The Paul Newman performance nobody understood but him: “I don’t know if they’ll be visible”
In Hollywood, there is an adage that many actors swear by when shaping their careers: “One for them, one for me”. Whether or not it breaks down as evenly as this in practice is neither here nor there – the intention behind it counts. In essence, many actors attempt to balance their careers with crowd-pleasing, commercial films and more personal, intimate projects. In these smaller movies, they can usually push their work in new, interesting directions that audiences may not fully comprehend. Paul Newman believed he made one of these movies in 1994, but confessed to being unsure if viewers would ultimately go on the ride with him.
When Newman signed up to star in Robert Benton’s Nobody’s Fool, the movie was a real change of pace for the legendary Hollywood star. For one thing, he’d never worked with Benton – director of Kramer vs Kramer and Billy Bathgate – before, but he’d also never quite made a film with the leisurely, plotless style of Nobody’s Fool.
In truth, it gave Newman pause, but he wound up embracing the process by trying to imbue his character – an underachieving handyman named Sully who is forced to reckon with his past as a neglectful father – with an emotional depth that wasn’t necessarily on the page. “There wasn’t a tremendous amount of plot progression,” Newman admitted to GQ in 1995. “I had to create the progression of where he was emotionally.”
In playing a character who had been happy living his life in a quietly noble manner until his intentional emotional reclusiveness is shattered by meeting the son he abandoned when he was a baby, Newman had a lot to work with. However, Sully wasn’t scripted to have any traditional outbursts that many Hollywood movies would include, and this limited scope for the kind of “acting with a capital A” that some stars may have aimed for with the character. Instead, Sully is a quiet man going through a quiet reckoning.
“His bravery was that he was at that point in his life when he did not want to deny it anymore,” Newman revealed. “He no longer tries to keep his own … accessibility … away from himself.” To the star, Sully finally “accepts his sense of family. And the incredible magnetism of that.”
However, playing such an interior character with so much going on under the surface was something that made Newman nervous – because he wasn’t sure if filmgoers would pick up on what he was trying to convey. “I don’t know whether the audience will get that,” Newman mused. “They may get something else. I don’t know that they’ll get all of the things this film means to me – the secrets between me and the character. They are tiny discoveries. And they’re mine. I don’t know if they’ll be visible.”
Fascinatingly, though Newman seemed to indicate there were emotional parallels between his real life and Sully’s fictional one, the actor wouldn’t fully elaborate on them. GQ’s interviewer began to wonder if Newman had begun reckoning with his own decisions in his waning years, much like Sully, making them closer than any audience would think. A thoughtful Newman responded, “Yeah. Painfully close,” but then shut the topic down completely.
Ultimately, Newman’s worries about the delicate subtleties of his performance being lost on people were unfounded. He received some of the most effusive praise of his late career for Nobody’s Fool and landed a ‘Best Actor’ Academy Award nomination, too. Famed critic Roger Ebert seemed to implicitly understand what Newman was trying to do with Sully, marvelling, “He does what he does with simplicity, grace and a minimum of fuss, and so I wonder if people even realize what a fine actor he is.”
