This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio. With more than eight hundred film and television credits to his name, Eric Roberts is one of the most prolific actors in Hollywood and one of the most misunderstood. Born into a family of actors and playwrights, Roberts.
Grew up in Atlanta, Georgia.
His parents co founded one of the city's first integrated theater companies, the Atlanta Actors and Writers Workshop. From the age of four, Roberts performed in repertory theater. His two younger sisters were also child actors, one of whom would go on to become one of the biggest movie stars in the world, Julia Roberts. Eric Roberts left home at eighteen to move to New York City. Just a few years later, he was cast as the lead in Frank
Pearson's nineteen seventy eight film King of the Gypsy. The performance earned Roberts his first Golden Globe nomination and made him an international star.
He would go on to receive.
Golden Globe nominations for his performances in Bob Fosse's Star eighty and an Academy Award nomination for andre Konchulovski's Runaway Train. In September twenty twenty four, Eric Roberts published his memoir Runaway Train, or the Story of My Life so Far.
I was curious what it was.
Like growing up in a family where a theater wasn't just a passion but a way of life.
I got out of school, Actually I didn't give ass back to school, Ada the American Academy. I was in New York by this time. I didn't get askedpect to be a senior. So I went across town and auditioned for the Actors Studio. Got in, and so just dropped the American Academy out of my condescence, went straight to the Actors Studio, got in, started working, started to having fun there, and then got my first movie very quickly and was very lucky. I became an international movie start
at twenty two years old. It was King of the Gypsies, Yeah, with Susan Sarandom played my mom, jed Hurst played my dad, Shelly Wyner's playing grandmother, Certain Hayden played my grandfather, and Brooke Shields played my baby's sister and my god thirty years later, I played Brooks husband in a movie.
Who directed King of the Gypsies.
Frank Pearson, the cool ass Frank Pierson.
B Frank Pearson who I love.
Yeah, he wrote Doddy Afternoon. He won Oscars for Cat Blue, all kinds of stuff.
So you go to the American Academy and my brother Stephen wasn't invited back there, by the way, so he's in good company with you.
But you go and that's your first movie? How old were you?
I got the movie at twenty one and it came out when I was twenty two.
That was your first movie?
Yeah, and you did You've done plays before. I grew up in repertory theater. I did my first play at four. I did my first TV series at eight. But I was in reptuee theater my whole life. I did eight to twelve plays every year in my life up until I left home.
And the repertoire theater was owned and managed by.
Who by my dad and my mother. It's called the Actors in the Writer's Workshop, and it was funded by the Martin Luther King Foundation, And we patterned after Joe Papp's theater in that we toured the underprivileged areas all week and then on the weekends we had theater in our central park which is called Piedmont Park, and we had theater and we did two places on Saturday, two places on Sunday. And that was my life for I don't know, fifteen years.
So it's safe to say you grew up in a show business family. This involved your other siblings as well. Were they all in the REP company?
Well, I'm a lot older than they are. I'm eleven years older than Julie. I'm nine years old than Lisa's so I was already getting ready to leave home by the time they were cognizant. I like change a lot of diapers, but I didn't do a lot of plays with them.
Really, yeah, did they eventually do any Were they involved in that work at a whole now?
Oh yeah, yeah, but only in the children's place in the afternoon. And my father wrote a play called Little Lisa for my sister Lisa. It was all we knew, all we did. And I left home very young. I went to New York at eighteen.
And when you did the film with Frank, when you did the film with Pearson and that took off, what did that do for you. Well, how did you feel about that burgeoning film stardom?
Were you ready for it or you weren't.
Well, you're never ready for that because you can never really understand when it's going to be up to you're in it. What happens, as you know, Alec, when you get famous, you don't change, but everybody thinks you're going to, or you're about to, or you might, and everybody acts differently with you. You're not the one who changes, but you're around you treats you differently, and it's so silly, and you say to them, this is so silly. It's not you, but they don't understand. You have to be
in it to understand it. It's the kind of thing that if you talk about you sound like, well it's me. It's so hard to be famous, and you sound like a big asshole. So you can't do that. So yeah, have to avoid that. But everybody does treat you differently. It is not you who changed with the stardom. It is the world around you, how it adheres to you, how it likes you, how it does that thing it does to stars, And it's very silly and very overstated. And what you just have to do is just ignore it.
I made a couple of movies, mostly supporting roles in films in the late eighties, and I always mentioned that I did a play Prelude to a Kiss, off Broadway with Mary Louise Parker, and we got a very very love letter from Frank Rich back when that really mattered. And the point is is that I went through my career and I relied on these instincts that I thought
were good instincts, and they were very decent instincts. And then all of a sudden, when Prelude moved to Broadway and I didn't go with the show, and Tim Hutton did the show on Broadway and I went to go to a movie to make a lot of money. That's when I ignored my instincts. And everything went wrong from there for me. The instincts that got me somewhere, I started to abandon those because all of a sudden, you have something to protect.
No, but I would disagree with you, Alec. It didn't go wrong from there. You've had a great career, You've done some really awesome, awesome work. That's just a fact.
But when you do King of the Gypsies, does everything start to get more precious, and everyone's telling you you can't do that.
You got to do this, Oh yes, to lose.
Oh yeah, I was telling now. The reason I work so much now is to make up really for lost time, because back in those days, everything was so precious, supposedly so precious, and stuff like Breaking Away, for instance, was the first big movie that he had me turned down because yes, Eric, it's going to be a hit. Yes you're going to be a star, but you're going to be an adolescent star, and they're gonna have to overcome that. We want you to be an adults.
Who's telling you this.
Bill Tresh. Bill Tresh my manager, So we'll have another hurdle to get over. If we make you an adolescent star, we have to make an adult store. So you must turn down Breaking Away. I didn't want to, but I did because he's smarter than me. I thought about the industry, so he knows what to do and what not to do. So I do what he suggested. But I did that with dozens and dozens of movies. So all it really ended up being was I was not employed. I was just waiting for some perfect piece or something.
So what's the next thing you did after King of the Gypsies.
After King of the Gypsies, I went back to the theater and I did a massive appeal with my low O'Shea.
I did on Broadway.
Yeah, but yeah, I went back to the theater and oh yeah, I did Paul's Case for the American Short Story Series. That's right. Everybody fought me over that. I really wanted to do that piece, and Bill and everybody else thought it was it was not worthy of me. But I did it because I wanted to. And then I got the nicest review in the New York Times. It had a little picture of me on the back page and it said the perfect Paul Eric Roberts, King
of the Gypsies was no Fluke. That's my proudest interview I ever got.
What was the next movie?
The next movie would have been A Raggedy Man with Sissy Spacey and Jack Fisk, her husband was the director. That was a glorious piece as Sissy got to play a single working mother back in the forties. And I'm a sailor who blows through town and leaves her with a kiss and makes her friends with her sons, and it's just a wonderful wonderful story, and that's when I met Sam Shephard for the first time. He and I ended up making four movies together, but that was our
first time and we made fast friends. Sam was a cool guy to work with and I'm miss him.
How far awayway from Pope.
Pope was my fifth or sixth film. Yeah, I said. There was Raggedy Man, then some TV stuff in Star eighty, and then Pope.
Star eighty was before Pope.
Oh yeah, I was twenty five when I did Star eighty.
I tell people that in order to play a role like that of her husband of Paul, if you said to me, give me the twenty five top performances by a male actor of the last seventy five years inhabiting a really serious dramatic role, you're on that list.
Wow.
Thanks, I mean that performance in that movie, no apologies, no pulling your punches. You play him as determined and is self seeking and is driven, not reading the room very well, not a lot of self awareness. But those scenes when you're there at the mansion and all that stuff, you're dying for this guy. You're dying, You're looking at him, You're looking at the TV, going, oh, Paul don't do that.
If you don't do that, maybe this will work. And you just see Hugh playing this character who believes he has everything. Who wouldn't want me, who wouldn't want to be in business with me, who wouldn't want to fuck me? Everybody wants to be me or be with me, But you play it not in a loud but in the most nuanced way. That is one of the greatest performances I've ever seen in my life.
Oh wow, brother, thank you so much.
Phil.
Let me tell you why it is. It's not me. I am the instrument. I am the vessel. But it was all Bob Bossy. He wrote an incredible screenplay. And then we shot all the stuff up in Vancouver and we come down to La We shot in Maccoova for a month. We're down in La now. We had two days off in between. I'm living at Paul Jabora's house, which which is a great, big mansion. Anyway, in the middle of the night, suddeny, somebody's banging on my door.
Paul's Jabara has some weird living he does, so I think it could be anything at the door, so I grab a hammer. His construction the house, there are tools out. I grab a hammer and I go answer the door. What the fuck? And is Bob Bozzy. He's got a little portable typewriter and he says, how you doing. I said, I'm sleeping. He said, well, we have to work. I said, okay, come on in. He comes in. He says, I type you dance. I said okay, And that's his expression for
he types improv. I type you dance. So it's a mill of the fucking night. Okay, I guess we do that. And so he started doing that to me. He would come over every day after work and he type I dance, and he would work and he would rewrite. And I also got from him the most personal note from a director I ever got. I'm doing a scene one day with my guitar and I mess up the song and I said cut. Well, you don't say cut on a Fossy said le's you're a fosse. And he goes, what
are you doing? I said, I fucked up. He goes, God damn it, Come here and he walks across that big sound change of zoa trub, you know, the big one. He walks across it. He goes, come here, and I'm in my underwear, and I got the crew behind me and I got a guitar and I walk over there. What he's look at me? I said, I'm looking at you. Look at me. I'm looking at you, dude. He goes, Okay, you're playing me if I weren't successful, do you understand?
And I did, and I really did, so I started imitating even how he walked on the way back to the set at that moment, I basically played him in that movie, even though it was somebody else.
Now Mary Elle, I would imagine with Fosse Fossey, some of the women in his projects suffer a great deal. Did she have a tough time on that film? Did he direct her heavily as well?
Let me tell you one quick story that won't hurt her feelings. I'm crazy about her, by the way, as a person and an actor. But here's the deal. So we're like shooting maybe two three days, and we're in Vancouver and he says, to get your voice out of your face, I want it coming from your chest. You're telling and he started and he kind of imitated her,
kind of made fun of her, and she started crying. Okay, well, you know when a woman cries on his set the makeup runs, I got to get up and go, so she got some good So it helds up like two hours. And he says to me, quote, she can't take it, I hope you can. And that was all that was ever said about it.
That was all that was ever said.
But yeah, he was a passionate lunatic and when he was onto something, he wanted you write with him, and if you warnt, he would drag you by the hair. It's no abused and abused word. But he was a genius. And once you work with a real genius two things that you're not one and that they're hard to find. And man, he was the most special thing in my life ever had that I didn't expect.
Now, there weren't many movies I've ever done. We're all watch a movie and I'll go, my god, who is that?
You know?
I tried to become someone else dispositionally and attitudinally and everything and emotionally. When you saw Star eighty, did you freak out? Because you'll sit here there and go, oh my god, who is that guy? Who is that guy?
It's the same feeling when you watch a project that you hit. It's like hitting a Ball perfectly. It's like, yeah, that's it.
Wow, Now when you do that movie. I was always explaining to people who don't work in this business. I said, you have got to pick up where you left off. If I don't see an actor for five years and I run into them at a film festival, we're hugging like I saw you last week.
I said, it's very parapatetic.
We're all on the go, we're all moving around. But if I had a good experience with you, when I see you, I keep in touch with some people, and a lot of them move see I don't. Did you stay in touch with him at all? Or was it out of sight, out of mind for him?
Well, he was discussing he wanted me in his next movie, and it was maybe going to be about the Kennedy guy got shot in the face up in Harlem. He had talked to me about it and he was working on it. And so I waited about eight months after he died, and I called Gwen and I said, Gwen, he was working on a piece ball Blame. Talked to me about it. Can I see it? And she said, let's just let it be. I was heartbroken. That's that, and so I thought, if you.
Were age appropriate, he would have put you in every movie. You could have done all that jazz, but you were too young. I love all that jazz.
Love.
Oh it's a great movie.
I know.
Cabaret is great. Yeah.
I love all Bob stuff. Yeah, I know.
Yeah, he made perfect movies. Yeah.
So then when you do Pope, the director is who We had two directors.
We had one director who got fired and we had Sjo Rosenberg, who ended up really directing the film. But at first it was this. I got that script in January of that year. We're not shooting until September. I got a script in January. Back of the old days when you get warnings. I got this script in in January, and I got the book in the script from Cotching Kirkwood,
and it said pick apart Paulie or Charlie. So I read the book, I read the script, I read the book again, and I decide, I'm going to pick Paulie, but I'm going to play him differently. So I have to ask because it's not on the page. So I call Cotching Kirkwood and say, hey, guys, I picked Paulie and they said why, I said, because he's a fun ass part, and I want to play him, but I want to be allowed to play him as he is
done on the page. I've talked to you guys, I go, okay, But we wanted you to pick Charlie, and we thought you would because he's the leading man. He's cool, he gets dressed up, he's got the babe blah blah. We thought you'd picking. I said, no, he's a good part, but I like Paulie because he's better. If I can be allowed to play him like this. He's written as a tough, dumb thug that's been done ten billion times by ten billion actors, even though I've done it eighty
five times. Can I do something else? I want to play a mama's boy who wants to be this guy but is not this guy looks up to Charlie because he sees Charlie as this guy. I want to be that. And they said, whatever you do, Eric, you do it because we're hiring you because it's you, So whatever you do, we're behind you. I said, okay. So that was January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August. I'm dieting. I dropped thirty pounds. And I purmed my hair.
I learned my script from back to front. I'm ready to go. I shot, ready to go, and we have five days of rehearsal and we start to shoot. We're all staying at the Mayflower Hotel in Manhattan. I'm living in Westport, Connecticut at the time. Next shor to Chris Walking. After the third day of rehearsal, the director asked me to stay after to talk to him. Okay, I do, what's up, dude, Why are you so skinny? I said, well, that's the sky. I want to be a walking Spas attack.
He goes, why'd you perm your hair? I said, same thing, walking spas attack. And then he gets angry. What the fuck is a.
Walking spas attack?
It's going well, I said, John Belushi, only skin He goes, no, No, that's not this guy. This guy's a tough thug. This guy is tough and stupid. Blah blah blah. I said, no, that's how he's written. That's not what I'm playing. And I told the producers and I thought they would tell you, but yeah, they gave me the go ahead to not play what's on the page. He said, well, I don't agree with them. I don't agree with you, and I'd
like you to resign. I said, well, I'm not doing that, But I say to him, let me think about it, and I.
Go up to Goodness.
I go up to Mickey's room, knock on the door and say, Mickey, the boss just asked me to quit. He said what. So we called the producers and they fired that director and they brought in Shoer Rosenberg, who directed a great movie.
You're One and knowly with Mickey.
Micky and I have worked together now, I don't know four times, five times. Our other big thing was he plays a speed dealer and I play his boss who sells him the speed. Now, when they offer me that part, that's also another character change, they call me, we're gonna hook you up with Mickey Rourke.
Cool.
I love Mickey. Great. What's the part bill? They send me the script. I love the script. But he's a tough guy and he has his body exposed, and he has all these girls and he sells Mickey speed and he's all cool and all this stuff and all cliche. Watched yeah, and I said, you know what, that's been done a lot too. Can I plan the opposite? Can I play a screaming queen with boys, and they said, yes, oh, it was called spun Spu.
I'm watching it tonight.
It's called Somebody.
It's in my basket tonight.
And this cool Swedish director and he said, Eric, of course, I love the idea of god. Jonas Ackerlin Nikki has the best death scene of any of us guys who played bad guys in the history of motion pictures. Wait till you have to watch. You're not going to even give you a hint. It is so moving and it is so immediate.
Oh, it's so good. Eventually, go on, what year did you do Runaway Training?
Nineteen eighty five?
And it's by and large I don't remember every frame of the film. Great film.
I always tell people, you go to watch you if you want to watch a smart and intense and well shot, well edited film. It's essentially a two hander. Now they hired him first.
Or you first.
They hire him first, and then they bring in John and I and we meet him and we have a great lunch talking about stuff each other and how much we love each other's work, all that stuff everybody does, you know when they get together. And then I say to him the same thing I said to the Pope people, this guy's kind of cliche because he's in he's in jemp with statutory rape. So I want to make him not gross. I want to even make him not incestiarily a man. I want to even change his voice so
it's up high so he's not lack a threat. And if he's country, everybody think he's stupid. So you know, I have to talk about his education, you know. So I asked him if I could do that. He said, you can do anything you want. But he's Russian. He couldn't hear the accent.
He didn't know.
He didn't know what the fuck you were doing, I know, but he allowed it. And John Voight is one of my three favorite actors I've ever worked with. Oh my god, we never came I might have character to each other. We lived in those characters for the whole shoot and we just did it and it was just satisfying.
Where did you shoot them?
We're supposed to shoot in Montana, and we get to Montana, the whole cast, the whole crew, and the thaws. Where's the snow?
Oh?
So the producers Golden Globus, they'd say, well, let's go to Alaska. Place in Alaska. We shoots in Alaska, so we moved Anchorage and they got forty miles a track. There was just our track, forty miles back and forth, and we shot a movie.
John, who I've begged to do this show, and I told him when I ran intoim, I said, listen, I don't want to talk about politics. I don't give a shit about your politics or whatever. I said, I am, you know, you're a great admirer. And I when he popped up on Ray Donathan and was just completely knocked out by how great John is at this stage of his career. I mean, he was so what a fox.
John is a mega talent. John is a megata. Look at his list of movies. I mean coming home all those I mean, oh my god, eh, I mean, I'm a cowboy. I'm in my conference. I know, dude, it's endless. And he's always great, always, I know. And we never talked politics. We never came out of character, either of us. We've taken character from starting to finish.
Actor Eric Roberts. If you enjoy conversations for the claimed stars of the stage and screen, check out my episode with the legendary Lrie Metcalf.
Greta sent me the script and I read it and really responded to the material. And it was very small independent movie in so I thought, oh, I haven't done a movie in about ten years, so this will be a nice little way to put my toe back in the water and see how it is. When Ladybird exploded, I was unprepared for. I had no idea what that publicity circus train was. That you have to get on, you know, and ride for about three months.
To hear more of my conversation with ry Metcalf, go to Here's the Thing dot org. After the break, Eric Roberts tells the story of Bob Fossey showing up at his door in the middle of the night with a typewriter.
I'm Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing. Eric Roberts has always been deeply committed to his preparation as an actor, from his days studying at the Royal Academy in London to working with some of the most sought after directors in Hollywood, Roberts has developed a meticulous approach to building characters from the ground up with diverse roles. In films like King of the Gypsies star eighty, Pope
of Greenwich Village and Runaway Train. I wanted to know whether his instinct to stray from what's written on the page has served him well across five decades of filmmaking.
I'm old school. I'm like you. I'm old school. I do mountains of homework. I live for my time at my desk. That's the most precious time I have. Besides my time alone with my wife, is my time my desk with homework. Those two things are my joys in life. I get a bunch of choices and stuff. I do my thing. I'm gonna go this way, go the other way. And then I say to my director, what do you
want to see? And he'll tell me, and I'll take what he wants and I will try to fit into what I've done, and they're presented all because he's the boss. And see what I love about show business and what people don't like about show is but I do is It's an authoritative system. You have a dictator and everybody else, and that's how it works best because you have one guy with his idea, his drive, his vision. Okay, let's
all get behind this guy because it's good. Here we go and you get behind him and you drive for him. He's the guy out front pulling us all.
As I'm working now in films, I mean, by the time they get the funding together and they're really ready to give you a plane ticket and send you there, it's Thursday, and this you're on a plane Friday, and saturday's your wardrobe fitting. It's so different from what it used to be. No rehearsals, a lot of time, no rehearsals. What I want to talk to you about is then and now. You made great films, you gave historic performances in movies.
But when you show up on the set with.
The director who you've made more movies than everybody on the whole fucking crew combined.
What's it like for you now to do that? What do you do?
That's not a conscious thought, really, it's all the same process. It's just I have less time now. As you pointed out, we have no time. So I arrived with my same question every day. Hi, Hey, okay, what do you want to see? Boss? I always call them boss to establish they are my boss. I let them boss me around, tell me what to do.
Now.
I have my idea of what I'm going to do. But I let them pull it in the direction that they want it, and usually they thank me.
Right.
A lot of times they don't, but usually, yeah.
I know.
It's funny you say that because I had one guy I worked with on a film over in London and they had whatever the financing was where we had to run over to London and shoot this for a weekend. It was one of these tech thrillers and I'm the CIA boss screaming at everybody. But the director was really interesting because he wanted to direct and he was really this very boisterous us, this big Icelandic guy or Norwigi go Ia figure out he was from lovely guy. But as soon as we were on the set, he was
very gentlemanly. He was very solicitous. He said, oh, I would love for you to do my film.
I met with him.
I talked to him finally when we're there and we're making the film, he was like okay, everybody, you know, he was really like booming, oh do this do that? I thought, my god, I haven't been around that in a while. I'm usually around guy. So we're talking to the DP and talking to the lighting people and look at video playback and they.
Don't have a fucking word to say to me. They think I'm good. They're like you, you do what you do well, you hired you to do what you do. You figure it out. And I like to be directed. Do you like to be directed?
I love to be told what to need to ask my wife. That's how we're trained to be, to be able to do whatever they want. When I try to do what we want to do, We're trained to do whatever they need. And it's a great feeling. I love to be told what to do. Yes.
Now, I want you to know that I was gonna do a film once which was the most macabre and strange and insane movie, and I was actually kind of excited to do it. But it didn't work out. And then the director rewrote the film and a gender reversal. All the men were gone. He wanted me to play a doctor who gives my wife cancer. I inject her with cancer cells to watch or die, and I masturbate to her dying decomposing. But I thought, this guy's the most fucked up guy, Tom six. He did the show.
When you find yourself in those kind of hands, what I do is I completely give over to them. Okay, I'm here for them, So whatever weirdness they're gonna take me, have me present, I'm gonna do, Well, what do you want to see? What are you looking for? And I let them tell me and I go deliver for them. Sometimes it's a he Sometimes you're like, okay, well I wouldn't have thought of that, but okay, yeah, but we work for them.
So, you know, talk about actors then and now. When you're working now and you're doing films with younger, less experienced actors, you think actors are different today than they were thirty years ago.
Well, yeah, sure they are. It was it was a vocation thirty years ago. It's like it's like a moment now it's like I'm going to be famous. It's not like I'm going to do this and it's going to make me famous. But I'm doing this and this makes me famous. But I'm not in this to be famous for this.
To do this, We'll do a sequence of things right and build my way up.
Yeah right, yeah, I'm sure every generation has some kind of version of this. But the younger guys have gotten lazy. They don't want to work. They just want to be famous, and uh, you know me too. But I love the work.
Now, when you make films for me, I have my example of this. My example is Mission Impossible. You go along and you're doing small things. I was joking with people. I'd say, I do an independent film and the entire budget of the film was a budget for gum on the set of Mission Impossible, and I said the reason that that was always tough. Then I go on the set of Mission and I go, oh god, I remember this,
big movies, big budget. So when you show up on Nolan's set to do Dark Knight, what was that like for you?
Well, if you're a movie geek, which I am, it was even even more than you're asking about, because.
It was this.
We shot all the Chicago stuff in Chicago and then all the other stuff. We're gonna We're gonna shoot at Pinewood. Okay, we've all shot pine Well, we all know what it's like. But we get there. That was a lie. We're not shooting Pinewood. It's a secret because we're hiding from the press. Okay, so where are we. We're the old Zeppelin hanger, thirty miles north. Go there. So we got the old zeppelinanger.
We walk in. It's about three football fields wide, about three stories tall, and you walk in and it's all Gotham City. It is so cool. And if you are a movie geek, which I am, it's heaven, man, it's heaven. And me and Gary Aleman would play all day long. We weren't on camera. It was just so much fun, dude, to be there, and it was like a dream. It was like it was like it was like a movie about a movie. It was like we weren't even working. We're making a movie about a movie. Even though we weren't.
It was just it was heaven.
So Nolan, what is the director of his ilk, the modern blockbuster director?
What was he like to work with?
Really sweet, a perfect gentleman. His wife Emma is kind of the boss and she says things like all right, moving along, Christopher. But he gave me my favorite note I ever got from a director. We're doing this big party scene and I had the last line and it's kind of a closing line, baboom, and I say it cut dead silence on the megaphone. Eric Roberts, don't be funny.
Not to take now.
I'm not known to be funny. So that was my favorite note I ever got.
God to be on those sets. They asked me, what's it like to work with Cruise? And of course everybody says the same thing, but it happens to be true, which is he's just the hardest.
Working guy you've ever met in your life. And he's all about work.
We come to work, he wants to talk, he wants of a nice he knows the perfect timing. It's ten minutes of good morning and high and give you a hug, and let's get a coffee. Then we're gonna get into rehearsal in the next twenty and it's all the same every day, pretty much management by him and Chris. But man, was it a joy to work with him because they took their time. You know, they didn't luxuriate in toime.
But whenever they paused and decided that something wasn't working and they needed a change or some amendment to the text or whatever it was, with a purpose.
They weren't just jerking off, you know what I mean.
And God, when I did mission, I had two small parts of mission and it was the time of my life to work with with Tom.
Well, Tom Cruise is so famous that he gets undermine. He is so talented he is so handsome and he's so famous that everybody wants to take something away from him. But he's one of our permanent greats.
Forever dude, or yeah, forever, forever Actor Eric Roberts.
If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Eric Roberts discusses why his role on HBO's The Righteous Gemstones was one of the best jobs of his entire career. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the thing. Eric Roberts is many things. An OSCAR nominated actor, a stage veteran, a memoir writer, and recently a contestant on ABC's Dancing
with the Stars. Roberts says he joined the cast because it's his wife's favorite television show. Having recently watched my wife perform on the latest season, I wanted to know what Robert's experience was like performing on Dancing with the Stars.
I am not a dancer, Alec, but you know, I had this incredible partner, Britt. She was so good to me, and you know, I fell over my four feet and tried to get through it. It didn't do very well. I think I lasted four cuts. My wife is a fan of the show. She's a huge fan of the show, and she loved your wife on the show. She went nuts through your wife. She thinks your wife has made those beautiful women on the planet and will say so to everybody.
I would agree, yeah, but I'll tell you my wife went there and you realize eventually, you realize pretty quickly that she's bringing to the event what the pros bring. So it's like, where's the drama? You know, she comes in, she nails that, she goes home. She comes in, she nails it, she goes home, and she only lasted four cuts and they sent her home, and she was very despondent about that because it's not a dance competition, it's a TV show.
I mean, Andy Richter lasted longer than.
My wife didne Dancing with the Stars, which tells you everything you need to know. I got two more questions for you now. One is one of the more recent things. I was told. What we read you said was one of the best experiences you've had in your career was righteous Gemstones. Talk about that man, what part did you play?
I played a guy named Junior who was the next partner of our lead when they would promote wrestling. But here's what happened. That was an open call. So my wife and I shot an at home audition and we sent it in and I got the part. Like that day he called it. Yeah, well by blah blah, Yeah, you're it, We got ya Okay. It was the best scripts, the most fun character, the best actors to work with, the best location. Everything was perfect. I have never had
a job I liked anymore than Righteous Gemstones. I had so much fun making that show. And those people are all geniuses. The actors are great, the right directors are great. I just loved everybody. I can't say enough nice things about that because I was allowed to play this really fed up guy completely and three dimensionally, and they were just so.
The show is right, if the tone of the show is right, you can have a ball like oh yeah.
And it was perfect because of them, and they invited me in for a season. It was such a pleasure.
I love John.
Yeah, that's my favorite job I ever had.
That's amazing. That's amazing. What's something that you haven't done?
Now?
You've done a lot of movies and TV, a lot of things on film, a lot of theater in your youth so forth. Is there something that you haven't done you wish you're looking forward to doing one day?
Maybe they're sure, is man, I'd like to play Nuriev after he stopped dancing.
Is somebody writing something for you?
No, it was talked about years ago. This person came to me from Russia and said, how'd you like to play Nuriev? I said, I don't have those legs and I can't dance, so we can't do any dancing. It was like, yeah, but yeah, I mean he was as fascinating guy in a fascinating time, and he was gay when you was against the law to be homosexual, So yeah,
I'd be interested in that. But that went away. But I did a bunch of homework then in the interim, and I really know the guy now and I really want to play him, and he needs to be played because he wrote ranks with everybody, everything there was, but he maintained who he was and his talent was beyond recognition. He was a one of a kind and he died alone. Dude, He died very much. He really yeah, you know, he really know he had AIDS, but yeah he was. He
was a gay Russian with AIDS. How marginalized can you make yourself? And yeah back then, yeah yeah, but there's nothing. There's nothing moving forward with that now then, I know of No.
Let me tell you some pell. You are a great, great fucking actor, and you're enough.
And every one of these movies, all of these ten thousand fucking movies you make a year, they're lucky to have you.
They're lucky to have you. They are they're lucky to have you.
I will tell them you said so.
My thanks to actor Eric Roberts.
This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City. We're produced by Kathleen Brusso, Zach MacNeice, and Victoria de Martin. Our engineer is Isaac Kaplin Woolner. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing.
Is brought to you by iHeart Radio.