We always named our dogs after jazz musicians - Charlie Parker and Nancy Wilson. What kind of dogs? "Ah, just a couple of mutts, Nancy and Charlie. Next thing you knew, we'd bought a house and had two dogs." She said, 'Let's go back, see what happens - it's an adventure.' Our kids were grown up. I can earn some money.' Jill was very good. After he returned from a brief stint in Hollywood in the early 1990s he sat in London for eight months and was offered one radio play. He married the actor and author Jill Gascoigne, who is 16 years his senior, and they have lived in Los Angeles for the past 12 years. He prefers clothes shopping to football and has set up a girly-man group with fellow actor Gary Oldman for fellow heterosexual girly-men. Throughout his life, Molina has defied expectations in a gentle, unassuming way. You know, you've got like a three-hour make-up job and a hump - Heh!-Hehheh! - and a limp. "You can't just turn up and put on a suit. The curse of being a character actor is that he has to put so much time into every role. At the moment he has the perfect balance - two independent movies (Jim Jarmusch's upcoming Coffee and Cigarettes, and Nick Hurran's funeral parlour comedy Undertaking Betty) offset by Spider-Man 2. The blessing of being a character actor is that he's always doing different stuff. "In America it's odd because when you talk to journalists they ask things like 'Does it bother you that people kinda often refer to you as, you know, aren't you the guy that played so and so?' And I'd say, 'No, it's actually a compliment if the actor is disappearing and what remains in the memory is the performance.' That's got to be good, innit?" If he was Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise he'd have to play Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt in every studio film he made. It does make life much more interesting, though. "I'm an actor," he says, coming over all thespish. It's funny that he so often plays hard cases when he's such a teddy bear. He's an unlikely mix - oafish, sexy and a little maternal. His hair is thick and wavy and black, his eyes (so often cold and menacing on screen) are a soft, dopey brown. When he was in his 20s he looked old for his age now he looks young. There is a lovely warmth and ease to Molina. It wasn't Steve McQueen or Robert Redford - it was people like Walter Matthau and Anthony Quinn. "The big stars I felt a kinship with were never the romantic leads. I was always a bit weird-looking and I carried myself in a weird way, so when I was at drama school I was never considered for the romantic parts." I had an early growth spurt, and when I went to secondary school I was tall enough to be a policeman. "When I was younger I was always big, I was a fat boy at school. As a child, he'd been bullied for his size. It wasn't just his background that was different. When I was young I never really felt English." "I've been thinking about this a lot recently, partly because I've been playing Tevye. Both parents tried hard to assimilate (his father even making cackhanded attempts at slang) but never fully succeeded. When he was young his mum worked as a cook and his dad as a chauffeur and odd-job man for a Jewish family. He was brought up by his parents in west London. It's easy to forget that Molina is English. Even at drama school if there was a part of some eastern European thug it would be me." Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh."Īnd his English? "I don't give good English really." Why not? "I was always like the foreign geezer. Good Jew, good Arab, good European, good South American, I give good Cuban. I tell him that the first time I noticed him was as the hapless schlemiel in Les Blair's film The Accountant. His father was Spanish, his mother was Italian, he looks Jewish (though he's not) and he does great accents. But as with most of the baddies or screwups or buffoons Molina has played (from Joe Orton's murderous lover in Prick Up Your Ears to the coked-out drug dealer in Boogie Nights, the suicidal comedian Tony Hancock in the biopic, or the uptight local politician in Chocolat) he retains a degree of humanity. Doc Oct is a Faustian figure who sells his soul to science. The body of Dr Otto Octavius, half-man, half-octopus, is staring down from hoardings worldwide.
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