This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing from my Heart Radio. The war in Ukraine has been raging for nearly nine months now, but the conflict between Ukraine and Russia has much deeper roots. In late two thousand thirteen and early two thousand fourteen, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets in protests against
their own governments pro Russian policies. The movement, known as the Mid Uprising, led to the deaths of more than one hundred people in Kiev and the ousting of President Viktor Yanukovich. Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula in March two thousand fourteen, driving the region into an ongoing conflict that
would culminate in a full scale invasion of Ukraine. On February two thousand two, My Guest Today, actor writer and rector Leev Schreiber was just one of the millions of Americans watching the war unfold on television until he decided to turn his grief into action. Schreiber is a co founder of the nonprofit Blue Check Ukraine. The group's mission is to fast track financial resources directly to organizations providing support and life saving aid to Ukrainians on the front lines.
With such an impressive effort, I wanted to know more about Schreiber's advocacy work. What's an example of other things you were involved with? Not much, you know, I did. I worked with the Feeding Him Harvest Feeding America. Just because I like to take the kids to on Thanksgiving, we had this ritual where we'd go to the you know, the soup kitchen, the soup kitchen on Bowerie and it was fun for the kids and it was great for me, and it was a way of sort of showing them
give yeah, right, give something back. But this was the first one where I felt like I had to do it or I was gonna lose my mind. Why. You know, the story is that I have Ukrainian ancestry, right like my grandparents. That's that's what gets me in the room. But the reality is, i was watching the war on the couch with the kids, and I'm looking at my kids, and I'm thinking a about my own legacy as a person, as a man, as a father, and all those things
I'm thinking about. I'm looking at these guys who are you know, like painters and graphic designers, and custodians who are you know, kissing their wives and children goodbye and getting on a bus to go fighting the war in which they're wildly outnumbered and outgunned. And I'm I'm thinking, well, those are Ukrainians, and and am I Ukrainian at all? Could I say goodbye to my kids if I had to, if I were in some existential fight for our homes
and our lives? And the answer was not, like I couldn't do that, And it's like, no, I'm I'm not Ukrainian. And then what am I am? American? Right? And And I was just thinking about how much I'd take for granted as an American that my grandparents didn't, that they fought for the freedoms and the liberties that we have today, and their desire to live in a country where their children could aspire to become what I've become and do the things that I've been able to do. I owe
them a debt for that. And it's that fights being fought again in Ukraine. And the other thing that really captured my imagination about is that the thing I struggle with here is that the incredible polarization we've got going in in this country in politics and the partisanship and the disinformation and the misinformation. And nowhere is that struggle clearer to me than in Ukraine, the disinformation that's coming
about the disinformation in American media. Yeah, I mean it feels like, with the decline of higher education in this country, politics had become like a team sport. You know, there's the reds and the blues and policy and all of the things that actually really matter to the people who go to the polls to vote are irrelevant. It's just did my team win or did your team win? And that's a that seems like a terrible place to send my children, you know, And it's not how our democracy
should function. And I think what's going on in Ukraine is is an existential fight for democracy and those values that those values that we share, which which are the right to be who you want to be, to speak with language you want to speak, to go to what church you want to go to to to raise your
children the way you want to raise them. And for those people who don't know that when Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union before they break up, there were tremendous limitations and abuses there about what people's freedoms were in the Ukraine, there were there were independently Krainian religious beliefs there under the Soviet system, they were pressed and I think arguably until my dawn, the Russians were very much controlling the Ukrainian government. I think that's why
my dad happened. And I think once that uprising occurred and hundreds of thousands of people from every walks of life went to that square and said, no, we want to be part of the European community. We were we reject what this puppet dictator is is proscribing for us putin an ex crimea. He was like, okay, it's trouble,
I've got it. You know. As part of the the Salt Talks and you know, anti nuclear periforation, Russia and the US signed an agreement with Ukraine that if they were the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world, and we signed an agreement with them that we pledged to protect their borders and their sovereignties, both America and Russia,
which is part of why we're still in this. Russia rat find that again in two thousand nine, and as you know, in two thousand so so basically Ukraine gave up its entire nuclear arsenal and its ability to protect itself, which was always the design I suppose, or at least it seems that way in retrospect looking at what Putin's done, And so in two thousand nine Putin ratified that, and then after my dawn annex Crimea, and here we are now.
I don't want to state the obvious, which is that in America people either who don't really care, or they don't care enough, or they don't have good information. And how would you describe the historic and maybe even spiritual connection between the Ukrainians and the Russians? And what I mean by that is not the Russian leadership. Do the Ukrainians feel any kinship with the Russian people between the
two people and they hate Putin and the government? Or are they indifferent or actively hostile toward the Russian people. I'm no expert on this by any stretch of the imagination. You know, I got a guy who's really really smart
about this is Timothy Snyder. From what I know from traveling to Ukraine over the past year, there's a tremendous amount of ill will from the average Ukrainian to the average Russian Having said that, I think there are plenty of Russians, as we can see from the little bit of news that's that makes its way out of Moscow, who are profoundly against what's happening in Ukraine. And I suppose the tragedy of all of this is they are brothers,
you know, they aren't so closely related, so closely tied. Yeah, And the reality is that for for many, many years, most Ukrainians, well most people in Eastern Europe, they spoke Russian and they inter mixed and all of that until they're I think, really my don was a kind of defining moment where people said, we want to be Ukrainian, we want a Ukrainian government, we want sovereignty, and we
want to speak our own language. Because you you want to believe, with the limit information I have, you kind of sit there in a very armchair way and go, God, the Russians could probably go into Ukraine and just flatten the whole place. Like a month, they turn the whole place into an ash tray, and uh, you know, start changing the signs into cyrillic and we're on our way. And then you realize, is it a case of fully engaged Ukrainians they're in this and the Russians are kind
of coming down there. A lot of them are pretty half hearted about that, a a lot of them don't want to go. And you're and and Putin is now reaping what he sews in this department, and a lot of these Russian fighters. You're like, I got no problem. It's like Muhammad Ali, I got no problem with the Vietnamese. Is that what's happening? Absolutely? You know, Ukrainians are in
an existential fight. Russians don't know what they're doing. You know, they remember they intercepted all of those telephone calls between those soldiers and their mothers. And he was like, Mom, you wouldn't believe the carpentry here. The toilet seats are amazing, you know what I mean. And these Ukrainians they've got no choice. They win or they die. They win or they have no home. They went and they have nowhere to live. They don't they can't raise their children, they
can't do anything. It's over. It's their end of their country. You started Blue Check with some partners. The war starts in February. You start Blue Check in March, Yeah, lead Marchia and what what how did that happen? Like, who do you call first? How do you start blue check? Fortunately, I'm not the brains behind this. I had. There's two
guys with thirty years of experience in humanitarian aid. A friend of mine from dramas Yale Drama School called me, Harris Fisherman, and he wanted He asked me if I would do a live stream like podcasting thing with Ukrainians that they could tell their stories and what they were experiencing.
And it just didn't feel right to me. I just I didn't like the idea of, you know, I was just seeing too much of that on the news, the idea of exploiting people's emotions to kind of show what's going on, and it felt wrong, and I thought I would be nervous and uncomfortable on that situation. So I sort of gruffly said to my friend Harris, if you want to help them, just give him some money. And I got off the call, and uh so these guys
called me back. One of them's named Jason Cohne. He's the chief public policy officer for robin Hood Now and he used to be one of the executive directors of Doctors Without Borders. And another guy that he works with, Michael Goldfarb, was the communications person for doctors about borders as well. And this guy, Murphy Poindexter, who is, as far as I can tell, like deep in the IC community in Washington, UM but was working at a place
called the US Ukraine Foundation. And they said were you serious about what you said that you wanted to raise money for Ukraine? And I was like, oh, ship, someone's just called my bluff and I said, yeah, I am and uh. We quickly put together a plan that I mean, these guys had just a ton of between between them,
thirty years of experience and humanitarian aid. And the idea was that we were going to identify the people on the ground in Ukraine, boots on the ground NGOs who were doing the work to provide humanitarian aid and get the money directly to them. I had heard of a philanthropy app called give Well, and I thought that's a
good model. Why don't we try to do something like that where people can see, where everything we do is transparent And we wouldn't exist without Ropes and Gray, who is the international law firm that agreed to do all of our verification and vetting pro bono and they came on and had just been amazing. And so a few days after that, I bought a plane ticket and I went to Poland. I started working. I was insane. I didn't know what I was doing, but I called Jose Andreas,
who's a friend. I was working at his spot in Poland on the border World Central Kitchen making you know, rectual stern giant. I see how Jose andres and some loud cacaphitist thing and he's like, yeah, are you doing, my friend, when are you coming over? You're coming? And I went and and then and and we sort of I just bought the plane ticket and then we figured
what we're gonna do. Once I got there, and Murphy, who was working at US Ukraine Foundation, and Michael and Jason have all of these connections because of their humanitarian aid work, and they set up all these meetings for me with NGOs and people who were doing work on the ground in Ukraine, and I just went in and I met them, and it was extraordinary. I mean, I just the resilience and the courage of these people, the fighting spirit of these people's extraordinary. It's no wonder to
me that there they're kicking ass and taking names. Frankly, just what that's what I saw, and I saw. I I brought a cameraman with me because I knew that the next step was going to be go home and raise money, right, and we filmed people like yllant to Brishalik at the Leviv National Symphony, who's got this, you know, seventy piece orchestra who can't do concerts anymore because of the pandemic and because of the war, and so they're rehearsing.
They rehearse at night and during the day they've feared out all the seats in the theater and then places stacked to the ceiling with boxes of medical aid and food and clothing and things like that. And the day that I arrived there with a camera, I opened the doors to that theater and they're rehearsing Mozart's Requiem and you can imagine that site as just like eight ft high boxes of aid and these people playing Mozart's Requam, which is one of my favorite pieces of music. And
it was just extraordinary footage. And brought it home and we started raising money. We did a benefit in d C where we we had the Washington National Opera orchestra playing and they played along in sync with my video. Was fantastic. It was just fantastic. Yeah, And that kind of got us on our way, and you know, doing a couple of CNN interviews and things like that, and getting the word out there and having friends like you and being able to do things like this is just
made it work. Your flu over there the first time when April and you were there for how long, two or three weeks and they Polish Ukrainian border. You're on the Polish side initially, and and and you go into Ukraine obviously because you go to the concert hall and what did you see? You know what, There wasn't a lot happening in Leviv. And I didn't go past Leviv at that point, so I didn't I didn't see much refugees fleeing exactly. Well, I saw a lot of refugees
because I was on the border. I went to a bunch of field hospitals that were unfortunately too far away from the action. I met with health ministers, and I met with a few of the NGOs that we were eventually going to sign on and give grants to. And I saw this, you know, it's a beautiful country. It's a really beautiful place. And the thing that I couldn't I have a video that I'll play for you of these like nineteen and twenty year olds in a bar.
First of all, everybody's out drinking, having like celebrating their spirit because it's extraordinary year olds singing these like hundred year old Ukrainian folk songs drunk in this bar was just extraordinary. Yeah, that's the spirit of the country. And even now, which is now, it is kind of a unimaginable what they're going through. Zapparija was a really good example of I don't know what else to call it other than putin cynicism, but the strategy of responding to
military advances by attacking civilian infrastructure. In Zapparijia, he hit the main hospital, and then the night after he hit the main hospital, he hits an apartment complex in the middle of the night when they're sure that there are people sleeping in their beds and are going to need medical care. And that's the big, the big, big issue
for Ukrainians right now is medical infrastructure. I mean, he's not only decimated the energy grids and all of the other stuff that they're relying on to stay alive and warm through this winter. And as you know, the temperatures in Ukraine after December into January or it's all sub zero. And but they've hit He's hit all of the medical infrastructure. So it's alarming and it's just more important than ever that we continue to provide them with the aid that
they need to keep that machine running. Most of these doctors too, by the way, have been working since February, you know, with no shifts off. Things like fixators for limbs, ambulances, operating tables, all this stuff is really really essential and that's part of why I agreed to be the ambassador for the President's Fund, which is united in the medical
aid capacity. Back in June, Humanitarian Outcomes, which is a sort of aid watchdog organization out of the UK, published a report that said of the two point six billion dollars that have been donated to Ukraine, only six million had been activated and given to the NGOs on the
ground who are fighting. It's an alarming, un alarming number, and it goes where to Red Cross and big organizations like big multi additional big multinationals who have big overhead and can't even operate in country because of the liabilities right. They can also because their multinationals decide where they want to send that money and sit on it as long as they want to when you've got a very acute situation. And so for us, that was a huge sign that
we were doing the right thing. That going directly to the NGO is going directly to the people working on the ground, is the way to do it. Leev Schreiber. If you appreciate conversations that educate and inform on the Ukrainian conflict, listen to my episode with Bryce Wilson, a freelance photojournalist who reported from the front lines of Ukraine.
I was at Zelenski's inauguration. It's very surreal for me to have seen this huge narrative of his character, quite literally a character because he has an acting background, and he, in my opinion, will be remembered in the same vein as famous Ukrainian poets, people who were invested in the idea of Ukraine's independence, like Zelensky, in my opinion, is a hero through his leadership. Here more of my conversation with Bryce Wilson that here's the thing dot org after
the break. Leev Schreiber shares the story of being invited to meet Ukraine's President Zelenski. I'm Alec Baldwin, and you were listening to Here's the thing. Through its donation network, blue Check Ukraine provides direct financial assistance to n g os in Ukraine that offer crucial services such as emergency medical care, food distribution, and mental health services. I was curious to hear how the Ukraine and people reacted to the presence of Blue Check at a time of such turmoil.
They were so grateful that were we were there. They were so happy to see us, that that that they couldn't believe you came, that Americans cared that that that that we were willing to even just to be there. They didn't know what I was gonna do. And I'm that guy from Ray Donovan. They knew who you were. I'm sure the intelligent ones are like, what the hell is this actor going to do? Right, I'm going to go punch Pootin in the face, right exactly, you can
bring the bat out. But it it just it made me even more convinced that I had to really be effective and not waste their fucking time, not going there and just hear their side, their stories and sorry, okay, and come back and be like, hey, guys, look what I did. You know what I mean? Because that you went back again? Yeah, I went back again. So he went three times and then the second time what was the I don't say mission, but what was the uh itinerary? Then you were gonna go where and do what? I
was going to meet the president? Yeah, like, what's well? He heard about us because of that Humanitarian Outcomes Report, which he was also pretty missed off about two and uh and he invited me to become an ambassador for United twenty four. And you know, we talked about how that's Kiev, that's his that's his personal fund for Ukraine.
It's broken into three tiers. Initially it was a conflict for me because part of what we were trying to set up was something that was what's considered neutral aid. In other words, it doesn't participate in any political or military stuff. So they were really great to us, and they carved out the medical aid piece, which is what I represent. It was an extraordinary experience and I was
in Kiev. I got to see Bordianka, I got to see Bucci, I got to see all of these things that we've we've seen on television on the news, and now I know, I know what it looks like. And I got to see also all of the extraordinary help that all of these other countries are given in lending. And Adam Driver and I went to Romania and saw the troops who were who were stationed there preparing and training,
and you know, all the typhoon pilots there. Does anybody tell you what they'd like the US to do, like like in a long term says, other than relief and aid and sidewinder missiles or whatever the fun they wanted the world Sam's or what we really needed, whatever the whatever the global community can provide them in terms of weaponry. In a more law terms says, do they want to join NATO? Do they want to be in NATO? They
always have. I think that's pretty much what started my don was that there was this collective sense of relief and excitement about joining the European Union and NATO and all of that, and Jankovic and the Russians never had any intention of letting that happen, and of course he buried it, and that's what caused the uprising. People from everywhere and hundreds of thousands is a really terrific film, Cold Winter on Fire if anyone wants to know about
that period that it is just extraordinary. That tells that whole story very clearly. And it was just amazing to see children, old people, people from every walk of life just come out of their houses, pour out into the streets and go to the go to Madan and and say no. And they stayed there and you know, people were people died and were shot at and they barricaded themselves. It was I mean, you know, revolution. And since then they've been rebuilding their government and trying to get rid
of the corruption and the Russian influence. Setting aside what people would like to have happened, what do people over there, what do they think is going to happen longter they think they're gonna win they're driving the Yeah, they're right, they aren't it right? You know what I mean, it's unsustainable. It's like it's this thing that I you know, I got.
You know, when you when your kids lie, it's like the best thing that I've ever thought to tell my kids when they lie is like it's okay, but think about the moment when you get caught in the lie and what that's going to feel like. And if you still want to tell the lie, tell the lie. I wish I could say that the two right. I think about the moment when you get caught, what's that going to feel like? And the reality is it's starting to happen.
And that's that's what I think. And I've always felt that civil unrest in Russia and the sanctions, if we can hold out, if we can stand it, are gonna be that there's gonna be daylight. You know. The bedrock of Russian nationalism are the mothers of these conscripts who got wiped out in the first wave. They went to the military academies and they said to them, they said, please, don't send our kids. They're eighteen year old kids. Don't send them. Of course we're not going to send them.
Who do you think was in that first wave? And where are those kids now? They're gone. So those mothers are now coming out in the streets. And that's not like the liberals or the progressives, or the elitist or the the opposition. That's his bedrock, that's his base, and I think it's unsustainable. It's that's the beauty of it. I mean, at least. I think just lies are unsustainable. It's just it's eventually and history bears it out. Eventually
they come out. What's funny because as an American and therefore having grown up on a legacy of those people that don't work inside the American system, we kill them or we just what we depose them. The end a d m overall around the globe. This is the American way of doing things. So you you kind of sit back and go, I mean, you know they're never gonna get Putin, They're not going to kill Putin, but you wonder how much longer he's got to last over there?
Do they realize that he's really kind of losing it? I think? And the Russians are always everything looks great, where everything looks okay, where everything doesn't look dire until
the day before the guys gone. They'll get a day, but the guy's gone, you know what I mean, And you just get so sick and tired of the Beyond the death and beyond the injuries and the casualties, it's just the psychological toll the whole generation of Ukrainian people, I'm gonna live now with watching their country just get smashed to pieces, but for no reason that they didn't having to deserve that. There wasn't they didn't have that coming.
You know, well, are you gonna go back again? Yeah, yeah, whenever they need me. When you met Zelenski, how did he strike you? I wish, I wish you could meet this guy, because I just knowing you personally for sometime now, I know that you would love this guy. That would be hilarious encounter. He's incredibly sharp and he has a
tremendous sense of humor. Unfortunately, not all of his translators are as good, and so what happens is you kind of have to listen to him in Russian to get how smart he is and how good a public speaker he is. There's a kind of courage there that I just don't understand. There's a kind of strength of character that I think people have seen and meeting him, you know he's feeling he's pretty short. Than taking a picture with him, I found myself, Yeah, but tough like a
pit bull, and he looks like that. And I remember one journalist that we were This was a conversation before we actually met in person. The journalists and I were doing a zoom with him and the journalist asked him, you know, there have been twelve attempts on your life in the in the past few months, and what what's that like, Mr President? One of those questions, you know, and the guy's timing and this is all because I'm thinking, like an actor, I'm watching how's he gonna feel this one?
Because this is good? And his timing was just he stopped for a second and he looked at the camera because you know, he's by himself in a zoom and in Russian, because I didn't listen to the translator. The translator was stumbling through it, but in Russian. And if you can imagine me doing English Russian because I can't speak Russian. He would like to tell you the truth.
The first couple of times it scared the ship out of me, but then you get used to and that was that was that was the guy life for me. And that and that when when I asked him my question, which was if you could speak to the people in America and around the world who were considering supporting Ukraine financially or otherwise, what would you say to them? His response was just completely inspiring. To remind us that we all share this desire for democracy, that it's not an
easy system, right, And that's what my brother said. My brother said, these wards are inevitable, right, It's like a snake shedding its skin. They just happen over and over again. But it's part of a democracy. It's part of the horror of democracy that we have to fight for it. But it's still the best system in the world. And
that's the thing I love about being American. You know, anyone who's down on their luck anywhere in the world, this is the place they come if they want a shot, because we've still got the best system, you know, and so we've got to we've got to cherish it. We've got to we've got to take care of it. We've got to nurture it, because it's the best. Yeah, there were things that were interesting, you know, like people voting
for candidates and not voting for parties. I thought that was positive and I thought building on that stuff like, let's get smart, let's figure out what do you want vote for it? You know, who do you want vote for him? And that it's it's that's the future, you know. And I think there were enough moderate Republicans who went to the polls and they I'm using my words obviously, but they were like, we really maybe need to have
a little less crazy town for a while. So you have this operation Blue Check and someone you work with, they're determining, you've got people on the ground where that money is going to and picking the local NGOs where the money is going to go. Yeah, we do that.
And what we do is well we also you know now, because we're working very closely with the Ukrainian government and the Health Ministry in particular Victor Leashko and the Deputy Minister, what we agreed the best thing to do was to create a portfolio of NGOs that would cover every base, right, so it's you're not always just doing shelter. Sometimes you're
doing medical aids. Sometimes you're doing elderly people. One of the one of my favorite groups that we found is called Stranki and what's their Rankie does is they help homebound elderly people because you know, you see these videos of like these little villages getting bombed out and they're just full of old people who didn't want to leave their houses. Right. The young people can go sleep on couches and Loviv and Kiev, but the old people are like,
what do I got twenty years? Fucked them? I'm going to stay here. This is my home. And you really see that attitude in elderly Ukrainians. They're like, we've been through everything, We've been through so much over the course of our lives. I'm not giving up my home. I'm not going to leave my animals. I'm not going to leave.
And so these people are are the ones who are bearing the brunt of a lot of the frontline attacks and assaults, and so STARRANKI is an organization that really just focuses on elderly people, homebound elderly people and taking
care of them. We have the Women's Center, which, obviously now because of all the men are at war, that was a group that used to be a watchdog organization for gender equality and rights in the workplace and sexual abuse and all these other things, and they immediately transitioned into a kind of shelter for women's single moms and the chilled. And we're just terrific in the in the first few months of the war. We've got the little
bit of Symphony, which is a food distribution. We've got Leaky twenty four, which is an organization that makes sure that people are able to get prescriptions, you know, like people forget that in the midst of war you still need things like insulin. You know. Schools, We've got a great group called Toller Space, and what they do is they educate teachers on how to talk to kids about
what's going on. Ukraine needs you seven Mental Health Hotline, which is kind of a cultural thing because you know, for many people in Ukraine's a real sort of patriarchal, macho society and the idea that you get through these things with vodka's you gotta you know, we're pushing back against that. But the idea was that if we had a diverse enough portfolio, we would be able to cover
any given base at any given time. And now I'm also working with a group called Superhumans, which was started by a guy named Andre Stebnitzer, who is a really successful businessman in Ukraine whose house was bombed and destroyed. And his response is to say, I'm going to build a hospital for Ukrainians that focuses on prosthetics and things like that, because that's a huge issue unfortunately for children as well. But getting fixators and things like that to people,
you know, they've lost. You can't fly there right, so if someone gets injured, it's not like you can metav act them out. Liev Schreiber. If you're enjoying this conversation, be sure to subscribe to Here Is the Thing on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Liev Schreiber discusses his acting career and shares his perspective on transitioning to
the small screen with Raydanovan. I'm at like Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing with dynamic roles and everything from X Men origins to remix of modern horror classics like The Omen. Some listeners forget that Shreiber is a classically trained thespian well versed in the Bard. Considering Schreiber's pedigree, I wanted to know if helming an Emmy nominated show
like Ray Donovan had ever been a goal. No. I thought I was going to do classical theater for the rest of my life, because my whole strategy was big fish, small pond. There wasn't a lot of people who wanted to do Shakespeare, and I wanted to do Shakespeare. I
liked it. A week was fine. You know, my education up through graduate school like Rota and Yale was nothing compared to the education I got working and meeting people like you and Dustin and people who I thought made really strange and interesting choices, you know, because I fought off that thing, that perfect verse thing. And you're being kind to me right now, and you know it. I was fighting off. You know, we said backstage about you. What I said, I would try to speak, you know,
in my normal voice. I said, and you guys are all doing this English thing. And I said, and of course Liev speaks Leev. You had your own language, you spoke own dialect. Yeah, you're being kind again, because I you know as well as I do that I was fighting off that English training. That I was fighting off that perfect verse rise the end of the line, hook it around open vowels. And what I what I loved about you and what I loved about your king was this guy. It wasn't about his voice. It all came
from his pelvis. It all came from his junk. And I was like, that's the way to play this guy. And by the way, I borrowed it when I played him a couple of years later. But it was so physical, and all the actors that I've loved and that I've learned from just so physical. There was this guy Michael Potts when he was playing Luccio, who's like the pimp from Measure for Measure. He this little thing with his
fingers like this. I stole it for Ricky Roma in Glennarys and he used to just constantly doing this thing. Was I loved the way he did that with his fingers And I said to Michael, what are you doing? He said, I don't know. I just he's counting money. And I was like, okay, and it's and you had that thing. What I loved about that performance is my interpretation of what you were doing is all of that murdering that he was doing out in the field was
just his sex drive. And the irony of what was so beautiful about it is that when it came down to Duncan, he couldn't get it up, he couldn't do it, and that I thought that was just such a compelling performance.
The sling shot of the Queen my Lord is dead and the rage and the what I what I took from that which was so valuable to me was the rage and the chaos and the insanity and the ferocity, and it's so perfectly written because it delivers to tomorrow and tomorrow the best and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day, and the guys shattered. I would tell people that in that production, I said, you, Michael Hall, zach Brath, Michael Wow. Zach Braff said, there's
a few guys in that production. They went on to k was a kid kid. I stab him with the sword and I said, I'm not gonna pull the sword, and I said, if it's cool with you, I'm gonna put my boot on your shoulder. I'm gonna peel you off my sword, and then I want you to drop that others. Zach Brath looked me, he was like, that's so fucking sick. Man's sick. I go, yeah, I want
to just peel you off my sword. Now, when you describe for me, you're making films and you start to star in the films, give me an example of one that creatively was really really a joy for you. What's a film you made and you're making the film and you're going, I mean, I love this. Two of them. One was the first. One was Day Trippers, that Greg Mottold directed that it was just that I had never
met a group of actors that solid. It was Stanley Tucci was Hope Davis, was Parker Posey it was, and Mira it was just a Campbell Scott and I had, you know, noble it depends, and I had no experience making films, and and here was this sort of altruistic It was like, you know, back in the nineties when independent film was kind of having its heyday, and here was this incredible ensemble of actors just giving it over to each other. You gotta work together. No one's a
star here, you know, you gotta work together. And here we're a bunch of like really stellar actors just doing it. And it felt so good because we weren't getting paid. It was something altruistic about it. There was something generous
about it. And it happened to me again in a movie called Spotlight, and it was just an extraordinary piece of writing on and Josh's part, and it was something that I felt very connected to because of, you know, the time I'd men doing Ray and you know, at some at some level, the core of Rays about a guy who's been spun by his priest and the detail and the um, the restraint that they showed in depicting journalists and what they do and their value to our society.
I just thought it was incredible. And every actor in that was like Sammy Sosa. For me, it was like everybody, everybody, and that was just so good. And when they came to you to do the series, because you've never done our series regular before, correct And when they came you to because when I was asked to do a series when we did thir d Rock, Remember sitting there shooting the pilot, I'm going, I don't want to. They bring
me They bring me a fresh ice coffee every fifteen minutes. Well, this is nice, it's cozy, they got every everybody's lovely if the whole thing is really very pleasant. But I don't think I can come here and say this and be this guy. And the next thing, you know, we come and by season two it's a different show, like we had to find our way. But by season two they sort to win everything and they're writing and they're winning all the writing. At me, some blah blah blah,
how did they get you to do that show? Who is responsible for you doing that show? My kids you know, I mean, Naomi was a huge star and we were traveling all around the world, going to different countries and making movies, yeah, making movies, and you know, it just felt like her career was really solid, and you know, me doing plays wasn't really gonna work out because you don't get weekends eight shows a week, and that would mean that I would have to stay in New York
because that's where I want to do plays. Really if I'm going to do plays. So when you go do the TV show your Kids, we've got kids, and the kids are now of the of an age where it's time to go to school. And so I said, Tony, where do you want to live New York l A. And She's got this beautiful house, Sally Fields Old House,
and you know, she's built this life. And I'm like, all right, I'll go to l A. You know, I'll commit the Cardinals sin and I'll go to l A. So I told my agents to start looking for a television show that would that would shoot in l A so that we could live in that house and be there. And they found me this show about this Boston fixer who had been abused by a priest and he had this really tight family situation and he was interacting in the Hollywood scene, and it all seemed like nonsense to me.
But the woman and Binghaman who remember who told her? Yeah? Who wrote it? Was just extraordinary and just so intelligent, and she stuck it in me and I was like, all right, I'm just perfect. Let's do it. And I didn't expect anything to happen. We did the pilot. I was like, Okay, that was fun. Like God, I guess I blew that. And it just grew and grew and grew.
One of the things that I think again is like, because they let me have a say in some of the casting, it really I was able to put people in it that I really felt good about and trusted, and they helped with that as well. But I just that cast just just day after day booming. It was similar in in the way where you have everybody. It was a great cast, and everybody was perfect and distinctive. I mean, everybody has certain distinctive energies and hard workers
to like, everybody worked hard. And I tried to get any to come to a play with me here in New York. You should beg you should well, he doesn't
want to leave his family. He's got that situation. But the way he pursued, the way he went after Parkinson, the way he went after everything, how hard he worked, dash, the way he would swing for the fences with Bunchie and Paula who harnessed all of that real Irish rage that she's got, and just every actor and Carriss, the woman who played my daughter, just like Ah for you with the show, you saw Aliev you never saw before on that show, you know, an unbridled kind of character
as I saw him as just pure vulnerability, you know, like the most vulnerable character I've ever played in my life. And that the culture that he comes from, it's unacceptable, and so he steal himself up. He's pretending, he's pretending, he's trying to exist for others because he can't tolerate himself, you know what I mean. And that and that for me in many, in many ways is kind of a central theme on in being a man and how to
be a man. That just my grandfather, you know, my gran Ukrainian grandfather who kind of braised me, and it was just he was such a tough bastard and he never he never talked about where he was from, which is part of my obsession with Ukraine and all of this stuff. He never admitted that he could speak any other languages other than American. He never admitted what he'd been through, or what he'd seen, or what he'd lost. And there was a kind of determination and and principled
tenacity towards being something being American. And he hated Germans like that's the only thing that showed. He hated everything German, German cars, German beer, until my oldest brother got a German girlfriend and suddenly he loved Germans and everything German. But there was a kind of you know, if I didn't open the door for somebody, I got a smack in the back of the head, if I had a fight with my brother's girlfriend and I threw a jellyfish at her, and I can't I don't even want to
say what he did to me. But he was that person that was trying to give me some character and strength. And then I heard from my mother this story about how he had been in love after every single in love with this younger woman who left him in the middle of his life. That just devastated him, and I it was that thing I just what are these qualities
of masculinity? And I think Anne was very interested in that too, because I think ends she's writing her brothers, she's writing her father, she's writing her lovers in raydonov and and what is it about men that compels her that makes her that's so interesting? And and for me it was like this idea of you know, in all good characters and you know this, it's like it's duality, right, it's juxtaposition. It's if you think a character is something,
you better go look in the complete opposite direction. So Ray was written as this incredibly tough guy who could just kick everybody's ass, and you know, used as few words as possible, and once I got to part there even less words. But in reality, he's stuck at the moment when he was sexually assaulted by this priest when he was a seven year old kid. And that's the person who's really just dying to come out all of the time, and that's the person who's so violent. That's
where the violence comes from. In my opinion, violence is a product of fear more often than not, you know, which is which is how I see what's happening with poutin he's backed into a corner, he doesn't scare. Yeah, quick shout out to Bill Heck. I've rarely seen an actor played the younger version of a character as beautifully as he did. He was he had everything you needed to do. Void. I mean, he was void as he had.
I loved him. They loved him. David and I wrote the movie mostly because we were so blown away by Bill Heck, like, you know, let's let this guy just take the show and the and the young actor was playing me. We just thought these actors were so good. He was just extraordinary. Everybody in that but particularly Bill just that he just he has that kind of you know, that's the thing that that voit does that not many other people can do, is the charm, Like he just
does charm better than anybody I've ever seen. And thank god we found Bill Heck. He was great. Two quick things. I don't get to see you that often. We have got crazy lives, but I want to say, when I saw that show, we just confirmed what I always knew about you, and that is there's nothing you can't do, drama, comedy, shake whatever, There's nothing you can't do. And then number two, I'm very proud of you about this Ukraine thing. Good
for you man. You go there and men show up that way, and I really really really appreciate you giving us the time to tell people about it. My thanks to Leev Schreiber. You can donate to Blue Check Ukraine at blue check dot i N. This episode was recorded at cd M Studios in New York City. We're produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach McNeice and Maureen Hoban. Our engineers Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is Daniel Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio