INTERVIEW WITH JOE MANTEGNA:

RGP: Hello, Joe. Thank you for giving me some time here. I was wondering if you could just say a few words about what you are doing now and where your career is going.

JM: Well, career wise I’ve just finished two films this summer. I did one in Chicago called "Uncle Nino", a family type of picture. One of my daughters makes her debut as a film actress playing my daughter which was a great experience and in my hometown. We went out to Italy where I shot a film in Rome and Florence which is about a Renaissance painter. So there were two different extremes this summer in terms of films. Then I just finished a film. I just got back from North Carolina and Connecticut doing a film called "Stateside" with Val Kilmer. It is a coming of age film about a young man who plays my son. Jonathan Tucker and Rachel Lee Cook are in it. It’s a good drama, coming of age kind of film. So anyway, this is what I’ve done currently. For the last thirty years in my career I never know what I’m doing next. I’m a character actor so I’ve jumped around to all kinds of things.

RGP: How was it to play Dean Martin?

JM: Oh, it was great. It was a dream. Dean Martin is one of my heroes. It was demanding. Whenever you’re going to play a real person, you run the risk of…well, everybody in the world kind of has an image of what that person is and who he should be and so you really have to do your homework. But I felt good about it and it was a very well written script.

RGP: I have a question that I’d like to ask you. I often tell my patients a little story about when I had to in medical school see my first patient alone and I, of course, thought that as soon as I walked in there they would know that I didn’t know what the heck I was doing and I spent about ten minutes outside the room trying to figure out how to approach this person. What I ended up doing was just making believe that I was the one of the Attending physicians that I had respected and kind of adopted their mannerisms and modeled myself after that and strode on in and that made a big difference because from that time on that’s when I kind of considered myself to be a physician. I tell people that story who have chronic diseases trying to get them to use modeling and acting in a way. If you adopt a certain persona for long enough you tend to actually feel it and I am just wondering if you agree with that or if you could give a novice, a non-actor, any pointers on how to approach a role. I mean, a little insight on how you approach a role.

JM: Well, I think there is a lot of truth to that. I’ve been trying to do that as a golfer all my life. I go out there thinking I am Arnold Palmer and I know how to do this. But, you know, there is some degree of that. I mean, I don’t work with a system as an actor in the sense of method as much as it’s a compilation of everything I’ve done and learned all my life. All I would say is that I tend to lean more towards…in a way it’s kind of what you’re talking about of creating my characters from the outside in as opposed to go in and kind of little by little add all the little pieces and attributes and increments and visuals that create who I’m trying to be. So whether it’s the look of the person, the costuming that they wear, the clothes they wear, the mannerisms they have, the accent they might have, all of that, and those are externals but they help and it helps then give you a clue as to maybe then what’s going on beyond that. Then, of course, you’re using the material like a map as to where you go with it so a lot of it is that. It’s almost like you create this, you take all these layers and put it all together and so you create this persona whatever it may be and then hopefully the script has inspired you in some direction to go with it, you know, and then all these little layers help define it for you.

RGP: I’m curious. Years later, are you able to think of a role you did five years ago and adopt that persona again easily or do you have to work at it again if you were going to do that?

JM: Well, I think you do have to work at it a bit but like anything, it depends on how deeply involved you were in it at the time that will have bearing on how easily it is to get back into. It just depends. Obviously, it’s like anything. If it’s a skill you’ve picked up, depending on how well you defined that skill at that time will dictate how well you can recall it later. But sure, you can tap into that. I think that’s what looping is about in a movie. In other words, when you go in and you do extra dialogue on a film that you’ve completed maybe six to nine months earlier you’ve got to go back in and go into the recording studio and look at it, add lines and substitute lines, and in a way you kind of jump back into the mind set into that character so actors, at least some actors, have to kind of do that on a continuous basis.

RGP: Your oldest daughter has autism, is that correct?

JM: That’s correct.

RGP: What would you say that you’ve learned from your experiences as a parent?

JM: Well, you know, you learn patience certainly. You learn that not all things fall into a certain kind of pattern that can be predictable and that can be understandable and that’s going to be easy, you know. So you learn to accommodate. You learn to be patient. You learn to improvise. You learn a lot of things. I mean, it’s the life lessons that I suppose you learn that nobody gets a free ride and that you do the best you can with the means that you can and try to open yourself to as much knowledge and all that that you can. You know, obviously you can’t help but learn from being in a situation like that.

RGP: What was available to you thirteen years ago to learn what you were going to deal with?

JM: Not as much as there is today, that’s for sure. I mean, there has been a lot more attention pm it and I think a lot of it obviously is from these…ironically, this week "60 Minutes" has been doing this whole thing and ABC has been doing this whole thing on autism and the fact that 1 out of every 500 births they feel has some degree of this.

RGP: That’s a lot.

JM: That’s a hell of a lot. Thirteen years ago they were talking more like 1 in 1000. There’s even this belief that there’s something going on. You know, why is this happening? There seems to be a greater onslaught of it that seems to be happening. So I don’t know. But all I can say is the more attention obviously that is on it the more research will be done and the more hopefully knowledge will be gleaned and benefits will be made.

RGP: Did you see the film "Mercury Rising"? Are you familiar with that at all?

JM: No.

RGP: Okay, it was about eight years ago. It was a film that was an espionage film actually, but one of the main characters was a child with autism whose parents were killed at the beginning of the film and this child had a special ability to decode or was interested in decoding things. The film was really an espionage film but in watching the film obviously this child with autism was a supporting character that was integrated into the film and you learned a lot about autism. I think that’s what we’re shooting for in our books to begin with and hopefully in our screen plays, is to write a book, write a story, that is independent of MS (the first disease we’re looking at is MS) but independent of the disease but have supporting characters with the disease and through their behavior you have to be able to teach unique solutions to common problems. One of the things we have to do in order to do that is get the character right and I wanted to know if you were…and to do that we have solicited help from patients themselves to write in what life is like for them and to make that available to actors and writers and journalists and that’s part of the project that is in progress. As an actor, if you were going to jump into a role where you had a chronic illness or associated in that role with a chronic illness, do you think it would be useful to get feedback from people directly as to what life was like for them?

JM: Oh, yeah. I mean, absolutely. I think that is what ultimately an actor does anyway. I mean, you basically research the source material as much as you can obviously. When I played Dean Martin, he was dead when we made the movie but there would have been nothing better than to spend a week with Dean Martin if I could have. But in lieu of that, I spent time with his friends, his relatives, people like that who could give me as much information about him as possible and then, of course, I would read things and listen to things and do all that, whether it’s print or film or video or records or music or whatever it was. So it’s the same thing as what you’re talking about. You know, you want to research it as close to the resource material as you can, you know, where you’re going to be drawing it from.

RGP: So that might be useful. I just want to get this feedback from you, but we’re trying also with people’s permission when they post a little story to have an e-mail address so that people can enter it so that you could possibly interact with them. They would give prior permission that they will receive e-mails from people inquiring or asking further questions. But I’m glad to hear that you think that would be useful. Obviously, since I’m not an actor I’m not absolutely certain, but it just sounded it would be useful. I think really those are all of the questions that I have. Well, maybe one other question. How have you become involved? I think you have become involved a little bit in autism and in that cause of increasing the amount of research money and things like that. What sorts of things have you done?

JM: Well, I’ve been involved with these groups mainly. I mean, for quite a while now I’ve been involved with this one group out on the east coast called NAAR which is the National Alliance for Autistic Research and have done fundraisers for them and I’m on their advisory board, whatever help my name and interest and time to help in that research is. And then the same thing with a group here on the west coast, Cure Autism Now (CAN) which was profiled on Wednesday night. They did that whole thing on the founder whose son is autistic and they started that and they have done an incredible job. So with those two groups, one on the east coast and one on the west coast, I’m kind of involved in it. What happens is, initially when it became apparent my daughter had this, it’s not something that you went around saying, "Look what happened to us. Guess what’s going on in my house." It’s something we kept pretty close to the vest but once it became apparent, you know, I’m not going to keep our daughter locked up and try to pretend that there was this kid hiding upstairs, that she was different from our other child and from a lot of other children. We’re not like that. You know, we’re look, this is my life, this is how it is. You know, I have a very public life. I cannot help it. I’m in the wrong racket if I didn’t want a public life. So once it came to that realization, it was like look, I’m not going to go out and beat drums about it but on the other hand I’m not hiding it. I’m not trying to make excuses for it or trying to seclude it away and trying to keep it from prying eyes. But what I will do is I’ll acknowledge it and if it can be of any help the fact that I do acknowledge it then maybe other people will benefit from it because I do have somewhat of a public forum being in the line of work I am. And as it turns out that is the case. There are a lot of people who will come to me for advice or whatever. Other parents I will run into in show business who don’t know that we have an autistic child and so they may just get that discovery of a child that they have and they’re lost and they’re where we were fifteen years ago where they’re like, you know, oh my God, and so there’s a certain comfort knowing that there is somebody who is even maybe in the same business or the same line of work, the same peer group they can relate to. So I try to make myself available in that respect and all of us sharing knowledge to do what we can.

RGP: One final question. I do want to ask you one thing. I’m a neurologist and the question is what am I doing talking to actors and writers and another ultimate goal really to me is it’s a patient advocacy issue and I draw the line by saying that entertainment has a tremendous ability to affect attitudes and the way my patients are treated affects their well-being. Have you noticed as far as you and your child are concerned…first of all, do you agree that the way people look at this problem, the way the general public looks at this problem, has an effect on the family’s well-being and on the child’s well-being and have you noticed any kind of change over the last ten years in the way people approach autism?

JM: Yeah, I have. I mean, you know, ten years ago sometimes we would be out and my daughter would be doing things. Like we would go into a grocery store and she might be talking to herself or doing some other things that she would do. You could almost sense that there was…you know, we felt like strangers in a strange land more. You know, we felt like there were a lot of people not quite understanding what was going on and why is this kid doing this. Nowadays, ten years later, maybe because it has had so much more attention, it’s more prevalent, other people relate to it in the sense that it’s like in almost every family you know somebody has a cousin, a nephew, or a brother-in-law, or whatever with this thing that it’s just more in the public eye and because it’s more accepted also within the school system. I mean, it’s in the public school system because the federal government affords to be able to get the kind of resources she needs and this and that. So in the school system there have been more gains in terms of them acknowledging it where ten years ago it was like they tried to lump these kinds of things a little more together where now it gets more specific and they try but still there’s going to be a funding problem. But at least they are aware of it and there is more attention on it. I have definitely felt that there has been more happen in the last ten years.

RGP: Has it made a difference to you?

JM: It’s made a difference somewhat. I mean, I feel in some ways. You know, my daughter is 15 now and so in other words she is not able to benefit from some of the gains that were made in terms of like when people who maybe have a child who is like 2 ½ right now and finding out they’re autistic and have the resources and the things, but you can’t think that way. In other words, it’s like, you know, ten years prior to that it was going to be less and twenty years ago it was less and thirty years ago they put them in an institution. So you can start backtracking all you like and say, as far as that goes, a hundred years from now they’ll probably cure every disease there will be and the medical profession will be out of business. You know what I mean? It will all be done genetically. Who knows? So until then you’ve just got to take it. These are the terms I am dealt. This is the day I’m dealing with. These are the circumstances I am in. So you do the best you can in the time frame you’re in and hopefully try to make it better for those that follow you. That’s what progress is.

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