When the good guy goes bad

Exuberant comic star Robin Williams doesn’t think it’s odd that he has suddenly shaken up his screen image by doing a trio of back-to-back dark roles.

Gone is the freewheeling mania of The Fisher King and the mournful gaze of Patch Adams. Williams has become troubled and sinister on screen - first as the killer in Insomnia and now as a stalker in One Hour Photo.

In the third film Death To Smoochie, which has no Irish release date yet, he plays a sacked children’s TV host intent on killing his successor.

But he is, after all, an actor first and foremost. “I think people assume I started out to be a stand-up comic, when in fact that was just survival,” he says.

In One Hour Photo Williams ditches his usual comic playfulness to depict a lonely photo laboratory developer who has an obsessive fixation on a family, whose photos he prints.

His character, Sy Parrish, is a creepy wallflower type and a buttoned-down Williams is unrecognizable from the big-hearted roles he normally plays. This time he delves into the life of a disturbed obsessive. Williams says he feels some sympathy for Sy, an outsider who really wants to feel a sense of belonging.

It’s actually a peculiar love story, he suggests. “Through developing this seemingly perfect family’s photographs, Sy seeks to live vicariously through them.”

The film’s director Mark Romanek adds: “The loneliness and insidious desire to belong and how that can spiral out of control is central to the theme. Sy’s just like the faceless man, the man nobody notices.”

Williams, the star of such hits as Good Morning Vietnam and Dead Poets Society, says he was more than happy to play a very unappealing character. “Just because a guy is working in some service field doesn’t mean he doesn’t have deep hopes and regrets. Everybody is complicated,” he explains.

Williams, 50, realises that people are surprised he has done three dark roles at this stage of his career. “When I first met Mark Romanek he was astonished I wanted to do this role. It must seem kind of an odd time for me to add some dark colours to the palette.

“The truth is I’ve always wanted to do these kinds of roles, it’s just that they wouldn’t offer them. Hollywood goes by what sells and often what sells is happy, warm and fun,” he says.

“I asked an agent to find a villain for me to play and he found three nasty pieces. I mean, a kid’s show host who is a substance abuser and flat-out nasty in Death To Smoochy. I went, ‘Hey this is great’. These came at a good time for me.”

Doing these parts wasn’t too much of a stretch for Williams who trained at the famous Julliard drama school in New York. “I wasn’t thinking ‘Whoa, where will we go now’ or ‘Will people accept me in this?’ It was too late, they’re done!”

Cinemagoers have a vision of him as a bear-like quick-witted stand-up comic and screen comedian, he says. “But there’s a face you put on. Sometimes people will ask to take a picture and I’ll say ‘Sure’ and they’ll say ‘Why aren’t you smiling?’ Hey, I am smiling, I’m happy, I’m just not goofy.”

In Insomnia - which is currently on general release in Ireland - Williams played cat-and-mouse with Al Pacino, who is the detective who tracks him down. So will he be joining Pacino in Godfather 4? “Only if they let us do it as a Disney Ice Capades special,” Williams laughs. “The first time I met Al was in 1972. He and Robert DeNiro were debating which one was going to pick up Elizabeth Taylor that night. It was even surreal for me.”

While Pacino became the first-time father of twins last year at 62, Williams is very much a family man. He has a 19-year-old son, Zachary, with first wife Valerie Velardi and a 13-year-old daughter, Zelda, and 11-year-old son Cody with second wife Marsha Garces.

“Zach is the handsome one, all the girls keep swooning over him,” beams Williams. “He’s studying anthropology and breaking hearts.”

It is Zelda who most likely to become another actor. “I tell her what my father told me. If she’s going to become a performer she has to have a secure back-up profession – something like welding,” he jokes.

He’s also gone back on the road in a US tour doing his often wild stand-up routine. “It has proven good for my mind and good for my soul. Doing stand-up requires you to sustain yourself. I needed that kind of discipline again.”