Alfred Molina Breaks Down His Career, from 'Boogie Nights' to 'Spider-Man'

The first eight minutes, or whatever it is,

of that sequence at the beginning of the film

that sets up the whole story,

so they used that for all the trailers.

So I'm getting phone calls from friends of mine,

kind of going: [ bleep] hell, Fred,

you're all over the [ bleep] trailer.

Are you playing a starring part?

I said, If you could go to the bathroom

after the credits, you're gonna miss me.

[pensive music]

Hello, I'm Alfred Molina.

And this is the timeline of my career.

[dramatic music]

The family legend goes that I was about nine years old

when I said I want to be an actor.

And I can't imagine that at the age of nine

I actually knew what the heck I was talking about.

I had a teacher, Martin Corbett. He had been an actor.

And he was a huge influence

and a bit of a father figure as well.

And he was also the first person who took me seriously

when I said I wanted to be an actor.

And I remember him saying quite clearly:

I'll do everything I can to help you.

But the minute you drop the ball,

I'm washing my hands of you.

And I can remember at the time feeling rather shocked

by the kind of the abruptness of that.

But in fact, he did me a huge favor,

because it really made me focus on it.

And he gave me books to read.

He gave a whole list of plays to read.

And he took a real interest.

Many, many years later when I did my first play on Broadway,

he came over to see it.

He happened to be there the same night

that a friend of mine had come over to see the play also.

And my friend Andy said to Martin:

So Martin, when Alfred was at the school,

was he a good actor?

And Martin said, No, no, no. He was a terrible actor.

But he was a marvelous show-off

and very enthusiastic [laughs].

No time to argue. Throw me the idol.

I throw you the whip.

Give me the whip!

Adios, senor.

When I first got the call

to come and meet Steven Spielberg and Frank Marshall

in London for a casting session for Raiders,

I was on tour with a production of Oklahoma!

I dashed back to London to do the interview.

You can imagine, I mean,

Steven Spielberg was already a huge, big-star director.

I'd be working with Harrison Ford,

who was also a big star by that time.

And I went in there very, very nervous, very excited.

We kind of got on well.

He was describing the part and saying,

look, you know, it's not a huge part,

but you're right in the beginning of the movie.

And it sets up the whole thing.

And he just made it sound like a great gig,

which of course it was.

And he then said, So this character's kinda like,

you know, Latin American.

How do you feel about that?

And I said, Oh, that's good.

And, you know, my dad's Spanish.

I was trying to make him feel like I was the only person

who could play this part.

Then it was like, Oh, well,

thanks for coming in, handshakes.

And as I was leaving, Steven just said,

Oh, Alfred, by the way,

you don't have a thing about spiders, do you?

And I imagined he meant like those little,

we call them daddy long-legs in England,

those little spindly spiders

that come up through the drains in the summertime.

So I just kind of went: Ah, no.

I didn't think for a minute he meant great big tarantulas.

[suspenseful music]

The first day of filming,

my very first day in front of a camera on a movie,

you can imagine, that suddenly this guy turns up

with this Perspex suitcase

with all these little tufts of straw

in these little compartments.

And underneath each tuft of straw was a tarantula.

They started putting them on me,

and I'm thinking, What the...

And Steven's saying, Look scared, Alfred. Look scared.

And I'm kinda going, Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm scared.

But they weren't moving.

So Steven said, No, they're not moving. They look fake.

We've gotta get them to move.

And the wrangler, the guy who was looking after this,

said, Well, they're all males.

You've gotta put a female in there

and they'll start to move.

So he did that.

And then suddenly, I mean, I don't know how many there were,

20 of them, they went bananas.

And they were running all over my chest and my back,

up the back of my head.

And at one point, one of them

even kind of got like near my mouth like this.

And, ugh, this was like my first day.

[Alfred coughs]

Poison is still fresh. Three days.

They're following us.

The week in Hawaii was like my last chunk on the film.

And towards the end of that week,

Steven and Harrison and I, we ended up having lunch.

And at one point I can remember Steven saying,

Oh, I don't know what we've got here.

You know, there wasn't that feeling of:

I think we've got a real winner here.

He really was genuinely thinking, who knows?

And so there was a sense of:

Well, yeah, it could be this, it could be that.

But I learned very quickly

that the level of fun you have on a movie

isn't always commensurate with the level of success.

And I came away from that experience

having the time of my life on that film.

Not just creatively and working with wonderful people,

but also practically.

I mean, my daughter was about to be born.

We were broke.

This movie kind of paid me like a big chunk of money,

certainly in my terms.

And it meant we could have our daughter

in a modicum of comfort and security.

So that movie saved my ass.

♪ Jesse's girl ♪

♪ Just be with me ♪

♪ Where can I find a woman like that ♪

John Lyons, who was one of the producers on the film,

he called me and said, Look, you know,

we've got a bit of a situation.

We are wondering if you might help us out.

And I said, Sure, I'm not working.

I'd be happy to do it.

And he said, I'll get you in touch with he director

and he can explain.

Paul Thomas Anderson said,

I said, So what's the character?

And he said, He's a coked up drug dealer

on a shotgun rampage.

Now, who's gonna say no to that?

Come on, you punk-face.

[gun firing]

P.T. Anderson wanted that scene

to be full of nervous tension.

And the way he created it was that he had the young actor,

who was playing like my kid, letting off these firecrackers.

And they were full-bore. They were very loud.

[firecracker exploding]

And he told that young actor:

Just like them whenever you want.

Don't worry about sound or continuity.

Just do it whenever you want.

'Cause he wanted John C. Reilly and Tom and Mark

to genuinely feel that they didn't know when it was coming.

[firecracker exploding]

But it would've meant

I would be kind of reacting to them as well.

So he came up with this brilliant idea.

I had earplugs, so all I heard was a kind of very dull,

sort of muffled [mimics gunshot].

But I also had the dialogue coming into my ear,

so I could hear the dialogue.

So I was able to just wander through this noise

without reacting to it at all.

And then the three of them on the sofa,

genuinely kind of getting freaked out,

'cause it was [bleep] loud.

[firecracker exploding]

If you want it- Oh, don't worry about him.

Yeah, the one line that I improvised that, you know,

stayed in the movie; the young actor, he lit one of them.

It went really loud. [firecracker exploding]

And I just turned around and went: That's Cosmo.

He's Chinese.

I think I said it because I actually forgot the line

that I was supposed to say, but they kept it.

So I was rather proud of that.

Bells are not intended as entertainment, madam.

They are a solemn call to worship for-

Mademoiselle. I beg your pardon?

Mademoiselle. I've never been married.

But feel free to call me Vianne.

We're always keeping things under a lid somehow, you know?

Otherwise, they would be chaos, you know?

So I think that feeling is very human.

And then if you add to that a character

who is socially, morally repressed,

dealing with a very negative situation,

his wife has just left him,

there's tension in his life,

and somehow it boils over

and has to come out somewhere.

And it comes out

in this almost kind of quasiracist attitude

towards Juliette Binoche's character.

'Cause she represents freedom.

She represents sensuality and joy of life,

which he has denied himself.

There was just a feeling of what would it be like

to just say no all the time to yourself.

The London fast, Madame Rivet.

Are you not supposed to eat something?

How would that make you feel?

I just kept thinking about that.

And then of course, you know,

the big scene at the end when he finally explodes.

[dramatic music]

[chocolates spilling]

Lasse Hallstrom, our director, very wisely realized

that we're gonna do a few takes of this

'cause we want to recover it.

You're gonna be eating a lot of chocolate.

So I'm gonna shoot this on the last day,

'cause there's a chance you may not feel very well [laughs].

And he was right.

Eating that amount of chocolate,

I woke up the next morning with a hangover

'cause of all the sugar.

As you know, the sugar in alcohol

is what gives you the hangover.

So I felt like I'd been like on the binge all night long.

But at the end of the day, I asked the prop master,

I said, How much chocolate did we eat?

And he said, You ate about four pounds.

I couldn't believe it, you know?

But it was delicious [laughs].

[Salma] I have something important to discuss with you.

I don't have time to chat with schoolgirls.

I'm not a schoolgirl, panzon.

Salma Hayek, who I'd only met once before,

when she first arrived in Hollywood,

we did a reading.

And I happened to sit next to her,

and she saw my name on the cards, you know, Molina.

So she thought, Oh, well maybe he speaks a bit of Spanish.

And we got on great.

A few years later she says to me, I want to do this movie.

It's about Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.

Here's the script.

I'd love you to play Diego.

And then she said, But this isn't the finished version.

Over the next year, Salma was working on the script,

trying to raise money and so on.

And she very, very nicely and very loyally, really,

kept us all in touch.

Here's the latest development.

Here's where we are now.

I hope you're still in with us.

And I kept writing back saying,

Yeah, I'm there, I'm there.

And she had her dream cast of who she wanted in the movie.

She wanted me and she wanted Geoffrey Rush

and she wanted Roger Rees and she wanted Saffron Burrows.

But then when Harvey Weinstein got involved,

he wanted bigger names.

And she dug her heels in and said, No, no.

These are the people I want. This is my movie.

In order to stay loyal to us all,

she ended up having to sign some kind of deal

where she had to make all these movies

for the Weinstein Company.

The loyalty she showed to us all was really remarkable.

And so, you know, I won't hear a bad word about her.

And in fact, one of the big glossy magazines,

they did a big cover story on her

when the movie was about to be released.

And they interviewed, you know,

all the actors that were involved in it.

And I said that Salma was in a sense

a victim of her own beauty.

Because if she was white and male,

given what she's done in the industry,

she'd be bigger than Harvey Weinstein.

That's what I said.

And they used that as a quote.

And the next time Harvey Weinstein saw me,

he blanked me like I had cancer.

I mean, I couldn't believe it.

So, you know, I pissed him off.

I wear that as a badge of honor.

But she was incredible.

She was loyal to the nth degree.

And not just to me, to everybody,

everybody involved in the movie.

[scoffs] What will people say about such a pair?

They'll have never seen a better match.

I read every book I could find about him, about his work.

I went out and looked at every piece of art

that was available.

I went to look at the murals.

I tried to absorb as much as I could about him.

I even read the book that he wrote, his own autobiography,

which is very much a fable

in the sense that not a lot of it is accurate.

He bullshitted about himself a lot.

And so you had to take it with a pinch of salt.

He was clearly a man of great appetites:

not just food, you know, but sexual appetite.

He was very knowledgeable about art.

He was a consumer artist in that sense.

He knew his history.

He knew his place in the world of art.

He understood his responsibility.

But I wanted to look like him as well.

When Julie Taymor met me, she said,

How do you feel about putting on weight?

And I said, Oh, I'm fine with it. I can do it.

You know, and I checked with my doctor,

and I found out how to do it properly

without kind of doing yourself too much damage.

And my doctor had said, If you want to bulk up

for the movie, do it with carbs, not protein,

'cause it'll be easier to lose.

Pasta and rice. I'm eating loads of risotto.

And so I'm in this restaurant,

I treated myself to this gorgeous bowl of pasta.

And I had it. It was delicious.

The waiter comes and asks me if I wanted some dessert.

And I said, No, I'll have another bowl of the pasta.

And he kind of looked at me a little askance,

and then he kind of went away.

And then he came back with the second bowl of pasta.

And as he put it down, he said,

There you are, Mr. Molina.

Preparing for a role? [laughs]

But it was fun putting it on.

Took me 10 years to lose it, but nevermind.

[dramatic music]

Ladies and gentlemen,

fasten your seat belts.

It was a big surprise to me,

because it's not the kind of movie

that I imagined myself to be qualified for.

You know, you always think of these big action films

as being kind of certain, you know,

actors who are known to be, you know,

kind of physical types.

And I've definitely never been that.

The story goes that Sam Raimi's wife

happened to say to him:

There's this actor in 'Frida.'

He looks interesting.

And Sam being a smart man, listened to his wife,

as all smart men do, and he called me in.

And we had a great meeting.

And I kept saying, Look, I'm up for it.

But I gotta be honest with you,

I've never done anything like this before.

And I've certainly never worked on a film

with all this technology.

You know, I've never done much green screen

or anything like that.

But what swung it was we did a screen test

where they gave me an approximation of the costume,

the big leather thing with the big trench coat.

You know, I'm doing all the usual things

that you do at screen test, you know,

giving them different angles.

And then Avi Arad, who at the time was head of Marvel,

takes off his sunglasses and goes, Put these on.

And so I put the sunglasses on,

and the whole room just sort of went,

oh, this could be the image.

And I think that's what swung it.

I will not die a monster.

[dramatic music]

[Otto screams]

The beautiful thing about a lot of the Marvel villains,

and in fact, a lot of the Marvel heroes,

is that they all become so reluctantly.

Otto Octavius has this terrible tragedy in his life

which changes things.

And so they become these monsters, these villains,

almost against their will.

And what that does, it gives those characters

a real level of humanity.

It gives them kind of moral dilemmas to deal with.

And there's always a moment

when they're struggling with that dilemma.

Should I carry on doing this? Should I pull back?

Am I being a bad person?

And these

monstrous thing should be at the bottom of the river.

And that was all in the script.

And Sam wanted to develop that.

It gave the character a kind of depth

and something that the audience can hang onto,

because it's no longer a two-dimensional character.

He's not just the bad guy.

He's actually the bad guy with a kind of emotional life.

And that I think makes them just so much more interesting.

[George sobbing]

People would ask me at the time, you know:

What was it like doing a gay love story?

I said, Well, no, it's a love story.

It's very human. Just happens to be two guys.

But there's nothing that they're going through

that doesn't happen to anybody

in any kind of relationship that's close.

Losing the job, looking for health insurance.

We need a breather.

Yeah, believe me,

moving out of here is the last thing we want to do.

Loss, bereavement, financial pressure,

the pain of separation,

all of those things;

everybody in any kind of relationship

could very easily go through the same thing.

Goodnight, Georgie.

[soft piano music]

At the time, my late wife

was going into the throes of her Alzheimer's.

And so there was a lot of,

kind of a lot of pain involved in that period.

And like a lot of actors,

part of you wants to kinda use it.

And so I kind of leant into that a little bit, you know.

And I didn't feel guilty about it,

'cause my late wife was an actor.

And I think she would've approved.

And also, John had had some experience of loss.

And so we knew what we were talking about

in a sort of very kind of personal way.

[dramatic music]

Hello, Peter.

Hi.

Coming back 17 years later to play the character again,

no one was more surprised than me.

And when they asked me, I said,

You realize I'm quite a bit older.

I've got crow's feet.

I've got a wattle, you know, double chin.

I've got bad knees.

And Jon Watts and Amy Pascal, they said,

No, it's your role.

We want you back, and we can fix all that.

You know, we'll de-age you.

We've got the technology. We can change everything.

So I was delighted, obviously.

I mean, apart from the fact that it's great fun to play,

playing that part, in all honesty,

completely changed my life.

I mean, it did.

Just took everything, not just to a different level,

but also to a whole other group of cinema fans.

There's a fan group that loved all the movies

like Chocolat and Enchanted April and Frida

and all those movies.

And now suddenly the children of those people

are kind of digging Fred Molina 'cause he's playing Doc Oc.

I'm grateful, dear boy. Truly.

Yeah, you're welcome.

How can I help?

The original deal I was signed up for,

with an option for two more movies.

And when he dies in Spider-Man 2,

I kind of went: Well, I guess

that option's no longer relevant.

And it was actually Avi who said,

Oh, no one dies in this universe.

Which was intriguing at the time.

But by the time 17 years had passed,

I'd completely forgotten all about it.

But when it came back, it was a very pleasant shock.

Getting a chance to work with Andrew Garfield and Toby again

and with Tom was a very intriguing idea.

And then when we were told

that there was gonna be this thing,

when these universes all come together,

I thought, this is brilliant.

But also, it was actually quite emotional.

Just, you know, they're in their costumes, I'm in mine;

and we're just like standing around

in between shots, just chatting.

And I remember thinking, This is kind of magical.

You know, this kind of thing doesn't happen to people.

And I think we were all feeling the same thing.

We all kinda like took it in.

And out of that came this very nice little improvised scene,

which is in the movie,

when they're talking about their various aches and pains

and stuff like that.

You okay? Oh, it's my back.

It's kind of stiff from all the swinging, I guess.

Oh yeah, no, I got a middle back thing too.

Really? Yeah.

And that came out of a real conversation

they were all having about the injuries they'd had

when they were filming their movies.

Those guys work hard: they work hard for those parts.

I wouldn't dream of selling the estate

without Sonya's consent.

Besides, I'm proposing to sell it for Sonya's benefit.

This is insane. It's absurd.

Two things were the main attraction.

One was working with a new director,

or a director that was new to me, certainly.

And this idea of this adaptation,

which was both quite radical,

and at the same time,

very, very true to the original play.

But this is a completely new take on it.

It felt like a new play.

And that was very exciting, you know.

And I think the great thing about these classic plays,

the ones that are really good and have earned that status,

is that they stand up to scrutiny.

And then of course when I found out the cast,

this wonderful, wonderful cast of actors:

Steve Carell as Vanya is the most sensational thing.

And I know a lot of people in the business

know what a wonderful actor he is.

I think in the public sphere,

people may imagine him as this wonderful comedy actor,

but he's got depth and he's got passion

and he's got emotion.

His performance is absolutely stunning.

And maybe I'm being naive.

Maybe I'm thinking of 13th century feudal law or something.

But it was my understanding that the estate

passed from my sister to Sonya.

We worked on the backstory

of these characters at great length.

Why does this happen?

Why is he doing that? Why is he here?

And all the clues are in the script.

At one point Alexander says, I loved success.

I loved being famous.

And now I'm stuck in this crypt

surrounded by stupid people making worthless conversations.

His world has been completely taken away.

And he describes his downfall

as being suddenly out of the blue.

And we were kind of thinking,

What kind of circumstance, in our modern sense,

would create that?

And we thought, Well, you know,

a high-flying academic maybe got canceled.

And the fact that his wife is younger than him,

maybe she was a student of his.

And the notion that Vanya at one point

really looked up to my character,

thought he was a genius, loved his work,

loved his books, worked hard to support him,

now starts to realize what a waste of time.

And that has a huge impact on how you play each scene.

That's like the exciting part of the process.

And it's constantly changing. It's constantly alive.

When I was very, very young, my dad got me a job

as a waiter in the restaurant where he was working.

And if I say so myself, I was a good waiter,

to the point where the management offered me the chance

to do a two-week management training course.

And I turned it down because I've got an acting job.

So my father, my father says,

Well, this acting job, how much are they paying you?

I said, Well, I'm getting union.

You know, unions get 15 pounds a week.

15.

He said, How much are you making here?

About 30, 35.

Wait a minute, wait a minute.

You are making 30, 35 year,

then you go to do making 15.

I said yeah.

And he looked at me,

and he had that look on his face

that you reserve for the mad and the lost.

He just like stared at me like he didn't recognize me.

And the only thing I could say to him was:

This is what I love, Dad.

And he never quite got it.

I did disappoint my dad.

Yeah.

I think if my dad had lived a little longer,

I think he hopefully would've realized

that I hadn't wasted my time.

Oof.

Yeah.

My father and I never really talked about my work.

He wasn't kind of phoning me up

and saying things like, so what are you up to?

What's going on?

Never had that kind of relationship.

When he passed away, I went to Spain for the funeral.

And I was with his widow, my stepmom.

And she drags out this suitcase,

and it's full of like clippings and photos

and bits from magazines and letters from people

that wrote to him saying, oh,

I just saw Alfredo in this thing.

And he kept all this stuff,

but he never talked about it.

And my stepmom said, Do you want any of this?

And I couldn't handle it. I said no.

I've always tried with my kids,

my daughter and my stepsons,

and now I have a stepdaughter now with my wife.

All you can do is just tell them how brilliant they are.

That's all you need to do.

[gentle music fades]