Tony-winner Robert Sean Leonard returns to Bergen County and Broadway
Tony-winning actor Robert Sean Leonard is experiencing not one, but two homecomings.
The more literal is his return from California – where he played Dr. James Wilson in eight seasons of “House” — to Ridgewood, where he was raised.
“My brother, who’s a cop in Ho-Ho-Kus, called about two years ago to tell me that he heard that this lovely old Victorian house near where we grew up was for sale. So I just called the owners, cold, and asked if they were thinking of moving,” Leonard said, with a brief look of mortification on his face as he recalled his audacity. “They said they weren’t, but I told them that if they ever did want to sell, to give me a call.”
A year ago they did, and last month Leonard, his wife Gabriella and their two daughters, Eleanor, 7, and Claudia, 3, moved in.
In the midst of unpacking boxes, though, Leonard was often absent, because of his other homecoming – his first role on the New York stage since returning from Los Angeles.
He’s appearing in “Prodigal Son,” which was written and is being directed by John Patrick Shanley, the author of “Doubt.” Now in previews, the drama opens Feb. 9 at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s off-Broadway space at the New York City Center.
With a kind of full-circle neatness, Leonard, whose breakout role was a prep-school student in the 1989 film “Dead Poets Society,” portrays a prep-school teacher in the play, which is based on Shanley’s own experience as a working-class Bronx boy attending a New England private school.
“I was told that Shanley was interested in me,” Leonard said. “I read the script and I liked it; it’s a very unique play, very surprising. Kind of like a ‘Twilight Zone’ episode.”
Leonard, who started out as a child actor, is known for his enthusiasm for stage acting, and he’s built an impressive list of Broadway successes.
He made his debut replacing Matthew Broderick in Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” and his subsequent plays have included “Arcadia,” “The Iceman Cometh,” “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and “The Invention of Love,” for which he won his Tony. During a break from “House,” he came to New York to do “Born Yesterday.”
Many of the plays he’s done, on Broadway and elsewhere, are revivals of classics, which, he said, made “Prodigal Son” a different kind of challenge.
“Working with an author who’s breathing is an unusual experience for me,” he said,
At 46, Leonard still has an enormously engaging boy-next-door quality. He’s unstintingly praising of other actors, enthusiastic, good-humored and unassuming — he kept apologizing for being late for our interview at the theater (he hadn’t seen the message moving the start time up a half-hour), and he good-naturedly posed for a photographer right after walking in, without even a glance at a mirror.
In what Leonard describes as an enormously fulfilling stage-acting career, a pivotal interlude was working on “House.”
He’s made no secret that performing in a weekly television series, no matter how good it was, was not the most artistically satisfying work he’s ever done. However, his salary, which reportedly reached $175,000 an episode, has given him financial independence.
“I’ll be grateful for ‘House’ till the day I die,” he said. “But doing TV or film is not what I like best, or what I do best as an actor. I’m better onstage.”
He recalled that 10 years ago, he yearned to be in the Lincoln Center limited-run production of Tom Stoppard’s three-part drama “The Coast of Utopia.” Not only were his close friends Ethan Hawke and Josh Hamilton in it, it was the kind of serious, meaty theater he loves to do.
He debated whether to leave “House” for the production, when actor Sam Waterston advised him to stay put.
Leonard said Waterston told him that in a lifetime of performing, he didn’t achieve financial stability until late, when he had a continuing role in the “Law & Order” TV series.
“He told me that, with 'House,’ I could do that while I was relatively young, and then I could do anything I wanted. It was good advice.”
It’s enabled him to put money away for his daughters’ college educations and buy a nice house in Ridgewood, near his brother, who lives in Midland Park; his sister, a teacher, in Ramsey; and his father, who lives in Waldwick and still substitute-teaches at the age of 84.
It also allows Leonard to anticipate, with great enthusiasm, working at a non-profit theater next year in the title role of Shakespeare’s “Richard II.”
http://www.northjersey.com/arts-and-entertainment/celebrities/he-s-come-home-to-ridgewood-and-to-n-y-stage-1.1502976
JANUARY 31, 2016 LAST UPDATED: SUNDAY, JANUARY 31, 2016, 1:21 AM
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