Intern Ben Conniff salutes Roy Scheider with a virtual reprint of this classic Playboy Interview:
Roy Scheider, the highly acclaimed actor of screen and stage, died last Sunday at the age of 75. Scheider is probably best known as everyman police chief Martin Brody of Jaws. But we caught up with him for the Playboy Interview five years later, after he starred in Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz. Scheider played Joe Gideon, an “obsessed, possessed, self-absorbed, self-destructive, extravagantly gifted, manically libidinous, workaholic director” who bore eerie similarities to Fosse himself. Scheider gave us the lowdown on his roles and his lifestyle.
Playboy: The film is at least semi-autobiographical for Fosse. Was it that way for you, too?
Scheider: Yes, sure. This movie was, in a way, almost like a couch session for Bobby, and through the device of Joe Gideon, both of us pumped a lot of our anxieties and frustrations into the character.
Playboy: So, while making Jazz, you and Fosse discovered a great deal of common ground.
Scheider: Bobby’s often said one of the reasons he likes working with me is that he thinks I’m hungry. Every job, I’ve got to prove myself all over again. And he feels the same way. Whether it’s Pippin or Sweet Charity or Cabaret—every time out of the chute, they’re out to get you, so you’ve got to be better than you’ve ever been. You can’t be just as good. Bobby talked a lot about “flop sweat,” the fear of falling on your face in front of an audience, or simply not being able to get it up when you need it. That’s an anxiety every human being has felt.
Playboy: Gideon is also a compulsive and sometimes self-destructive womanizer. Is that another “common ground” between you and Fosse?Scheider: I’ve been married for 18 years to a woman who is my lover, my best friend, my advisor, my confidante…when something happens to me, it’s almost as though it isn’t real until I’ve shared it with Cynthia. But still…It’s sort of an unsaid understanding when I’m away on location. I don’t spend every night in my room playing with myself…It is a peculiarly male problem to want to copulate with almost anything that moves. But, of course, women have the same promiscuous desires as men have and current literature informs us that women lead at least as rich a fantasy life as men do. So, in that sense, they suffer more than men by society’s rules because of the double standard. A guy can go out and fuck himself to death, and he’s a hero. A girl does it, and she’s a nymphomaniac. You figure it out.
Playboy: Immediately after Jazz, you did Harold Pinter’s new play, Betrayal, on Broadway…Returning to live theater after a nine-year Hollywood sabbatical must have been a bit of a culture shock. Was doing a play harder or easier than you remembered?
Scheider: It was a hard as I remembered. And as frightening. It’s what Fosse talks about in the first line of Jazz—being “on the wire.” It’s that danger. The same danger a stunt man enjoys or a writer or an athlete: putting your ass on the line and wanting to risk it all for something that has a huge return, or no return. Every night I made my entrance on that play, my heart was pounding, my palms were sweating and I thought I was going to faint.
Playboy: Do you have some method or system for handling those fears?
Scheider: I begin by asking myself what I’m afraid of. And, of course, what I’m really afraid of is forgetting my lines and making an ass of myself. But what I do is turn that fear a round. I say no, that’s not what I’m really afraid of. What I’m really feeling, I tell myself, is a fear of how good I’m going to be. I shift that energy around and make it positive, get it working for me. I tell myself, Tonight, Roy, you’re going to be so fucking good, it’ll scare you. And it’ll scare them.
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Great guy. Great actor. Never got typecast. Roy was also a fitness nut. 'All That Jazz' was a powerful film that stands over time, in part because it was so timely. Scheider should have won Best Actor for the part. Chorus Line was hot; Broadway had several of its biggest hits running; Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's book, On Death and Dying was a best seller; Jessica Lange as the Angel of Death; Anne Reinking's fabulous legs were all over this movie; everyone was dancing, even small towns had dance troupes that toured around their states, and so on.
One of his better (and most underrated) films was The Seven-Ups (1973).