Hot Press meets Steven Bauer

“You’re calling from the west of Ireland?” asks Steven Bauer, delightedly. “Hey, I really love Galway!”

The Cuban-born star had opened our conversation with a complaint about it being a slightly overcast morning in Hollywood, to which your wholly unsympathetic Hot Press correspondent explained the monsoon-like conditions outside his office window. It transpires that having once shot a movie with Roger Corman’s production company in Connemara, Bauer is no stranger to the west’s inclement weather.
“I went there, unfortunately, to do a not very good movie called Star Portal in the late ‘90s,” he recalls. “It was a space vampire movie so we were shooting a lot at night. It was April and I remember it was very chilly and very wet. I don’t know how I found myself talked into doing it. It was a low point in my life. But I really enjoyed Galway.”
The low-budget Star Portal went straight to DVD, but thankfully Bauer – whose big screen credits include Scarface, Raising Cain and Traffic – hasn’t made too many duds in his career. Indeed, right now he’s on something of a high with the new Showtime TV drama, Ray Donovan, a critical and ratings hit.
Starring alongside Liev Schreiber, Elliott Gould, Jon Voight and Irish actress Paula Malcomson, Bauer plays ‘Avi, the tough Israeli sidekick of the eponymous professional fixer for the Hollywood elite, and the go-to guy who makes the problems of the city’s celebrities, superstar athletes and business moguls disappear.
Having already done a memorable turn as an evil Mexican drug lord in Breaking Bad, Bauer maintains that Ray Donovan is of comparable quality. “It’s truly the best of American drama,” he says. “Breaking Bad is there, too, but Breaking Bad is more bizarre – even darker humour. Ray Donovan isn’t really that dark, but there is a lot of humour. It’s a very strong family drama with very delineated characters. Very strong actors – a tremendous cast. I’m very fortunate to be in that ensemble.”
He predicts that Ray Donovan will do well. “It already got picked up for Season Two after only three airings. The first three episodes aired over here, and Showtime already made the commitment to start shooting a second season. It’s not really a surprise to anybody because it burst on the scene here. Critics are writing that they are addicted, they can’t wait until next week. You feel you’ve got some real hearty, meaty people, who you can follow from week to week, for the first time since maybe The Sopranos.”
Bauer was born in Cuba in 1956, but his family moved to the US when he was three. He’s obviously angry about the Castro dictatorship. “Cuba is a paradise really and has beautiful people, with beautiful art and culture, and it is still governed by these old, old men,” he sighs. “There is no freedom of the press. There is no artistic freedom. It’s incredible that they should lag so far behind.”
Having studied under the tutelage of world renowned acting teacher Stella Adler (founder of the Hollywood Acting School), he initially worked in US Spanish-language soap operas. He got his big break when Brian De Palma cast him as Al Pacino’s Cuban sidekick ‘Manny Ribera’ in 1983’s Scarface.
“Al kept me by his side through the whole of the entire shoot,” he recalls. “In between scenes we’d go to his trailer. We had this bond, this friendship that carried on off the screen. You saw it on the screen, but it was way more diverse off the screen. We had a lot of fun and we brought it to the characters. We brought a lot of humour. He kept me going and I kept him going and we were constantly breaking each other up.
“One of the things I used to do was: we’d finish a scene, and it was in the can, and I’d say to him, ‘How will your American audience respond to this in such stark contrast to your previous body of work? Don’t you think this movie is going to shock the hell out of people?’ And he would say, ‘Yeah, I don’t know whether it’s going to be successful. There’s a possibility that a lot of people will hate it, but I can’t imagine that there won’t be an audience for it – unless we’re completely delusional!’”
Although Bauer won a Golden Globe nomination for his performance, the film was panned by critics.
“Almost 9/10 critics hated the film. And I mean really hated it. They saw it as an affront to everything that had gone before in cinema. It took a long time for that to be reversed. It really took the age of the internet and also hip-hop artists who made it mainstream, who made it cool to acknowledge Scarface.”
Its scriptwriter Oliver Stone was also unhappy.
“Back then, Oliver wasn’t sort of welcome in Hollywood society. He had a reputation as a troublemaker and a loudmouth. He had written this very provocative and powerful script for Midnight Express, and he got a lot of attention through that. With Scarface he couldn’t leave it alone.
“There was a lot that had to be cut because of the length of his screenplay. It included the boat trip from Cuba and the incident where Tony Montana jumps in the water to save a drowning boy – and he redeems the character before you see him become a mobster. Universal said, ‘Let’s just cut that and take up the story when you hit Miami’. So from the get-go Oliver was just insulted and disgusted that his screenplay had been compromised.
“And then he would also venture into discussions about the story and about the relationship between Tony Montana and his sister,” he continues. “He started getting very involved in the conversations between Brian and Al about this sister relationship – whether it’s incestuous or not – and finally they just got sick of him. And basically they barred him from the set. It was mainly Brian saying, ‘I don’t need a second director looking over my shoulder, telling me what to do. It’s my interpretation that counts now’. Of course, eventually Oliver got to direct his own films.”
While Bauer has appeared in many movies since, he’s delighted that the pendulum has swung so that it’s now considered credible for cinema actors to appear on the small screen.
“It used to be that when you would crossover from cinema to television it was quite a change because with television, especially network television, certain elements are foisted on you,” he explains. “You had to compromise because network television is dominated by corporate people who make decisions about content.
“Since this long format of drama on cable, it’s completely different. Now you have film actors who are not compromised. You don’t feel like you’re giving up quality for practicality. You’re really just stepping across to another part of cinema. And in many cases, it’s more fun, more gratifying, because instead of 20 minutes of character development in a two-hour feature film, you have 12 episodes to develop your legs as the character. Which is a great thing for
any actor.”