Bill Irwin Is the O.G. Clown
Seldom does the theatre adequately address the topic of enemas. But Molière’s “The Imaginary Invalid,” which Bill Irwin has adapted and is starring in on Broadway, will serve all your peristaltic needs: Irwin’s hypochondriacal title character encounters a syringe the size of a submachine gun. “Molière pushes the envelope,” Irwin said the other day, on a park bench in Union Square, where he and his wife, Martha, and their Ridgeback mix, Zelda, had just dropped off their compost. “I worry that we might have too many enema references, though.”
Irwin typically skews self-deprecatory in conversation. He first came on most people’s radars through his baggy-pants clowning on Broadway and, later, on “Sesame Street,” as Mr. Noodle, radiating a kind of doomed naïveté. “In clowning, there’s a paradigm,” he said. “Chaplin and Keaton and Harold Lloyd—the young guy who’s going to make it in life, or who’s going to impress his mother or girlfriend.” He went on, “But you get a little older, and you realize, I don’t do that anymore. I’m no use to that genre anymore.” Irwin, who is seventy-six, had on sneakers and a loose blue jacket. As his recent roles suggest, he is better served performing the catalyst or the antagonist. In “The Imaginary Invalid,” his character is trying to marry his daughter off to a doctor against her will. In this summer’s “The Odyssey,” as the Cyclops, he prays to his father, Poseidon, to curse Odysseus and his men after they’ve broken into his cave, blinded him, and, as Irwin put it, “fucked with my cheese.”
When Irwin first met with the film’s director, Christopher Nolan, to discuss playing the Cyclops, he asked if he’d be wearing a mask. “Chris said, ‘Probably.’ He didn’t know yet. He often doesn’t know.” In Nolan’s 2014 film, “Interstellar,” Irwin voiced and did much of the puppetry behind TARS, the robot that resembles an enormous metallic KitKat bar. For “The Odyssey,” Irwin, wearing full-body makeup and prosthetics, shot with a thirty-six-foot-tall puppet in a cave in Greece and in a miniature mockup of the cave in Culver City. “Tom Holland said Chris was the most meticulously prepared shoot-from-the-hip director he’d ever worked with,” he recalled.
Irwin initially told Nolan that he might be too old to play the Cyclops. (“You need a guy who doesn’t need kneepads.”) He had no such anxieties with “The Imaginary Invalid”: Molière, who played the title role himself in 1673, wrote the play while he was in a tubercular decline, creating a part in which he could cough a lot while staying in character. Irwin was not rattled by the fact that Molière died after his fourth performance. Asked how his own health is, Irwin replied, “It is a daily question. But good, I think.” He added, “Martha and I ride Citi Bikes, and I’m a more law-abiding cyclist than I normally would be.”
He was pleased to hear, from his “Imaginary Invalid” co-star Rachel Bloom, the co-creator and star of TV’s “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” that clowning is huge in L.A. these days. “She said that the same young guys who, eighteen months ago, would have used a different label—‘improv’ or something—are now all ‘I’m hard-core clown,’ ” he noted. His years in the trenches have fostered compassion: “I have great sympathy for anyone who has signed on to be Ronald McDonald. He’s the least tuned-in-to-clown-history example of clowning. I learned at the Ringling school that the lower lip is the expressive lip. Like, tonight, when I do the show, I’ll go”—he twisted his lower lip—“because that’s the one that defines the expression. Ronald McDonald’s makeup is all upper lip, and that’s why he’s kind of frozen-looking.”
He talked about losing himself in a role. “When I watch myself, there’s usually more of me than I’d like there to be,” he said. Many of his roles feature an element of absence—from his early work as a silent clown to the strangled emotion he brought to assorted Beckett projects to his Tony-winning turn as George in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” What he holds back is what defines him. When a passerby in the park—a former colleague—called out, “Bill! I saw you!,” Irwin replied, “Hey, man! Did you come? You dog, you.”
Confused, the man asked, “What do you mean?”
“Oh, I’m doing a show.”
“No, I mean, I saw you just now. I haven’t seen you in decades.”
“Well, shit on a stick.” ♦