An interview with Michael Ontkean

By Oliver Webb

Between 1972 and 1974, Ontkean played a leading role in the hit TV show The Rookies and in 1977 landed the role of Ned Braden in George Roy Hill’s Slap Shot. He has since appeared in acclaimed films such as Voices, Making Love, Bye Bye Blues, Postcards from the Edge and The Descendants, as well as a portraying Sheriff Harry S. Truman in Twin Peaks.

Michael Ontkean sat down with Closely Observed Frames to discuss some insights from his illustrious career.

Industry beginnings

As a child, the most significant moment in determining my life probably occurred at age 12. The preceding four years had included three or four dozen Canadian TV and radio shows plus fifty-eight (58) episodes as a chorus and background singer on Cross-Canada Hit Parade – a weekly TV show (1955-1959) in which the top ten most popular USA and Canada songs were performed. Acting and singing jobs were taking way too much time away from playing hockey which was my true love. I decided to completely devote myself to developing my skills on the ice. I quit show biz and turned my back on that entire world.

At the close of a successful hockey season in the spring of 1970, I was scheduled to report to the New York Rangers training camp in the fall. A girlfriend from the University of New Hampshire wanted to swim in the Pacific Ocean. We drove to Los Angeles. Norman Jewison spotted me and arranged a screen test for the movie he was about to make, Fiddler on the Roof. I didn't get that role of a young revolutionary, but a number of people saw the screen test and I started getting offers (after more than a decade of not acting a single note).

When autumn of 1970 rolled around, I was having too much fun to leave California.

Paul Newman in The Left Handed Gun

This was the first performance by any actor that really caught me up. I was 12 and used to go to the cheap inner city movie houses (a double or triple feature for 50 cents). B-movies mostly, and some far below that low bar. These movies were the orphans of the film industry – the studios that made them didn't have any faith in the completed version, so they released them without spending any money for promotion.  

Toronto in the late 1950s was one of the places where Hollywood studios would lump batches of their lesser movies together and drop them into urban markets, a notch above the grindhouse circuit. For me, the experience of seeing them was simply a chance to be lost inside a wide variety of stories unfolding. The various genres were displayed in all their off-the-rack glory. However, on rare occasions there was a gem. Individual performances were never anything I ever paid attention to. Never until The Left Handed Gun. Paul, as Billy the Kid, was captivating in a very direct way. He was genuinely expressive in a way that was immediate and completely believable. Brash, cocky, shy, humorous, fearful, exuberant; he exhibited a range of emotions that were all real to me.  

I had seen dozens and dozens of westerns, but had never seen a cowboy express any impactful remorse in the aftermath of actually killing someone. Paul (with first-time director Arthur Penn) opened, and pulled back, a lot of curtains; giving a young kid growing up without a father the sense of a full person who displayed a variety of responses to life. Someone to literally look up to. And I kept looking, whenever one of his movies would roll into wherever I was living: Montreal, or Toronto, or Vancouver.

There were other actors I appreciated; Marlon Brando and James Dean come to mind, but I didn't connect with them in anything like the same deep way. I just couldn't identify with them. It wasn't until many years later that a possible reason started to come into focus. Paul radiated health; even when playing a troubled or tormented soul. There was never a neurotic undercurrent with Paul.

Whatever the specific story had him contending with, his character would always do battle directly and openly. Whatever inner demons existed in Paul or in his characters, he did not lean on the crutch of a personal neurosis. He was grounded in his manhood. Pauline Kael, in her New Yorker review, called Paul's performance in Slap Shot "a true artistic breakthrough." In her eyes, with this one indelible role, he graduated from "a leading-man movie star to a leading-man character actor."

Paul himself did not see the character of Reggie Dunlop as an opportunity "to stretch." He simply fell immediately in love with the originality of the screenplay and with the truck-tire marks on the body and soul of this very spirited man. A man with wildly negative qualities and boundless appetites. Paul had a palpable zest for life and he figured this irreverent, quirky, subversive script had potential to be a lot of fun.   

He was right. Right on every level. Every possible level one's imagination and willingness could embrace. In fact, he made a point of going on-record countless times in his life saying Slap Shot was "by far the most fun I ever had making a movie." There's no way to begin to describe how much Paul opened up the world for me without giving a bit of the context surrounding our first real life encounter...

Slap Shot

In 1975 I was living in southern Maine, making a couple of dollars above minimum wage, repairing motorcycles. I somehow heard (via what we here in Hawaii, call "the coconut wireless") about a hockey movie being made. I had no agent, no manager. At that time, I was an industry untouchable, having had a very serious dust-up that burned down the bridges of working in any more B-movies and having committed the cardinal sin of walking off a hit TV Series in the era when there were only 3 networks and no cable anywhere. Tryouts for Slap Shot had been going on for a couple of weeks by the time I showed up with my equipment and crashed the gate at the Pickwick rink in Burbank. Future stars hand-picked by Universal Studios, Richard Gere, Harrison Ford, John Travolta, Nick Nolte, Kurt Russell, Tommy Lee Jones, had not survived to varying degrees, the rigorous and essential skating drills. Apparently, it was akin to A Chorus Line on ice.

The director, George Roy Hill, definitely wanted all the actors to be completely convincing as professional hockey players. George wanted a strict documentary feel with an overlay of his savvy cartoon sensibility. Fortunately, there was a genuine pro hockey player in the rink that day, a guy I had played against in Montreal. Before waving me onto the ice he spoke at length to the stunt coordinator running the session – Ned Dowd another pro – who turned out to be the brother of the woman who wrote the script. Ned had introduced his sister Nancy to the sub-culture of minor pro hockey.

Michael in Slap Shot (1977)

And then Newman appeared. I almost forgot how to skate. I had no idea he might be there at Pickwick. Every day a new batch of hopefuls arrived to audition. After a few more weeks of weeding out all the skaters and players who were not convincing enough, there was a core group of about 20 remaining. We stayed intact to workout five days a week for the next month with Ned, who was now Slap Shot's Technical Advisor. This was California. There was another training and casting center for the movie at a rink in New York, and two more groups at arenas in Canada. I was hoping to maybe get hired as an extra.

I got to know Paul by sharing my love for this sport I had been playing all my life. It started with his asking me to show him some hockey moves. Surreal. The man I admired most in the world. Over the next month Paul began encouraging me to read for the plum part of "Ned," his teammate and sidekick. I hadn't acted a single note in two years and wasn't ready to aim that high. We kept on rehearsing hockey moves and he kept encouraging me. I was still blacklisted, but Paul believed I was the best guy for the role.

Michael and Paul Newman in Slap Shot (1977)

After reading for George Roy Hill on multiple occasions and then for various Universal executives, I was rejected every single time. Paul never wavered in his support. Paul is a tenacious giver with a heart of rowdy and unbounded generosity. He finally wore down the director, all the producers, and the studio brass.

Clearly, I owe my childhood hero just about everything.

Paul was too old to be my brother; too young to be my father. However, he definitely became both.

Working with David Lynch & Twin Peaks

David was a carpenter of the soul. He built elaborate sandboxes for the purpose of abundant playing. He understood that actors and actresses are basically tall children – the more playtime, the better. And it's always soulful. With David, it's always some form of home-made circus, some sort of offbeat pagan ritual.

David was an ultra-rare songbird who will continue to be heard and seen and continue to be admired everywhere films are shown anywhere on this, or any other planet.

Years before my first meeting with David, several actors played a significant part leading up to that fortunate event: John Belushi talked me into going to a midnight showing of Eraserhead. We were enhanced with some substance, or some combo ingested earlier that night, so my sense of what was actually on the screen ended up somewhat murky and certainly unreliable.

Elephant Man was the opposite. Mel Brooks was the producer. He had an office at 20th Century Fox right next to Paul Mazursky, where we were in pre-production for Willie & Phil and Mel was in post-production. Mel arranged an afternoon screening for Paul and a few of us working on the two movies at that time. The vast world conjured by David in a small room that afternoon was mesmerizing and profound. It was clear to everyone we were in the cinematic presence of a master. 

Blue Velvet confirmed to both Jeff Bridges and me one evening that David is some kind of ancient alchemist. Out of thin air he creates a palpable, enduring atmosphere. You don't see the strings, you don't see any wires, you don't see the elusive rabbit, or the twisted yellow brick road, until David decides to give you a glimpse.

Praised and embraced universally, Blue Velvet had also done well at the box office. David was primed and perfectly positioned for a follow-up feature film. However, after four long years of close calls the financing was not forthcoming; which remains a prime and puzzling absurdity of this industry. Financing eventually surfaced from a television source, yet David's intention was clearly to make another personal, idiosyncratic feature film. 

The original title was Northwest Passage. I had no desire at all to be in a TV series. I was eager to work with David and figured there was no way on god's green earth that a major American network in 1990 would actually put something this quirky and subversive on the air. This was a chance to do a strange film with the unique man who had created Blue Velvet.  

His hair stood thick, tall, post-modern rockabilly. I happened to be walking tall with the recent birth of my second daughter. Twilight time; late fall. We were indoors in smog-filled LA, but it felt like we were outdoors somewhere in Maine or Oregon. Somehow, we quickly discovered our birthdays were only a couple of days apart in the very same year. David had on a worn, meta-cool fishing jacket and I kept looking around for an open box of tackle and maybe a big bucket filled with river trout. He admired my funky jacket which had been made for me by my friend Mitsuhiro Matsuda. David probably cast me as Harry S. Truman so he could keep his eyes peeled and get some real good chances to steal that jacket.

A miraculous curtain surrounded the entire production of the original Twin Peaks movie. The atmosphere was both mellow and buzzing with electricity. Mischief, mayhem, and mystery were continuously tickled into vibrant Lynchian moments. All was surrounded by humour and giant truckloads of good cheer. I loved every minute of preparing, rehearsing, shooting, and hanging out.

Michael and Kyle MacLachlan in Twin Peaks

The very first day on our location north of Seattle (just David, Kyle, and myself) the Lynch magic is present right away; subtle, easy, and full of fun. David creates the conditions and maintains a wide-open atmosphere for all the essences of the Cooper/Truman relationship to come alive. He does this by being purely and absolutely attentive to whatever is humming in the immediate air. Kyle and I do an off-the-wall riff on the music of Led Zeppelin and Kate Bush; a brotherhood is born – it ain't adults searching for solutions, it's a rave without the drugs. David is constantly ready to incorporate anything and everything into a scene. He's completely akin to Thelonious Monk.

Immediately following that first morning rehearsal, when Cooper and Truman were born and a trio was formed, we stayed right with the musical adventure. We three piled into David's rental car and he proceeded to play a tape of the very recently composed theme music. Pure pleasure. A transcendent out-of-body experience! Angelo's music, in a completely visceral way, captures and communicates David's vision for the movie. That haunting theme wraps everything in a sublime gift basket. At that precise moment, we know we are on our way.

Michael and David Lynch behind the scenes of Twin Peaks

I was born on Canada's pacific west coast; very close to the US border and the specific mountain range region where Twin Peaks is located. Kyle was born in the northwest region of the United States, also very close to the same Twin Peaks mountains. The more time I spent with David, it became abundantly clear he contained and displayed strong elements of both Truman and Cooper. So, I borrowed freely for my character, as did Kyle for his.

David is the only director in 44 years that ever requested I slow down and take more time with something: Hours past midnight, Sheriff Truman is keeping a vigil staring into the daunting abyss of the Black Lodge, hoping, praying to find some sign of his buddy Cooper. Five or six increasingly slow, silent takes come and go. The only sound after each take is David's clear, spooky whisper quietly suggesting taking even more time. In every situation, David always has the uncanny capacity to dwell within his own realm of time. Eternity is not too long for Harry to wait. 

Michael and David

After seeing a screening of the original Twin Peaks movie (and being knocked out) Paul Newman gathered himself, got real quiet, turned and said it was one of the rare times in his life he had experienced a perfect movie. Seeing my childhood hero, my Slap Shot linemate, being so captivated by Maestro David was a high-water mark. Two great directors; two giants with previously different vocabularies speaking with one tongue.

I arrived in the town of 'Twin Peaks' having already known and worked with many superlative directors; Orson Welles, Mike Nichols, Paul Newman, Claude Chabrol, John Cassavetes, Robert Altman, George Roy Hill, Norman Jewison, Jose Ferrer, Paul Mazursky, Bob Fosse.    

So I was right at home.

"The most hauntingly original work ever done for American TV" is how Time Magazine described the original Twin Peaks. Everything that came after was an approximation. Without the actual Pacific Northwest physical locations, and without David guiding every nuanced moment, it was bound to be something else. There were splendid scenes in many episodes. There were stellar performances throughout both seasons. A lot of Love and Light. However, we never again achieved lift-off in such a comprehensive way.

Sheriff Truman Costume Design

Never before, and never since (in 44 years of acting) have I ever experienced an instant union with the clothing to be worn by my character. Usually it is an endless dance, back and forth with the costume designer and crew until I exhaust their patience and they give up trying to reason with "the crazy Canadian."

Saddled (and cursed) with being extremely meticulous about finding exactly what my character needs to be wearing, it's impossible for me to begin to act a single note on film if the wardrobe is not right...  

One year in Paris I spent every day, all-day, for a full month at Maratier Costumes and Uniforms in order to discover the necessary 1936 to 1945 period French clothing to launch the character Jean in Claude Chabrol’s The Blood of Others, 1984 (Jodi Foster and Ontkean played lovers working in the underground Resistance in Paris during World War Two).

Michael and Jodie Foster in The Blood of Others (1984)

Our Peaks Production Designer, Patricia Norris, was a genius. Prior to any consultations at all about Harry S. Truman, Patty had everything laid out for the Sheriff of Twin Peaks, on a big table in a small room north of Seattle. Everything she had prepared (without ever meeting me or talking to me) was perfect – every size, every shape, every fabric, every material, every pattern, every colour, every stitch – all utterly perfect. Patty's choices were all completely genuine lived-in pieces; all broken-in by actually being worn over time by real humans. None of this fake Hollywood movie-aging that pretends to be real but can be spotted by anyone who really knows clothing. Patty was Perfection. Nothing had to be altered, or added, or subtracted.

Later that day, my wife gave me something to wear around my neck. On a length of rawhide, she had strung a small brass fertility symbol from Fiji, the tooth of a wild boar from Mongolia, and 3 ancient I Ching coins from China. 

The Descendants

A neighbour asked me if I was in agreement with the Academy Awards this year. This sent me on a little trip all the way down to 1982, the year in which I was sponsored for membership by Jeff Bridges and Paul Newman. Turns out I only happen to be in accord with the voting about 1/3 of the time. The Academy Award ceremony in 2012 was the last time I was in Los Angeles. They certainly got it right by voting Best Adapted Screenplay to Alexander Payne.

Alexander is a superlative trinity – great writer, great director, great human being. He's a good friend of my third wife (the married life suits me, to the tune of being married four times).

At the time of The Descendants we had a place in Honolulu. Alexander visited to scout locations, to do his Hawaiian research, and to complete all his pre-production tasks. It was very enjoyable spending time and getting to know Alexander. I was fully retired from acting so wasn't thinking about being in the movie. My only thought was to be of help in orienting him to contemporary Hawaiian culture. I forget what actually happened, but somebody dropped out or got ill so stepped in at the last minute to be one of the silent cousins in the local clan.

George Clooney gave an absolutely perfect performance. The Academy really fumbled and failed that time. In service of a powerful story, George was a seamless blend of character actor, movie star, and unique method-actor. There's not a word, or a look, or a gesture, or a reaction, or a breath, that does not harmonize perfectly with this deeply original everyman that George creates. Far and away the most subtle and impressive performance of that particular year. In years to come this living being that George composed and crafted will come to be known as a master class in the art of acting for film.