemperFudgeI love the ones that were unpredictable. Falling Down, The War of the Roses (1989) and Wonder Boys (2000) are quirky and have a sense of humour. I’d love to fully accomplish comedy, which is such an underappreciated area, and I never understand why the Academy Awards fails to acknowledge it. I have tried! Last Vegas (2013) with Bobby De Niro, Morgan Freeman and Kevin Kline, Romancing the Stone (1984) and The Kominsky Method (2018-2021) were certainly comedic.
Was the V-neck green jumper you wear in the disco scene in Basic Instinct your own choice? Hooplehead1967It was the costume designer’s choice. I don’t know why people keep asking me that! I have a deep appreciation for the preparation these designers do. It’s like the hair – once you have put the clothes on, the character follows: from Falling Down with the tight, white, buttondown shirt with the plastic thing in the pockets for the pens, to the beautiful design for Wall Street, and Liberace (in Behind the Candelabra, 2013), whose costume was just magical.
What do you consider to be your greatest film? reed87To use a baseball term: I have a pretty good batting average. I can’t say they are all grand-slam home runs, but I have a lot of hits, singles, maybe doubles, a couple of triples. I appreciate my batting average over my span of 50 years. In some films, you are helped immensely by how great the script is. Sometimes you have a great part. Others, you work hard to create a good environment. Being a producer has really helped me as an actor because when you’re the lead – No 1 on the call sheet – you set a tone and an example. Something I learned from Paul Newman early in his career was [that] all he wanted was to be surrounded by better actors than himself because that just makes everybody good.
Iechyd da! Speak much Welsh? TurangaLeela2I do not. I love the country. It’s a magical place, especially the Mumbles. The Gower is of one the most stunning places on Earth. It reminds me of northern California.
Do you have a favourite pub? Bobbio39I don’t remember them. I go with the Joneses, whichever Joneses they may be. Half the town is named Jones, so you have always got someone to go with.
Does Catherine still make you take your trousers off as a forfeit if she beats you at golf, as she told Graham Norton? fuzzybearThe rules are I have to whip it out if I don’t hit it past the ladies’ tees, which I manage most of the time. But there have been times when we’re playing alone, and have to give her a little show because we are competitive. But only when I play with my wife.
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that, but what can you do? We don’t have any other choice.’ At that time you had people living in the system in China who depended on the same things that I did, but they didn’t have the luxury of bringing it from another country. There was always so much more risk to them than to me.”
McLaughlin moved back to the US part-time in 2016 and for good in 2018. A 400-mile drive took her to Salt Lake City, Utah, and a meeting with a Chinese woman. Shuping Wang had worked at a plasma collection centre in Hunan province, discovered HIV in the system and turned whistleblower, fleeing to America soon after.
Shuping Wang took McLaughlin to a plasma centre in Salt Lake City. “To her there was this parallel with what she had seen back in China. They were open seven days a week and it concerned her that they were continually operating and paying people for their plasma.”
McLaughlin started researching the American blood industry, little known in part because the sellers she interviewed live far from the major cities where the media is concentrated. “I thought when I was living in China the plasma economy, which is what they called it, was this very dystopian thing that only China would try to do. It turned out that the United States had already done it.”
America is one among a handful of industrialised countries that allows people to be paid to donate blood. It is the world’s biggest exporter of human blood plasma, supplying about 70% of global use, its industry worth more than $24bn in 2021. Each year an estimated 20 million Americans sell their plasma, although figures are imprecise. There are more than a thousand forprofit centres operating legally across the US.
McLaughlin, a former Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT, comments: “I have started to see it like dollar stores, pawnshops and payday lenders. It’s one of these industries that has grown up alongside the fault lines in our economic safety net. It finds a hold in communities where people are struggling and, because we have more people struggling and rising inequality, it’s really taken off.”
So who is the typical blood seller and why do they do it? McLaughlin had expected to find the poorest of the poor but, it transpires, most of them are screened out because a plasma donor must have a permanent address.
“What I found instead was a lot of people who, say, 25 years ago would have been middle class, and they just don’t make enough money for that lifestyle any more. I get the sense that one of the biggest demographics is college students. We’re talking about like big public universities where there are a lot of students who don’t come from wealthy backgrounds; I’ve talked to people who use this money to buy books, to pay to go out for a night, for ‘beer money’.
“You will also find people in communities like Flint, Michigan, where I spent a lot of time, who used to be able to expect to have this very normal American middle-class lifestyle and wages and benefits no longer keep pace with that. There are people doing it to buy groceries and to pay for housing. There are also people who are selling plasma to take a vacation.
“It’s these places where people are economically fragile, not necessarily desperately poor. The kind of fragility that we didn’t have 25 or 30 years ago when there were more social-safety protections.”
She devotes a chapter of the book to Flint, a majority Black city which infamously endured one of the worst human-caused environmental disasters in US history when lead leached into its water system. It has six plasma centres serving fewer than 100,000 people.
“Flint to me says something more about the state of America than anywhere else I went because there is this incredible pride in being the birthplace of the American middle class. People will tell you they had this amazing labour movement that built all these great jobs on which you could raise a family. That has just been hollowed out to the point where you don’t have a lot left.”
But the most productive plasma centres are clustered along the southern border, where Mexican citizens cross over to sell plasma in the US. “Our political leaders like Trump don’t want them in the United States but we have been allowing people to cross over to mine their bodies for blood plasma, so what does that say about us?”
Rates of pay for blood vary across the country. A person might, for example, make $40 their first donation, then $50 for their second, and receive a bonus if they make four donations in a month. “It tries to incentivise you to go as often as possible.
“I know at one point when I was in El Paso and the border had been shut down, so this pool of Mexican citizens who had been coming over to sell plasma was not allowed to come in, the payment rate was up to $1,300 if you went in twice a week, which is one of the highest I’ve seen.”
McLaughlin did not find significant evidence that giving blood frequently has negative health effects in the long term. “A lot of people get extremely tired. There is a lot of fatigue. A lot of people I talked to didn’t notice anything at all and they’re totally fine with it. It seems like it’s a very personal, individual thing.”
But she does point out that when people donate blood to the nonprofit Red Cross, they are limited to once every 28 days, which works out at 13 times per year. Those who sell to a forprofit centre can do it 104 times a year. “The disparity between those two limits is shocking.”
And whereas donating blood for free is lauded, donating it for money is stigmatised. “If you think about blood donation, it’s something that we consider quite heroic. If you go to the Red Cross and donate blood, you’re saving a life, you’re not getting paid for it.
“But somehow this practice of donating plasma for pay comes with a pretty heavy stigma. A lot of the people I interviewed who do sell plasma had not told their families that they do it because they were afraid of what their families would think: there would be some kind of judgment or their families would be worried about their health or concerned that they don’t have enough money.
‘The stigma is entirely linked to the fact that we stigmatise poverty in the United States. We look down on it. We don’t respect people who aren’t wealthy in the same way that we respect wealthy people. It’s been interesting for me to see the way that people view selling plasma as being somehow problematic and that’s definitely contributed to the fact that this industry is kind of hidden.”
Still, should we make a moral judgment about the blood industry? It is not, after all, pushing an addictive substance like opioids, but rather is helping the health of people in America and around the world, McLaughlin included. She replies: “We need to ask ourselves that.From my perspective as someone who depends on this substance, what people are doing is incredibly altruistic.
“I also think a lot of people are being financially coerced to do it and, the way the system is set up, you get paid more per donation for each donation you make. It’s gamified in such a way that people are encouraged to donate quite often and because it is a hidden industry, most Americans haven’t really considered if this is who we want to be.
“If you know that there are potentially millions of Americans who have sold their plasma to pay for things like groceries and vacations, are you OK with that? For me, it’s more a matter of getting people to think about it, that our economic situation is such that this is part of our fabric now and are we comfortable with being that way or do we want to think more deeply about how we can make this more feel more of a choice for people?”
She adds: “The industry itself isn’t necessarily the problem. The problem is that we have let this industry become a part of people’s incomes. I don’t know that that’s the kind of society we want to be.”
Blood Money is out now