Hollywood, Virginia
“I’ve done about 200 films in my career. I’ve worked with Francis Coppola, Delbert Mann, John Waters, Barry Levinson. The list goes on,” said Michael Kennedy. “These guys stand head and shoulders above all the other directors I’ve ever worked with. They clearly get it. But the gap between those guys and Steven Spielberg is astronomical. He understands everything.”
It goes without saying that acting in a Spielberg film is the highlight of Kennedy’s 60-year career. As his website said, Kennedy’s been “acting up” since 1953, but he got serious about the work in the early ’70s, after a hard divorce led to some soul searching and an “epiphany.”
“One day it just struck me. Wait a minute. If you want to be an actor, be an actor,” Kennedy said. “What the hell, you’re not doing anything else now except sailing around and drinking whiskey.”
It took until 1988 for Kennedy to get his first SAG role, playing a taxi driver in Zelly and Me, which filmed in Gloucester County and starred Isabella Rossellini and David Lynch. As a regional principal actor, Kennedy’s worked on the television shows “Homicide” in Baltimore and “Matlock” in Wilmington, and played minor roles in films like Patch Adams. He’s also an inspirational speaker and a real estate developer. In short, acting doesn’t pay the bills, but it’s taken him on a long, enjoyable ride.
“It’s like any career and any business. You start out where you’re accepted and you do a good job there and keep moving up the ladder. When I started, my resume was my name and my description on a blank sheet of paper, and you start putting on everything you do,” Kennedy said.
After an audition with Arvold, he was told to grow a beard. He’d been growing it for half a year when he got frustrated and called Anne Chapman, Arvold’s partner, in Richmond to complain.
“I said, ‘I can’t work, nobody wants to look at me.’ She said, ‘Michael, two words: Steven Spielberg,’” Kennedy said.
Two months later, he got an e-mail from Avy Kaufman’s casting company with contract details and his part.
“I had tears running down my face and I read it for about 20 minutes,” Kennedy remembered.
Kennedy played Iowa Congressman Hiram Price during about two weeks of shooting at the Capitol in Richmond for a scene on the debate of the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which was passed by the House with the required two-thirds majority on January 31, 1865 after five Democrats changed their votes.
While researching for his part, Kennedy discovered that his great-grandfather, Thaddeus Stanton, had been in the balcony during the debate. A one-time paymaster general of the Army, Stanton had also run a newspaper in Davenport, Iowa. Newspaper people like Congressional debates.
“He decides he has to be there. So he hops on a train, goes to Washington, sits up with the press, and watches one of the most important moments in American history happen,” Kennedy said.
It was a dramatic event, to be sure, and it will be a key scene in the film. But for Kennedy, the resonance with his own family history made it a nearly transcendental experience.
“The first time we shot that piece, when the screaming and yelling and cheering started, suddenly tears started running down my face. It happened every time we shot it,” Kennedy said. “About the fourth time, Steven was walking across the set and there were tears streaming down my face and he said, ‘What?’”
Kennedy told Spielberg that he had realized, in a physical way, that his great grandfather had been up there in the balcony, watching the vote happen in real time.
“He looked at me, he grabbed my arm, and he kinda pulled me close and he said, ‘I’ve heard your story about 20 times since we started shooting this,’” Kennedy said. “He said, ‘You would not believe the number of people whose families were directly involved in this Thirteenth Amendment debate.’ I was on a high after that for about a month.”
David Foster’s most important contribution to Lincoln will remain invisible and will likely be forgotten, but it’s possible that no one besides Spielberg and Day-Lewis had a better view of what it took to make the protagonist come to life. The Waynesboro electrician played Day-Lewis’ stand-in.
“When I was hired, I was told it’s going to take a very particular individual to be Daniel’s stand-in. You’ve got to be very attentive. You’re not going to be a person who’s a problem. You’re there and you’re professional. Actually every time he spoke to me, he spoke to me as Abraham Lincoln,” Foster said.
When I spoke to him by phone, Foster was reluctant to give out too many details about Day-Lewis’ performance on account of the strict nondisclosure agreements that he and everyone else in the production had to sign. The film officially debuts November 9, and reviews are embargoed until November 16.
“I’ve been in close to 40 movies over 23 years and this one, I won’t say it’s like national security, but they are very tight,” Foster said.
He did say, though, that while Day-Lewis primarily stayed completely in character on the set, he could move back and forth between reality and his part “flawlessly.” Also, reports of his being taken over by the role off-set have been exaggerated.
“A lot’s been made about the guy’s obsessed. He was living in primitive conditions and all that. That’s baloney,” Foster said.
So what does a stand-in do?
“They use you for lighting. Sometimes for sound. You might do the walking. I pay attention to everything that’s going on, because sometimes a director will come out and say things he wants and people won’t necessarily remember everything,” Foster said.
Foster got the part because, though a little bit heavier than Day-Lewis, his dimensions are nearly identical. His acting career began in 1990 with Toy Soldiers, where he met Louis Gossett, Jr. on set. Since then he’s played secret service agents, bank robbers, and college professors, mostly for television series like “Homicide” and “Gods and Generals.” Like Kennedy, he felt a personal connection to the film. His great-great-grandfather, Henry Stowell, was a captain in the Union Army’s 7th Vermont Infantry Regiment.
“A lot of people involved, black and white, had ancestors who were involved on all different sides of this. The emotions were there. People were tearing up. It was really neat,” he said.
In addition to playing Day-Lewis’ stand-in, Foster spent two weeks filming as a “radical Republican,” and he said the resonance with history was overpowering at times for him and for other members of the cast, particularly with regard to ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment.
“I can’t give away details, but we filmed some things in the Capitol and the emotions, my gosh. You were getting goosebumps,” Foster said. “The more we talked among us, we fed off of each other. That’s some of my proudest work. The emancipation parts.”
Foster described Spielberg as a larger than life figure with the charisma of Walt Disney. And Day-Lewis?
“He’s going to set the standard for all Lincolns past and present. He was the best I’ve ever seen.”
Lance Lemon has wanted to be an actor his whole life. You might remember him from his lead role as Paul in Live Arts’ production of Six Degrees of Separation. The 23-year-old Mechanicsville native majored in acting and studio art with a focus in cinematography at UVA. Lemon lives in downtown Richmond, and has been working as a bartender and staying as busy with acting as possible. Working on Lincoln was a dream come true, an opportunity he had to take advantage of. He approached Spielberg on set to hand over his materials.
“I’m serious about acting. I plan on being a Hollywood actor. You know, Will Smith, whatever you want to call it,” Lemon said. “And so actually getting to meet Spielberg and getting to talk to him and just seeing how he directs really was an eye-opener for me. It raised my expectations.”
Last week, Lemon quit his bartending job and he’s planning to move to Atlanta or New York. He’s a kind of litmus test for Virginia film. If the industry is going to have a home here, it will need actors who believe they can move up and out, not just exist as part-timers. For Lemon, starting his career at home made sense. He reached out to Arvold while he was still at UVA, and she’s been feeding him steady work, casting him in both Lincoln and “Killing Lincoln.”
“I think a lot of people get so caught up in thinking everything is out West and then you look here at Richmond and Spielberg’s shooting Lincoln,” Lemon said. “If you live on the East Coast, don’t shy away from the things on the East Coast so quickly, because they might get you out to L.A. faster and in the right manner.”
Lemon played an African-American Union soldier alongside about 15 other day players during a recreation of a battle scene near Powhatan. He sees the limits of historical roles for black actors, but said he never thought twice about taking his role in Lincoln.
“I don’t want to be cast as a slave or a butler the rest of my life, but sometimes it might be like that. I’m gonna go out and audition for any role that I think suits me and that I think will benefit my career,” Lemon said.
Lincoln is primarily a film about Abraham Lincoln as the Great Emancipator. Having grown up around Richmond and attended UVA, Lemon is keenly aware of Virginia’s changing attitudes towards race. He said some of his most meaningful moments during filming came as he sat around with older African-American extras who grew up in Richmond.
“There were a lot of older people who were there. They hired a lot of extras to be on set. And just to hear them talk about their experiences and their grandparents who were in slavery and how great they thought it was that this was happening in Richmond,” Lemon said.
I was supposed to catch a press screening of the film last Tuesday in Norfolk, but a perfect storm complicated the trip. I was looking forward to driving through the theater of war, hoping to draw some inspiration for the story, and I was dying to see Daniel Day-Lewis play Abraham Lincoln. Until the film opens locally, I guess I’ll have to settle for picturing him above the muddy streets of Richmond, delivering a message of healing in the high, thin, country-tinged accent that will change the way we hear his words for posterity, remembering that Abraham Lincoln fascinates us as an American archetype because he spoke to the moment in language crafted for the ages:
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations,” he said in the Second Inaugural.
The words are so grand that they sound moth-balled. It’s easy to forget they were delivered after a rambling introduction from a drunk to an impatient crowd gathered in a sodden street by a wood-splitting lawyer who got a pistol ball in his skull two months later, on Good Friday.