William H. Macy has appeared in more than 50 feature films and numerous TV shows, including playing Dr Morgenstern for four years in ER. He has also been nominated for an Oscar and won a coveted Screen Actors Guild Award. Despite this impressive CV, most cinemagoers don’t even know his name. His brilliant new film, The Cooler, looks likely to change that sorry situation.
Macy stars as Bernie Lootz — the world’s unluckiest man. “I’d had enough of playing losers,” says Macy. “I have played so many that I said to my agent: ‘Look, I’ve played that card for the last time!’ And then along came The Cooler, which is a magnificent film.”
Lootz is a chap whose luck is so toweringly atrocious that he is employed by a Rat Pack-style casino boss, Shelly Kaplow (Alec Baldwin), to roam his seedy Las Vegas establishment like a “piece of walking Kryptonite”, anni- hilating good fortune and leaving suicidal gamblers, who have gone from flush to bust, in his wake. “People get next to me,” admits the hopelessly resigned Lootz, “then their luck turns. It’s been like that my whole life. I do it by being myself.”
The sparkling Maria Bello plays Natalie, a jaded casino cocktail waitress who is exhausted by the Vegas lifestyle — until she meets her knight in rusty armour in the form of Lootz. He uses his influence to help her and she repays him with the best sex of his life. The love scenes caused something of a controversy when the film had its premiere in the US, prompting the film’s editors to shave off that all- important glimpse of pubic hair.
“I’d never done a sex scene before,” declares Macy. “But the scenes were the highlight of my career. I was scared to death at first. When I was 30 I was in good shape, but why they did they wait until I was over 50 to get me to drop my knickers and do that stuff?” Bello’s confidence, though, emboldened Macy. “We went to a café and she just said: ‘Don’t worry. I take my clothes off at the drop of a hat, it’s not a big deal.’ So when I got on set, Maria and I did, if you’ll excuse the expression, a dry run with our clothes on. I was much more confident after that. I also had a good friend on set called Jim Beam, who helped me enormously! I’m very proud of those scenes.”
Advertisement
The cast and crew spent the shoot ensconced in Reno, Nevada. “It’s a sad little town,” states Macy. “We found an old casino and we owned it for the six weeks that we shot there. We never saw daylight for a week at a time.”
During the production, Bello and Macy spent at least two weeks in bed, their backsides exposed to all and sundry. To compensate they threw a “show us your ass party”, at which, according to Bello, “all the cast and crew had to go into a makeshift photo booth and get their ass photographed for the Wall of Ass”.
“We put all the pictures up and you had to match the face to the ass, with prizes for the Most Creative Ass, Best Ass in a Supporting Role,” Bello recalls.
Macy has waited a long time for such exposure. He began his career in the late 1960s after abandoning his veterinary science degree to study under the then struggling playwright David Mamet. Together they founded the highly regarded Atlantic Theatre Company, and in 1987 Macy appeared as Sergeant Moran in Mamet’s House of Games, followed by Things Change, Homicide and Oleanna.
By the time Macy played the quintessential loser Jerry Lundegaard in the Coen brothers’ magnificent Fargo (for which he received an Oscar nomination in 1997), he was firing on all cylinders.
Advertisement
“I completely understood the character,” says Macy. “But I really had to work hard to get the part.” Today it is impossible to imagine any other actor playing the delusional Lundegaard. “I really had sympathy for him,” Macy asserts. “I always fantasised that if his wife had found out that he had staged her kidnapping just to help his family she would forgive him.” Since then, Macy has cornered the “loser” market with magnificent ease in films such as Boogie Nights (1997), Magnolia (1999) and Welcome to Collinwood (2002).
“There are losers and then there is Bernie Lootz,” Macy says. “He is almost biblical in proportion, he’s such a loser.” Indeed, The Cooler’s New Testament message, as Macy emphatically points out, “is that love will win out. It might take a while, and you might need to be patient, but it will win.”
Patience is a virtue to which Macy is well accustomed — for years he has been one of those guys “who’s in everything”, an actor whose performances you will certainly have remembered but whose name you might struggle to recall. With the release of The Cooler, though, Macy is set to become a household name and quite possibly a sex symbol.
“I used to go to a party and see a pretty young thing looking at me and think I’m gonna get lucky,” says Macy. “Now when I make conversation the first thing she does is call me Mr Macy, which is a dagger to my heart. And then she says: ‘When I was seven years old I saw you in . . . ’ It seems you become an icon about the same time as your prostate starts playing up.”
Glands apart, The Cooler is big news and Macy has hit the jackpot, with bells ringing and lights flashing. After more than 30 years in the business, it is a prize he richly deserves.
Advertisement
The Cooler is on general release