Growing with Moss
When stars like Hilary Swank and Leonardo DiCaprio want to dig deeply into a character, only one acting coach will do

By SARAH HAMPSON
Saturday, February 14, 2004 - Page R3

Hilary Swank won't do a film without him. When she won the Oscar for her role as a young woman who wants to be a man in Boys Don't Cry, she publicly thanked him and said she couldn't have done it without him.

Larry Moss, a gentle-faced 59-year-old, is a behind-the-scenes genius in Hollywood. He is the agent of transmogrification, the acting coach who helps actors inhabit the skin of other people. And his fame is growing as much, if not more, than that of the people he helps.

Last year, Bantam/Dell gave him a six-figure advance for his book on acting, The Intent to Live, which will be published in 2005. The Syringa Tree, the one-woman play by Pamela Gien that he helped her develop and which he directed, has become a worldwide hit (its Canadian premiere is at Toronto's CanStage Feb. 25), winning several awards in New York, including an Obie for Best Play of 2001. Offers to direct plays, both classic and new, are pouring in. Celebrities are lining up for his help. There's a long waiting list to get into Larry Moss Studio, which he runs with business partner, Michelle Danner, located in the Edgemar Center for the Arts, the new Frank Gehry landmark in Santa Monica, Calif.

Like Hilary Swank, Helen Hunt consults Moss about every role she takes on. James L. Brooks didn't think he could cast her as the waitress opposite Jack Nicholson in As Good As it Gets. She was too intelligent, he told her. So she asked Moss to help. Think about where the centre of the character emanates from, he suggested. Ah, a waitress lives on her feet, a long way from her brain, he and Hunt decided. So Hunt developed a tired "duck-like" walk, remembers Moss, and at the next audition, Brooks hired her. Hunt subsequently won an Oscar for the role. He just finished working with her on a miniseries for HBO called Empire Falls.

He helped Michael Clarke Duncan go from being cast in small parts in action flicks to becoming an Oscar-nominated actor for his subtle performance in The Green Mile. He coached Tobey Maguire through Seabiscuit and Téa Leoni through a new (unreleased) James L. Brooks-directed film, Spanglish. When Jim Carrey wanted to extend his acting range in The Majestic, he turned to Moss. In the much-anticipated Martin Scorsese movie on Howard Hughes, The Aviator, Leonardo DiCaprio's portrayal of the phobic millionaire will owe a lot to Moss's input as well.

"We had to create a voice, a walk. We had to find a way for him to have a germ phobia," says Moss, a tall man with a habit of speaking in a fast, unfiltered manner.

Hughes had a favourite meal of a New York strip steak and 12 peas, Moss notes. In a scene in the movie, DiCaprio is about to eat the meal when one of Hughes's Hollywood friends touches one of the peas.

"So I said to Leo, 'Let's talk about that. What exactly is that reaction about?' So we started talking about a worm coming out of the pea. In the imagination, that's what we believed a phobic might see. But ultimately, we found that a phobic doesn't wait around to look too closely at what he's afraid of," Moss says, leaping from his chair in a boardroom in Toronto's Berkeley Street Theatre, where the interview took place following a rehearsal for The Syringa Tree. "I don't want to see it!" he says in a frightened voice, as he suddenly morphs into a phobic character. "I don't want to be here!" he exclaims, his eyes wide, as he strides towards the door. He stops abruptly, changes back to his Larry Moss self, and turns to me. "Terror!" he booms to emphasize how such a character would be feeling.

Moss has few filters. What he feels, he says. What he knows, he shares. He is unafraid to tell me about his road to success, which has been filled with sharp, sudden turns. Born in Encino Hills, Calif., the younger of two brothers, he had a terrible childhood, he confesses. He and his brother, Allan Montain, who is a photographer, refused to take their father's last name, Moskovitz, because of how he treated them. His mother was a paranoid schizophrenic. His parents eventually divorced, his mother became very ill and his father went on to marry and divorce three more times, Moss notes with a mixture of disgust and amusement.

Moss has spent years in psychotherapy, which is evident in his thoughtfulness. He is deeply introspective. "One of the things I was thinking a lot about are what my themes as a person were," he explains, when asked why he began to develop The Syringa Tree with Gien, who was an actress in his acting class at his studio. "I asked myself, What do I believe in deeply? What would I die for? I wanted to develop more inner structure." As part of that investigation with his therapist, he consulted his trusted astrologer, Maria, in New York. "She was very specific," he says, leaning forward, spooked still by the accuracy of her advice. "She said, 'It's really time to full-on direct. It's not enough for you to teach. Do original pieces; work with a writer to develop the piece.' "

He returned to L.A. and began a new exercise with his students. "I asked them to sit in a chair for 10 minutes and feel where the muscles are tense and to let themselves remember something that happened to them. I told them they had to allow it. 'It will come to you. It will choose you,' " he recalls he said.

Within about five minutes, all of the 35 students in his class were either weeping or laughing or filled with terror. "It was the most remarkable opening of hearts I have ever seen," he says. The second part of the exercise was for each person to stage the memory and to play every character in the story. He was interested in doing a play in which one actor played all the parts. Gien was the first to come forward with her story about growing up in South Africa and witnessing her grandfather's murder. For two years, she and Moss worked on the script and the acting of it. Actor-turned-producer Matt Salinger, whom Moss calls the "unsung hero" of the play, got involved and produced it.

Moss's love of the stage -- where he "thrives in its immediacy" -- started as an actor in New York, when he studied with Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner and Warren Robertson. He appeared in many Broadway productions, including Neil Simon's God's Favorite and I Love My Wife, directed by Gene Saks, but it was as a teacher at the Juilliard School and later as a musical director at Circle in the Square that he found his true calling.

He moved to Los Angeles to open his own acting studio in 1980. But that change, like so many others in his life, came suddenly and as a total surprise. "I was in Debtors Anonymous," he blurts. "I owed the IRS $100,000." Why? "Oh, because I was poor for so long and then when I started to coach movies and they paid me directly, I didn't declare it," he says placidly. One day, an old woman came in [to Debtors Anonymous] and clutched her bottle of Evian water, declaring thanks to God for being able to truly afford it. "Ooh," Moss moans. "That was too much." He made a decision on the spot. "I thought I must go to L.A. and do movies and make lots of money!"

If Moss understands himself, which he does, seeing as clearly through himself as an X-ray machine, he also thinks a lot about what makes actors tick. The desire to perform is "the raw need to feel and be witnessed. It's the desire not to be invisible." But that's not all. "The deepest part of a true actor is the desire to be absolutely truthful in imaginary circumstances." By her own volition, Hilary Swank lived as a boy for several months in preparation for the role in Boys Don't Cry, he tells me. Her husband, Chad Lowe, whom she had recently married, introduced her as his younger brother. Moss met Swank through her husband, who was enrolled in one of his classes. He worked with her for six weeks to help her find convincing behaviour for her film character. "One was that she would constantly check to see if other men in a room believed she was a boy," he explains.

And celebrity? Does he have an insider view on why we are so fascinated with film stars? "It has to do with mortality, with the inability to face the idea that you're going to die," he responds without hesitation. "If you take care of film, it is forever, so the sense of being infinite is a subtext of it." Still, not all of what he sees in the cultural addiction to celebrity is healthy. "It's also part of a deep illness that's crept into the culture over the last 50 years, which is consummated in American Idol, which is that only one person can be the special one. It goes back to fairy tales, of course, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella. But it's not healthy," he offers, looking forlorn beneath his jaunty baseball cap.

"Technology has become so advanced, but we have not," he says, stopping for a moment to catch his breath. "There's so much primitive impulse in all of us," he begins again, fixing me intensely with his empathetic eyes. "So I think celebrity has to do with that primitive impulse: wanting to be loved."

Larry Moss is many people in an interview -- goof, acting coach, actor, philosopher, businessman, confessor, disgruntled son, therapy patient and, ultimately, cultural therapist, for it is he who helps us weep and laugh on our own, even when we're with others, in the stillness of a darkened theatre.