The Bit Player

If he is known at all, it's for two roles: Marine recruit Leonard “Gomer Pyle” Lawrence in Stanley Kubrick's 1987 Full Metal Jacket, and Edgar in Barry Sonnenfeld's Men in Black a decade later. In his first role, as a Marine suffering through basic training before getting shipped off to Vietnam, he is barely visible beneath layers of fat; his whole body jiggles, even his fleshy nose. Leonard's eyes are dim, a sky devoid of stars, and his mind is empty--especially an hour into the movie, when the mad Marine shoots his drill instructor, then swallows his own rifle. But it's less a performance than it is a photograph brought to whimpering life: D'Onofrio's transformation from man to menace takes place so quickly, so inexplicably, we're shocked by his suicide but hardly moved by it. As Pauline Kael wrote in The New Yorker in 1987, Leonard is “no more than a comic horror, like a sad, fat crazy in an exploitation film.”

In Men in Black, D'Onofrio disappears beneath an entirely different suit, this one made of rotting flesh and insects that live up his sleeves. As Edgar, D'Onofrio was barely decipherable--he spoke as though his mouth were full of marbles and cockroaches--and hardly recognizable. (He explains that Edgar's accent is a combination of John Huston and George C. Scott.) A year earlier, D'Onofrio had given a remarkable performance as Conan the Barbarian's creator, Texan Robert Howard--a man tormented by his inability to fall in love with the one woman who could love him back. But in Men in Black, he was an actor cast as a special effect, a man in a monster suit.

“It sounds silly, but no matter what kind of character you're playing, you never pretend to be anything that you're not,” he says of playing a giant bug trapped in a human's skin. “What I did was as soon as I got the idea--this guy's frustrated and uncomfortable--I wondered how I could do that. I watched documentaries on bugs and animals and I'm thinking, “Oh, my God, how am I gonna do this?' I was walking by a sporting-goods store, and in the window they had these basketball knee braces, and I bought two of them. I put them on my knees, and I bent each knee slightly and taped them off so they couldn't bend back straight. Then I took all this duct tape, and I wrapped my ankles and my feet so I couldn't rotate my ankles in either direction. Then I just stood there with my knees slightly bent and my feet slightly bent and tried to walk, and that's how I came up with Edgar's walk. It's ridiculous work, but it works.”

His role as The Cell's serial killer Carl Stargher--a man who kidnaps women, drowns them in a holding tank, then bleaches their skin until they resemble a child's doll--similarly forces the actor to peer at the audience from behind a mask of makeup. He appears as both demon and snake, clad in horns and scales, and as the fey, frightening king of a demented land that exists only in his demented mind. It's sometimes hard to tell if he's any good in the role, because director Tarsem Singh has fabricated a movie in which visuals overwhelm actor and audience. Plot and performance are rendered meaningless in Singh's surreal dream world.

Still, D'Onofrio takes nothing for granted, struggling to reveal a little humanity beneath the body paint and nipple rings; he finds the man, if not the tortured child, beneath the freak show. It's clear he prefers making films such as The Whole Wide World and Steal This Movie!, but he doesn't cheat even when acting against a blue screen. He speaks often of the work that goes into a role--the hours of research involved, the need to devour writings about and drawings by the criminally insane before shooting commenced on The Cell--the way an architect might before designing a skyscraper. D'Onofrio is a craftsman.

“Some of the roles I've played are more heartfelt, and some of them are just plain old hard work,” he says. “The Cell was just plain old hard work. I needed things to make sense for me. I needed to define the difference between me and these people who commit these horrible acts. I needed to know what defines us--where is the defining line between us and them--and to acquire that, I had to do this extensive nightmarish work and expose myself to the most horrific things. It was terrible.