The 83-year-old actor plays a divorce lawyer with a heart in Noah Baumbach’s grim movie about divorce
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| Alan Alda co-stars as a kind divorce attorney in Noah Baumbach’s film ‘Marriage Story,’ which airs on Netflix. PHOTO: NETFLIX
In an industry where actors are aware of their every camera angle—they fight pretty, cry pretty, even die pretty—Alan Alda does something unusual in “Marriage Story”: He lets his tremor show.
The 83-year-old actor, who announced last year that he is living with Parkinson’s disease, plays a scattered but principled lawyer in the movie about a scorched-earth divorce starring Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson. The film from director Noah Baumbach doesn’t mask Mr. Alda’s shaking hands but keeps them in the frame, a visual contrast to the slick moves of the sharklike lawyers elsewhere in the movie.
The actor best known as “Hawkeye” Pierce in the TV series “M*A*S*H” learned he had the nervous-system disorder in 2015 after his wife Arlene told him he wasn’t swinging his arms when he walked. He began acting out his dreams in his sleep too, another early sign of Parkinson’s. Soon after, Mr. Alda got the diagnosis. To cope, he wedged a pillow between himself and his wife of 62 years to make it harder to reach her in those sleeping episodes and began an exercise regimen to lessen his symptoms that included boxing and marching to Sousa music.
But he didn’t stop working. Aside from “Marriage Story,” which opens in theaters this week and debuts on Netflix Dec. 6, Mr. Alda this month returns as a psychiatrist in the new season of the Showtime series “Ray Donovan.” He also hosts an interview podcast “Clear + Vivid” and remains active in the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science. The center at Stony Brook University in Long Island, N.Y., uses improvisational theater techniques to improve the communication skills of scientists, doctors and other professionals.
The Wall Street Journal recently spoke with Mr. Alda about divorce, acting through his disease, and one of the first times “M*A*S*H” used tragedy to make a point. Here, an edited transcript.
“Marriage Story” paints a grim picture of divorce. Have you seen many friends go through the experience?
I have. The ironic thing about a divorce is that you’re probably getting divorced because of a real breakdown in communication. And now you’re facing a time in your life when you have to communicate even better for your children. The very thing that tore you apart is what you need more of to have a divorce that doesn’t wreck your life. What’s interesting to me is how this movie remains a love story in spite of the divorce. They’re cooperating better at the end than they are in the beginning.
The movie is filled with scheming attorneys, but you play one with compassion. How do you feel about lawyers?
As a young man sometimes I’d be stolen from by a producer who thought I was too nice a guy to resist, and I used to love a good lawsuit. I think a lot of people who are not outwardly aggressive get mistaken for patsies. It’s always good to set the other guy straight.
How did you decide you didn’t want to hide signs of your illness in the movie?
I left it up to Noah. I said, “I have this tremor. You can handle it any way you want.” It’s not part of the script so I didn’t want it to be distracting if Noah thought it would be distracting.
How do you expect the disease to affect your career?
I take what comes my way and I make the most of it. I don’t know if it will change things or not. The one kind of funny thing about it is, I’ve been doing “Ray Donovan” with Liev Schreiber and playing his psychiatrist and I said the same thing to them. “I got this tremor. You can cut around it if you want.” They said it would be interesting if the character had Parkinson’s, so I said OK. The way they wrote the character, his tremors are worse than mine, so I have to fake it a little bit.
Are you glad you’re able to be open about it on screen?
I’m not in the business of pretending I’m not sick. One of the reasons I talk in public about it was it helped remove some of the stigma, because I know people who have recently been diagnosed who feel that their lives are over, and they’re shocked and dismayed. It’s a common reaction to get depressed, and it’s really not necessary. I mean, it can get really bad, but your life isn’t over. You don’t die from it, you die with it.
On your podcast, you ask guests what thing they wish they really understood. How do you answer that question?
Alan Alda, seen in 2018, has his own podcast and also plays a psychiatrist in the Showtime series ‘Ray Donovan.’PHOTO: MATT LICARI/INVISION/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Why are we the way we are, so capable of nurture and torture at the same time? There are very few of us who, given the right circumstances, aren’t capable of both.
Going back to “M*A*S*H,” it seems like an early example of a TV comedy laced with drama that we see so much of now. How do you see tragedy as relevant to comedy?
When the first patient died on the table in “M*A*S*H,” the people who ran CBS at the time were very upset. One of them said, “What is this, a situation tragedy?” It opened the door for us to face more of the reality of war. I don’t know why they were surprised. Our intention was never to hide the pain of the lives of the people we were showing.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-marriage-story-alan-alda-lets-his-parkinsons-show-11572974317
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