A Summer Away from the 'House'

Image credit: PHOTOGRAPH BY RICHARD PHIBBS

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: So I'm guessing that money was also the reason you did Driven with Sylvester Stallone?
ROBERT SEAN LEONARD: I had gone to L.A. and said to my agent, I can't do another ''this is his first film'' anymore. I can't do another writer directing his own film: ''He's written four films, but this time he's going to direct.'' I can't do it anymore. I hate it. I've heard too many times now, ''He could be the next Scorsese!'' No, he couldn't. I'm sorry. I'm willing to bet he's not going to be the next Scorsese at this point in my life. If I make a mistake, I'll be sorry, but let's just assume he's not the next Scorsese. I once did a movie with Kiefer Sutherland called Ground Control, about air traffic controllers. We had like four directors. At one point, I walked in, and he was directing. I said, ''What are you doing?'' He said, ''Richard quit, I don't know.'' I remember Kiefer saying, ''Man, this is like one of those movies where you go home to your hotel and you're exhausted, it's three in the morning, you turn on the TV and the movie you're shooting is actually on Showtime.'' You think, ''I'm still shooting this! And they sold it to Showtime!''

I did too many of those. So I called and said, ''Just get me anything that you know will be released. That's all I ask. Anything that will definitely be released in a theater, I'll take it.'' They sent me four scripts, and I read them, and I didn't like any of them. But Driven, I liked the part. He was this wisecracking jerk, an agent. I'd never played a part like that. Every now and then I forget that it happened, it's like a strange dream. I still haven't seen it, and I don't remember much of it.

You got to work with Burt Reynolds, though.
Oh, yeah! I didn't have to act very much with him, but he was around a lot. We saw Mamma Mia together. One of the more surreal experiences in my life, watching the Abba musical with Burt Reynolds. We were in Toronto. It hadn't been to Broadway yet. It was this odd Canadian musical hit. I think he liked it. I was horrified. I thought it was the death of theater. I was like, ''You're looking at theater's tombstone on stage.'' Burt was like [He bobs his head, snaps his fingers], ''All right!''

When House ends, have you bought yourself years of theater?
Oh, yeah. [My fiancée] Gaby and I, I don't know where our kids will want to go to college, but aside from that, her favorite restaurant is the Chinese restaurant on the corner, and we wear the same clothes every day. I've never met anybody who spends less money than my fiancée, unless it's me. We're good. I can do theater for a long, long time.

You talk about the drudgery of making TV, and yet at least you're doing something different every week. This might be a naïve question, but as a non-actor I always thought it would get dull doing the same play night after night.
It's one of the hardest questions to answer about theater. I think something clicks in actors. I remember seeing Kevin Kline in a great Shaw play, Arms and the Man. There's a young girl, and there's a war in this fictional country and her fiancé is a royalist and the rebels are retreating through the city. A rebel, this 40-year-old very tired soldier, climbs a drainpipe into her room to hide, and her fiancé is leading the charge. She's very grand and very spoiled and her fiancé's an idiot. There's this great moment where the rebel laughs at her. She's proclaiming indignation over something, and he says, ''I'm sorry, when you use that tone and point at me, I can't stand it, it just makes me laugh.'' And she kind of relaxes for the first time in the play, because no one's ever laughed at her. She says, ''I think you're the first man I've ever met who hasn't taken me seriously.'' And he says, ''I think you mean that I'm the first person who has taken you quite seriously.'' And I remember lifting off my seat. I don't know why, the writing. Shaw was a genius, of course, but she is so right with that scene. She caps it. And then you realize, oh wait, he's right! Shaw's smarter than everybody! And the excitement of being the guy to say that every night, and to have 1,399 people say, ''Wow...I've never heard it put that way.'' To me, I get excited about it every day. Of course, there's matinee days when you just want to shoot yourself, especially when you're doing The Iceman Cometh. But to me, it never gets tiring.