Jamey Sheridan talks ‘Handsome’ game
Forget “Don’t ask/don’t tell.” The guys in “Handsome Harry” don’t even want to know.
“Those guys weren’t thinking about ‘Don’t ask/don’t tell’,” says actor Jamey Sheridan, who plays the film’s title character. “No one was asking about anything. In the world they lived in, they’d have gotten their head punched in. That’s really what they were concerned about.”
Opening April 16, “Handsome Harry” deals with a group of Navy buddies who harbor a shameful secret from 1973. Thirty years later, Harry gets a phone call from one of the group, who is dying and filled with remorse. Fearful of retribution in the afterlife, the former shipmate makes Harry promise to seek forgiveness. That sends Harry on a journey to track down the other shipmates, while coming to terms with his own role in the incident.
“It was a story that put its hooks into me,” says Sheridan, 58. “The night I read it, two things grabbed me. One was that it had jazz as a source of a love affair and I’ve loved jazz since I was 17. And the other was the psychology was interesting because he’s a person who commits a crime of which he’s also the potential victim. It’s this thing of wanting to be the victim and the perpetrator at the same time.
“I think of him as a guy in blackout. I had the good fortune to do ‘Long Day’s Journey into Night’ with Jason Robards and we would talk about blackouts, where you sort of disappear for two weeks and don’t know where you were until the alcohol wears off and you sober up a little. I would call Harry’s condition an incomplete blackout.”
As Harry, Sheridan got to play individual sequences with several different actors who portrayed the former shipmates: Steve Buscemi, John Savage, Aidan Quinn, Titus Welliver and Campbell Scott (who played his brother in that production of “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” and directed Sheridan in a 2000 film of “Hamlet”).
“Playing that part with all those different guys was like eating pancakes – I loved it,” Sheridan says. “When you play the central figure in a movie, you can lay back. You step out and let the other people do the dance, because you’re going to be around. I need to carry the heaviest load, so I can underplay. I don’t have to come in and generate plot. I’m not doing something flashy and then getting out of the scene. I’m there to add weight to things.”
Sheridan admits that he hasn’t had many roles like Harry “since I left the stage.” Still, he’s worked steadily in the past 20-plus years, moving easily between film and TV, in a profession it took him a while to come to.
“I was a late starter,” says the Pasadena native, who started out as interested in being a modern dancer as in being an actor. “I quit acting a couple times, dabbled in other stuff, traveled around. I ran out of money in Europe and ended up in New York, sleeping on a friend’s floor. I was thinking, well, what the hell am I gonna do? I’m 26, 27. So I started going around to auditions. I thought, if I could get enough work to qualify for unemployment, I’d stick with it. And I did.”
His break came in a short-lived Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons,” opposite Richard Kiley – which ran long enough to earn Sheridan a Tony nomination. The next year, he was acting with Robards, Scott and Colleen Dewhurst in repertory productions of “Long Day’s Journey” and “Ah! Wilderness” at Yale Repertory Theater and on Broadway.
“Here were the people I most admired in my craft and I was working with them,” Sheridan says. “I thought, ‘Oh, OK you’re really doing this now.’ The business comes and goes but I finally believed I was an artist.
“I thought Jason was hilarious. I felt so comfortable with him. He didn’t feel like a theater guy, just like a guy I’d meet traveling. We used to laugh all the time and I finally said, ‘Are we having too much fun?’ And he said, ‘If you don’t laugh, this show will kill you.’”
In recent years, Sheridan has been a regular in a couple of TV series, spending five seasons on “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” and, more recently, the first (and probably only) season of “Trauma.”
“I prefer one script at a time so I know where I’m going and can draw an arc,” he says, drawing a distinction between a film script and a TV series. “It’s a little difficult to play something today when you don’t know where you’re going to be in four hours of TV time. We were doing Episode 5 and I said, ‘Well, now I have to retroactively erase something I did in Episode 1.’
“But it’s good for the family. You’ve gotta pay the bills.”
