In August 1979, 18 Chicago artists and actors decided they wanted to stage plays, taking risks with material and experimenting with form. They called themselves Innisfree. They would champion unknown playwrights. They held production meetings. But they couldn’t agree on a play, and they never staged a single production. The group split up, and the few members who decided to try again–Gary Cole, David Alan Novak, Steven Bauer, D.W. Moffett, and Lindsey McGee–called themselves the “Remains.” Their first show was Peter Weiss’s The Tower, staged in the summer of 1980. A year later current codirectors William L. Petersen and Amy Morton joined the company, and a year after that Ted Levine became a member.
“Hey, you’re that white guy.”
Edward Saxon is one of the film’s three producers. What Levine brought to the audition, Saxon says, was “absolute fear. There was a sense of watching the real thing, of the guy who was really trying to keep everything under control. In that audition Ted was Gumb. It got kind of electric.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
When Levine got the part, he began researching serial killers. “There’s so many guys out there. There’s case histories of them,” he says. Levine met with John Douglas of the FBI, who tracks down and prosecutes sex-crime offenders. “I listened to some tapes and read some letters of some of these people. I was looking for consistencies. Something I found very interesting: serial killers are often half-Jewish, which is something I am, too.
“We tried it a couple different ways,” Levine says. “Once a little more raunchy, except Jonathan wanted to use the ‘Goodbye Horses’ music, so it ended up being more gentle. The thing that was going through my mind is his physical being. He’s kind of like an old glitter rocker, like Iggy Pop if he hadn’t become Iggy Pop, or David Bowie hadn’t become David Bowie. Here’s a guy who imagines himself with this kind of feminine power, you know, this spiritual kind of mother power. Mick Jagger, Bowie, all these guys have this androgyny that makes them attractive to men and women. Serial killers all pursue that feminine energy, that female persona. They get both [masculinity and femininity] wrapped into someone, and that’s like perfection, real power, and that’s what Gumb is after.”
“Obviously with someone like Gumb who’s that destructive and that sick, he’s in a lot of pain. There’s a very thin line between homicide and suicide. Someone who’s homicidal is just as likely to take his own life as someone else’s. This is something I found out researching these guys.
He remembers the day of a funeral for an older friend who had killed himself. After the funeral, the family was spread out on the porch, watching a Laurel and Hardy short on television. “It was this very painful, physical kind of comedy, where Ollie’s got his head sticking out of a hole, and Stan’s pulling his neck and tripping over a bucket. We were all laughing and crying; the impulse to laugh and cry sort of comes from the same emotional and physiological trigger. Something really clicked with me. I think it was at that point I realized how you could explore different ranges in acting. I understood something about performance, and what it meant.”
