Prolific Actor and Polish Descendent Liev Schrieber
By Connie Benesch
TORONTO--It's simply impossible to escape the sought-after Jewish actor Liev Schreiber. At 31, the San Francisco-born, New York-raised actor is amazingly ubiquitous. Already, he's appeared in 26 mainstream and independent films, from "Sphere" to "A Walk on the Moon" to "Phantoms."
At present, you can catch him in movie theaters as Mischa, the amateur, love-minded, well-intentioned-but-not-quite-with-it boxer in "Jakob the Liar." The film, which takes place in a Polish ghetto in 1944, also stars Robin Williams, whose Jakob invents fantastical to bring hope to his fellow ghetto dwellers. (Please see JVibe review.)
Meanwhile, you'll next see Schreiber in November on HBO, when he takes on the role of the young Orson Welles in "RKO 281," about the making of "Citizen Kane."
Then, if you visit New York this winter, you'll find the Yale School of Drama grad spouting off "To be or not to be" in "Hamlet" at the celebrated Public Theatre. And "Hamlet" the film comes out in January.
Wait. There's more. Schreiber also appears this winter in Norman Jewison's "The Hurricane." And the actor - who achieved fame as Cotton Weary in "Scream" and "Scream 2" -- re-emerges in "Scream 3" this holiday season. Come early spring, you'll also find him in "Spring Forward."
GenerationJ caught up with the thoughtful, soulful Schreiber at the recent Toronto Film Festival, where he eloquently spoke about an array of subjects, including his feelings about Judaism, Jewish humor, the Holocaust, his Polish-born grandfather, his pseudo Bar Mitzvah, girls, flying, his love of acting, and his female fans.
GenerationJ: How did you get cast in "Jakob the Liar"? Did you campaign to get it?
LS: No. I was doing "Sphere" with Barry Levinson. We were shooting in Sonoma, near where Robin and Marsha Williams live, and they invited us over to their house for dinner. And one of the things we did was watch the Pernell Whitaker-Oscar de la Hoya fight. And I've always been kind of a fight fan. I was rattling on about boxing, and it turned out Marsha was looking for a Jewish boxer for a movie she was doing called "Jakob the Liar." And as Jewish boxers are rather few and far between, I found myself a role.
GenerationJ: Have you done much boxing?
LS: A little bit. Not very well. But then neither did [my character] Mischa.
GenerationJ: Has that ever happened to you before - that you got work because you went to a dinner party?
LS: That was the first time. It was kind of wonderful. I got back to the set of "Sphere" and Barry's saying, "Marsha really liked you." And I was thinking to myself, "That's kind of weird; she's married to Robin Williams." And then they called and said they're doing this movie "Jakob the Liar" and would I come in and read for the director Peter Kassovitz.
GenerationJ: I understand that Lodz - where the cast and crew lived during the shooting of "Jakob the Liar" - is not only the author Jurek Becker's birthplace, but that of your grandfather Alex.
LS: Yes, my grandfather's from Lodz. And there were 35 synagogues before the war in Lodz, and now there's only one. I think all 35 Orthodox Jews in Lodz were in it the evening that we were there. That was kind of shocking.
GenerationJ: Shooting "Jakob the Liar" seems to have brought you face to face with history.
LS: Yeah. I think my generation's relationship to history is, well, historical. One of the phenomenons of my generation is that last week is history and 25 years is ancient history. So, although I'm Jewish and Polish, I didn't ever have a very personal or intimate relationship to the Holocaust or World War II. But getting off the plane or getting out of the car in Piotrkow and walking through the streets and seeing those bullet-riddled buildings and whole neighborhoods that were devastated by bombing and structures that still haven't been rebuilt reminds you that this was just around the corner. I think for me, realizing how recent 40 or 50 years ago was very profound.
GenerationJ: Working on this film also seems to have brought you closer to Judaism.
LS: It was very interesting learning where my family came from and learning about my relationship to Judaism. It never meant much to me before. I'd never felt very close to being Polish or Jewish. And I got off the plane in Poland, and I started to look around and I was like, "I kind of look like these people a little bit." [Laughs] Very strange. I thought, "Aaah..."
GenerationJ: Because you're of Polish descent, it must have been almost surreal for you to shoot in Poland.
LS: I had never been to Poland before, I was completely captivated and focused in
on what these people thought while we were making the movie. It was very odd. I thought it changed by generation. The very young people were very excited that we were making a movie there. And the middle-aged people couldn't have been less interested. It was so strange. We'd be shooting in a stairwell. Robin would be there, there'd be lights everywhere and four or five actors dressed like Nazis would be beating him into a wall or something and a couple would come down with their groceries [with a look] as if, "Excuse me." And we'd stop and let them go through. And then there were the older people who I think had a vivid picture in their mind of these events. And some of them had very compelling reactions to seeing the tanks there again, seeing the guys dressed in SS outfits and seeing all of these people walking around with yellow stars on their coats.
GenerationJ: This film made you really deal with the reality of the Holocaust.
LS: Yeah. Well, I had openly faced it many times. I'd identified with being Jewish. But I had never faced it personally, intimately and emotionally. It's the difference between seeing a dead body and seeing a dead body. I had never taken the Holocaust personally until I went to Poland. And, there I kind of felt the presence of my grandfather. I felt the presence of my uncles and aunts. And, I realized what had happened to them. I don't really yet know how to describe it. I don't really yet know how to talk about what's that like, to feel it. I think it's just a question of having a personal relationship to it, feeling implicated.
GenerationJ: Was it upsetting to do the role at times?
LS: Very. I got bronchial pneumonia. I think my whole body and mind were pretty rundown from being in that situation, being in that place.
GenerationJ: How long were you sick for?
LS: Almost the entire two-and-a-half months we were shooting. I couldn't shake it.
GenerationJ: Did you get better when it was over?
LS: Yeah. I came home, I got better right away.
GenerationJ: So maybe there was a psychosomatic element to your being sick?
LS: Certainly Peter [Kassovitz], the director, thinks there was. I would say that one could make a very good argument for it.
GenerationJ: Tell us more about your grandfather.
LS: He was a real mensch. He was sort of like my father. He sort of raised me. He was this guy who delivered meat to restaurants. He had this very, kind of, difficult, salt-of-the-earth job. At the same time he played the cello and he was a painter. He was a wonderful guy.
GenerationJ: What do you mean he sort of raised you?
LS: Because my mother left my father when I was five, and we moved to New York together. She was around, but my grandfather was also around. He helped us a lot when I was growing up. We didn't have a lot of money, and we were kind of struggling for a while.>
GenerationJ: Did your grandfather impart Jewish values to you?
LS: Yeah, yeah. We would go to his house for the holidays. He would prepare Seders, and he would take me to ball games, and he would buy me clothes. He tried to teach me to play tennis. Not too successfully.>
GenerationJ: How do you view "Jakob the Liar"?
LS: When I first heard about it, I didn't think about it as a Holocaust film. I read the Jurek Becker book first, because I didn't have the script yet. When I read it initially, I thought of it as a character film in the tradition of those Jewish writers who happened to have survived the Holocaust. The quality of the book that I loved was that the humor was distinctly Jewish. Bleak and yet full of that kind of resourceful human spirit. Ö"Jakob the Liar" is about a ghetto and a small community of people with very archetypal characters. There's a professor. There's a fighter [me]. There's a young woman. There's an old man. There's a bubbe. I was sort of surprised when people said that they were shocked that we were combining humor and tragedy, which is a great tradition of Jewish writers, and what the Eastern European Jews, at least in my experience, have brought with them to America. That kind of very, very dark humor is a survivor's mechanism. None of these stories, if they're any good, are about the Holocaust. Writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer and Joshua Sobel also write this way. To me, that's very indicative of Jewish literature, particularly post-Holocaust.
GenerationJ: So the humor in "Jakob the Liar" didn't startle you.
LS: Well, that's the way everything's s been done in my family. And I think in many Jewish families. To me, it is so distinctively Jewish to deal with these things with humor. To deal with the survivor's mentality.
GenerationJ: So your family members made a lot of jokes.
LS: Yeah, yeah. Very imaginative, very creative people. Very resourceful people. I think that's what came from. I think that's what the "Jakob the Liar" author Yurek Becker is expressing.
GenerationJ: Your family escaped before the war?
LS: Some of them, not all of them.
GenerationJ: Were any of them in concentration camps?
LS: Um-hm.
GenerationJ: They survived?
LS: I don't know much about it. My family doesn't really talk about it. My grandfather never really talked about it.
GenerationJ: Robin said that you and he were walking down the street and some
anti-Semitic Pole saw you in costume and harassed you.
LS: Yeah. Some drunk guy went, "Jew, Jew." There's still a lot of anti-Semitism there. It's very complex, though, their anti-Semitism. It's very odd to me, being Jewish.
GenerationJ: Several times in the film your character Mischa took something that Jakob told you and added a twist, changing the truth. Or you made up things that Jakob allegedly said.
LS: Yeah. When we were hauling concrete, I told people, "Of course, he
gets the BBC, he's listening to Winston Churchill all the time, all that stuff." Or when I said, "All of the dance music is really code language for the spies and freedom fighters."
GenerationJ: It was interesting the way you made things up.
LS: Oh, yeah, right. It's wonderful. That kind of very close-knit community dynamics. How gossip works and how rumors get started.
GenerationJ: Tell us about your love life.
LS: I was in a relationship for five years. And it actually also started to fall apart during "Jakob the Liar."
GenerationJ: What happened to her?
LS: I was just away too much. She's still in my life. She's still a very good friend.
GenerationJ: What about now?
LS: What I would give for a nice Jewish girl.
GenerationJ: Tell me about her qualities.
LS: Doesn't matter. Just as long as she's Jewish. I don't know. I don't believe you can control these things. Obviously, there are certain commonalities you share with people.
GenerationJ: There are rumors that you were gay.
LS: Oh, really? That people speculate, there's nothing you can do. I do have a lot of gay friends.
GenerationJ: You like both men and women?
LS: No, no. One of the great misfortunes of my life is how much I love women. It's terrible. I really don't think there is anything better than women. There really isn't.
GenerationJ: Why is it a misfortune?
LS: It's incredibly distracting. It's like you tend to get in these long, heavy, drawn-out, painful relationships.
GenerationJ: You're so well known; how do you meet somebody these days?
LS: Exactly. I don't know the answer to that.
GenerationJ: Any advice to people who want to go into movies?
LS: Be very honest with yourself about why you want to go into show business. I think there's a big difference between going into show business and being an actor, or being a writer, or being a director, or being a dancer, etc. You can't be duplicitous with yourself. You can't say, "What I really want is to explore these themes in my life" when what you really want is celebrity and money. If you want celebrity and money, that's fine. It's a very valid desire. Know what you want and pursue it.
GenerationJ: What did you want when you went into acting? You're well trained. Yale.
LS: Yeah, I love theatre. The first time I did a show in front of an audience, it was the first time I felt connected to people. I felt like it was the first time that people didn't think I was a weirdo. I felt like I was relating to people, and I felt like people were identifying with me. It was in college, a monologue show that I did.
GenerationJ: People thought you were weird before?
LS: No, it's that you're growing up - through adolescence and college, everyone feels a
little bit isolated or alienated from people. And I think that I felt, "They don't get me; I'm different somehow." And I think that all I really wanted was to be like the other kids.
GenerationJ: Did you have a Bar Mitzvah?
LS: No, I wasn't really Bar Mitzvahed. I was a Reform Jew. My mother is sort of an ecumenical person. She's a very spiritual person -- she lives on an ashram in Virginia. But we became friends with some Hassidic Jews, this guy named Aryeh Lasky. And when I was 15, my grandfather and I went out to see them in Brooklyn, and we had kind of a -- not a bar mitzvah -- but a party with me, my grandfather, and there were all these dancing Hassidic guys. We had a ball. It was really fun. This was at the Lubavitcher Rebbe Schnierson's place in Brooklyn.
GenerationJ: How did you meet Aryeh?
LS: I met Aryeh in the street, talking about Judaism. You know, the mitzvah
tank. And he stopped me. I was about seven or eight.
GenerationJ: Do you know any Hebrew?
LS: Very, very little.
GenerationJ: So you didn't have much of a Jewish education?
LS: No, not really.
GenerationJ: You knew you were Jewish.
LS: Yes.
GenerationJ: Anything off-the-wall that you're into? Unusual interests?
LS: I've always had flight dreams since I was a baby. And the first thing that I did when I started to get work and make money was to try and fulfill my flight dreams. So I sky dive and scuba dive. That's kind of off the wall, I guess, but not really.
GenerationJ:You've certainly played so many different types of characters.
LS: I've had a wonderful career. I've done 26 films, you know. Twenty-six
films, and people don't really know who I am. And I think that's why I've
been able to do 26 films, because they don't know who I am. I like that and
I don't want that to change.>
GenerationJ: So what's your favorite movie you've been in?
LS: "A Walk On The Moon."
GenerationJ: Why?
LS: Because it's about fathers. And I think that's a subject that holds a lot of mystery and emotion and wonder for me. It's also about mothers and daughters and grandmothers.
GenerationJ: So you're back again in "Scream 3." Tell us about that.
LS: What about it? Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim.
GenerationJ: What happens to your character?
LS: I can't tell you that. They'll sue me. They really will. It's a big deal.
GenerationJ: What was it like to play Orson Welles in "RKO 281"?
LS: Daunting. I'm a big Orson Welles fan, and I have a few friends who knew him and worked with him, and boy, I thought they're going to hate meÖ. I play him as best I can. I avoided mimicking him. There are certain things that we share. Classical training. I have a fairly deep voice, and he has a pretty deep voice. He actually took voice lessons to make his voice deeper. He worked with a speech coach to make his voice deeper. Yeah. So I just tried to go with a character who fit all of the pieces of evidence I'd put together from the reading I'd done and the films that I'd seen of his.
GenerationJ: It must have been fascinating.
LS: This guy was one of the most famous men in America by the time he was 19. And where do you go from there? He was a very isolated person, a very lonely person.
GenerationJ: Could you describe your character in "Spring Forward"?
LS: I play a young man who, on the first day of spring, is starting his first day of work for the parks department. He just got out of a correctional facility in Danbury for an armed robbery of a Dunkin' Donuts. And he's trying to get his life back on track. Through his relationship with this older guy, and the progression of the year, and his relationship to nature, things start to change in his life.>
GenerationJ: You're sure popular with GenX ladies. On one of your fan Websites, they flat out encourage "swooning and mooning" over you. One girl went crazy over a photo of you that showed your muscles.
LS: Oh, the muscles thing, I want to see that. [Reads printout provided.]
GenerationJ: You are all over the Web. I did a search for you on Alta Vista and found 1,652 websites.
LS: That's outstanding. I've gotta go on the Web.
GenerationJ: So what do you say to these female fans who are going ga-ga over you and your muscles?
LS: God bless them, every one of them. You know, I have seen some of those websites, and I've been an on-line chat on one of them. I'm probably just saying this because they like me so much, but those girls are smart. And they're all really interesting people. I draw a cool crowd.
Connie Benesch is Entertainment Editor for GenerationJ.com, JVibe.com, JewishCulture.com and JewishFamily.com. She wishes to extend a special thanks to Columbia Pictures for making it possible for her to attend the "Jakob the Liar" press event at the Toronto Film Festival.
Connie Benesch is Entertainment Content Editor for GenerationJ.com, JewishFamily.com, Jvibe.com and JewishCulture.com. She has an extensive background covering entertainment for numerous outlets, including E!Online, TV Guide, Daily Variety, Entertainment Weekly and The Los Angeles Times. In addition to her work for the Jewish websites, Benesch does content consulting, editing and writing for new and about-to-be revamped corporate websites.
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