Q 6

PLAYBOY: As an actor, who's your competition? Do you think you're up there with guys like Robert De Niro?

James Woods: From a business point of view, I've lost parts to John Hurt and Treat Williams and others. I would like to hear my name and De Niro's mentioned in the same sentence more often than not. Whether, in fact, that becomes true will depend on the future. But if I don't end up deserving that honor in the eyes of the world, tough shit for the eyes of the world, because that's where I think I belong.

Q 7

PLAYBOY: A lot of people thought you'd get an Oscar for your performance in The Onion Field, but you weren't even nominated. Why not, do you suppose?

James Woods: I don't seem to get awards. The year before The Onion Field, I was in Holocaust. Everyone said I would get an Emmy for that. There were 16 Emmy nominations for Holocaust. All the principals--except me. But the day I didn't get nominated for Onion Field was also the day I really fell in love with Katherine Greko, who later became my wife--so it didn't matter. Who gives a fuck about the Academy Award?

I mean, who's in the Academy anyway? The Joey Bishops of this world. The Academy is not made up of people who go to see The Onion Field. It's made up of people who watch The Dinah Shore Show. It would have pissed me off if Coppola and those guys were making the decision. But if the Swifty Lazars or whoever else is a member of the Academy doesn't think I deserve an award, well, I think it's something like a tone-deaf schmuck's telling Jascha Heifetz, "You know, I don't really like your music too much."

Q 8

PLAYBOY: But deep down, wouldn't you really like to win an Oscar?

James Woods: : Sure. Of course I want it. Do you know what it does for your salary when you win an Academy Award? It quadruples it. And I want them to pay me a lot of money. I want to bleed them where they live.

Q 9

PLAYBOY: And what would you do with really big money once you were making it?

James Woods: I don't know; I don't have that much need for money. With the money I made from my last picture, I bought my mother a condominium. If I got too much more, I'd probably just buy a lot of drugs and stop doing interviews and just settle down and destroy myself. The point is this: Why should I let the producers of this world drive around in a Rolls-Royce, and not me?

Q 10

PLAYBOY: What makes you merit that Rolls so much more than they?

James Woods: It's not me that counts. What's important is what the artist contributes to the film. Me, I can stand on a street corner and entertain and people will throw coins. Producers can make deals. Period. Anybody can do what they do. But not everybody can create a vision of humanity, in an offbeat way, that will enlighten people's souls. An actor, at his best, does that.

Q 11

PLAYBOY: When you were a kid growing up in Rhode Island, did you think you were good-looking?

James Woods: No. What was considered good-looking in those days were all those fucking little walking surfboards and Barbie dolls. By those standards, I felt hideously ugly. It didn't threaten me, though. I thought. Well, I'm real intelligent. I have wit. I have some standards I believe in. I never said, "I'm not good-looking. Therefore, I am a loser." Now I must say, in all honesty, I did envy the guys who looked more like the ideal. I thought, Boy, those guys have it great. Those guys never have a problem. If they have a pimple, it's always under their arm or somewhere like that.

Q 12

PLAYBOY: So how did you become an actor? In those days, only guys who looked like Tab Hunter thought of becoming actors.

James Woods: Becoming an actor was the one fantasy I never had as a kid. Basically, I wondered if someday I was going to go off and become a senior vice-president at Union Carbide and have an extra car in the garage. And I did go that route for a while. I went to MIT on full scholarship. My father, who died when I was 12, had always wanted me to go to MIT. He'd wanted to go there himself. But he couldn't--so it was his dream for me to go. My dad was in the Service. He had a rough life. He wanted something better for me.