News + Notes

EW Presents...

Continued

Mouth Hunt

More

Previous Page 2 of 2

In Mayhem, Turturro plays Cosell as a stoop-shouldered enigma with a frighteningly real craving for attention. Beneath the pomposity and carefully nurtured fractiousness is an insecure loner not unlike Charles Laughton's Quasimodo. "Howard used to say, 'I've lived on a precipice of professional peril every day of my life,'" Turturro says. "Early on, everybody wanted to fire him. That does a lot to you. I don't think I'd have the stomach for it, but he stuck it out." Turturro sees in Cosell the kind of unattractive outsider Laughton once reveled in. "Laughton embraced ugliness," Turturro says. "He combined it with a highly developed intelligence and an immense fragility."

Actually, Turturro had his pick of Cosells. He was offered the role of the Humble One in Michael Mann's feature film Ali. But he turned it down because he thought TNT's Cosell was a bigger and potentially deeper part. (Jon Voight plays Ali's Cosell.) And since TNT was shooting Mayhem in Manhattan, that meant Turturro could go home at night to his Brooklyn brownstone and be with his wife, actress Katherine Borowitz, who recently had their second child, Diego.

To get under Cosell's skin, Turturro had to first get under his rug. "I already have the nose," he says. "To make the toupee look right, though, the hair on top of my head had to be shaved." After donning the wig, clenching a cigar between his teeth, and slouching like a '50s poolroom hustler, Turturro could have fooled Frank Gifford. "Sometimes on the set I'd lose the posture," recalls Turturro, "and the director [Ernest Dickerson]would say, 'John, we need a little more hunch.'"

To nail Cosell's clutch-throated twang, Turturro listened to him endlessly on audiotapes. "Howard's voice was musical and high-pitched and had different placements than mine," he says. "I had to score it like a composer." For months his dissonant aria rattled through the Turturro household. "We were inundated with that sound," reports Borowitz. "Howard's inflection is so infectious that, after a while, the only person in our home not doing him was Diego."

Despite the off-key intonations and Elmer Fudd-ish laugh, Turturro still manages to tap into the soulful vulnerability of the man behind the caricature. "One reason I signed on to this project is that the script showed Howard's romantic side," says Dickerson, citing moments like a bathroom scene in which Cosell's wife applies lipstick as her husband does worshipful play-by-play. "The look in John's eyes is really moving. Ordinarily, you'd never think of Howard Cosell in love." Except maybe with himself.