Bobby Cannavale on Taking the Lead, Disappointing Scorsese, and Asking Pacino for a Favor

Bobby Cannavale still sounds a little traumatized from 2016. He’d spent years developing HBO’s Vinyl with none other than Martin Scorsese , starring in the drama as a coked-out record executive circa 1973. Cannavale himself earned great reviews, and the show was well-received by critics overall. But it was treated as DOA by the network, poorly rated, and ultimately did not return for a second season. “All these things seemed to conspire against us,” the New Jersey native says now. “I was shocked, frankly, by the reaction to it. I did feel like we’d created something special. When something that has that much profile fails like that, I couldn’t help but feel like I let Marty down.”

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It’s an unfamiliar feeling for Cannavale. The veteran actor has built an impressive list of credits on stage and screen, between Tony-nominated breakouts in Mauritius and The Motherfucker with the Hat and his explosive guest turns on everything from Will & Grace to Boardwalk Empire , both of which earned him Emmy awards. Nowadays, he’s mostly settled back into his character-actor sweet spot; he has a juicy supporting part, for instance, as Jennifer Lopez ’s abusive partner in the upcoming sports drama Unstoppable .

But this year also marked Cannavale’s first-ever lead role in a movie: Ezra , a throwback indie helmed by Tony Goldwyn and co-starring Robert De Niro, Whoopi Goldberg, and Cannavale’s partner Rose Byrne. (It was released back in May and is now available on VOD.) As a struggling stand-up comedian raising an autistic son (played by newcomer William Fitzgerald ), Cannavale shines in the kind of sensitive, emotional part he doesn’t often play. As with Vinyl , he spent years helping develop the project, and now feels passionately about keeping it in the conversation—giving us the chance to look both backward and forward at a career that keeps getting more interesting.

Vanity Fair: Ezra came out back in the spring. You’ve been bringing it back into the conversation recently, among noisier titles. What has that been like?

Bobby Cannavale: This is the first time I’ve been a lead in a movie. I’m peaking late. And I’ve never produced a film before. I don’t really keep my ear that close to the ground on business things, just because I’m just too busy with my family and my little kids. So on this one, I’ve been more attuned to that kind of thing. I really intimately understand the challenges facing a small movie anyway; I’ve been in a lot of independent films.

It is an uphill battle. I have this other movie, Unstoppable , that’s out at the same time, and I could really see it as a comp. Those guys are out every night just trying to sell this movie. They’re all over the place. Every night Jennifer [Lopez] is out there with Jharrel [Jerome] telling people about Unstoppable , and I get one night [for Ezra ]. We’re really a little engine that could. I’m getting a real inside look at what it takes to push a tiny movie like this up the hill, and it’s really hard, man. I got Al Pacino to host a screening at CAA so that they’ll come, which he did last night, which was really nice. He and Sherry Lansing.

You facilitated that with Al?

I did. I just asked him. He’s such a good friend and I don’t ask him for anything really ever, but I did ask him to do this for me—and he was gracious and wonderful as he always is. He was like, “I’ll do anything for you.” He sat there and he said hello to everybody and that was really helpful. But it’s a learning experience for me. Thank God I’m good friends with Al, because he puts asses in the seats. But I really believe in the movie. Usually I’m just an actor for hire, but I was in it on the ground floor trying to put this whole thing together. I do feel a sense of accomplishment, and I really would like it to get as much exposure as possible.

That makes me think of your breakout in The Station Agent , which is one of my favorite movies of yours and a title that was also very small.

21 years now. That’s nuts. I remember everything about that movie, because it took forever to get made. It took us four years of doing readings for different people, for small independent companies. Getting rejection letter after rejection letter because people wanted to recast Pete [Dinklage]. I can’t tell you how many studios were willing to take the movie on, so long as you can just recast Pete with other A-list type actors who could play the role. And just “forget that he’s a dwarf,” when really one of the fucking points of the movie was that he was this outcast.

I remember Pete and I taking the bus from the little house that the producer rented for us into Park City, and nobody knowing who we were. Us stepping off the bus, and the first person we saw was Pauly Shore passing out flyers for his movie. And everything changing 12 hours later when the movie premiered at Eccles. Pete could not walk around. It was an incredible experience. Then the bidding for it, and Harvey [Weinstein] buying it for Miramax. The attention that the movie got when it came out, the critics loving the movie, it winning all those awards at Sundance, I’ll never forget it.

It also fucked me up because that was the first movie I’d ever really had a good part in, and so I just thought, “Well, this is how it’s going to be every time!” I’ve never had another experience like that.

What’s a movie where you look back and wonder why it didn’t connect in that way?

Fuck. Well the biggest one for me was Vinyl . Another one that was years in the making, and it was just in Marty’s pocket for years, getting ready to make that movie—and that, for all intents and purposes, is a Martin Scorsese movie. It’s a two-hour pilot. That was one of those ones that you go, “Well, shit, it really didn’t get put out the right way.” You can Monday morning quarterback these things: We really were screwed out by circumstances that we didn’t have any control over. Whether it was the fact that HBO didn’t promote it as a new Martin Scorsese movie, they didn’t let their audience know it was a two-hour pilot, they didn’t really take advantage of what they had, they premiered us after Girls —didn’t make any sense. We premiered at 10:00 at night for a two-hour pilot.

I would imagine, as it’s a lead in a Scorsese project, that it still felt major to do it, right?

Even bigger than that, I felt like I was on a creative journey with Marty that lasted years. There was a window there between Boardwalk Empire —he was so impressed with that character that I played and with my work on the show, that he took a big interest in me. So it was years of prepping that show and talking so much about it. I felt like the bubble we created resulted in something that was really unique and special, and a different way of storytelling, certainly for television, than I’d ever seen. To just be brushed aside felt really disappointing. Marty was so kind and so generous to me by offering me something after: The Irishman . But yeah, it’s always felt to me like a little smudge on his career. I know how much that meant to him. I can’t help but feel like, “Fuck, why couldn’t that be successful? The one thing that I did with Martin Scorsese is the one thing that wasn’t successful?”

When you came off of that show, did you find your profile increased? How was the work coming in?

That’s a good question, dude, because the truth is it wasn’t great. I had everybody telling me, “It wasn’t your fault, it’s not your fault.” Marty was like, “It’s not your fault, it’s just business.” But that’s hard to accept because it’s your face that’s on the buses and on the billboards. I always described that period as the stinky year. I had a stink on me, and I could feel it. To add insult to injury, we got picked up for the second season—they let everybody know we’ve got a second season, and then they changed their mind. It was like a double fuck you.

I just kept it moving. I was like, ’Well, that’s the business.” My depression over it settled in three months later, and then it was real. I really did go to a dark place. I just thought, “Well, I’m never going to work again, because if something that Martin Scorsese and Terry Winter and Mick Jagger created didn’t work, and I was the star of the thing, then I’m going to have a stink on me forever.”

Of course, forever is not a word that really exists in this business. People come back all the time. The very first thing I did after that, like six months later, was this play called The Hairy Ape —this 100-year-old Eugene O’Neill play that I got offered. I couldn’t make heads or tails of that play, and it was this fancy British director and he really wanted me. It was the first time that I got an offer that was so enthusiastic. It was the greatest experience at that point in my life that I needed to have that I didn’t realize I needed to have, because creatively, I threw myself into that thing. I learned Mandarin. I took that really old material, and owned it in such a way that I maybe wouldn’t have been able to, had Vinyl been successful—since I wasn’t getting any other offers.

After Vinyl, you popped up in some great shows like Master of None and Mr. Robot . Were you saying no to other stuff, like broadcast-network material?

So my first success, where I didn’t have to work in a bar anymore, was because of John Wells. He gave me a great opportunity with the show Third Watch . Unfortunately for me, Third Watch was my first experience full-time working every day as an actor on something. I did 22 episodes of the first season, and I was self-aware enough to know that I didn’t want to continue to do that. That network grind and how they made decisions on who had storylines and who didn’t—I just wasn’t feeling it. I left that show in the second season and I thought, “Okay, well, now I’m just going to try to do things that I just think are interesting.” I had gone from making no money as an actor to making money on a network television show. I managed to save some money. That’s why I did Oz and I did 100 Centre Street . All these experiences just sort of piggybacked on top of each other and made me a better actor. I just figured I’m going to try to stay on this trajectory.

You seemed to have a lot of fun on Nine Perfect Strangers with Melissa McCarthy.

I really love Melissa. We’re good friends now. She called me about it, as she’s done many times. It’s funny: just yesterday, my son Jake —he’s filming this Scarpetta show with me. He’s playing young me. He sent me this random text and he was like—wait, I have to read it to you. [ Reads text ] He said, “Hey, Dad, I don’t know why I’m thinking about this, but I just remembered that your name in Nine Perfect Strangers was Smiley Hogburn. WTF? Why is your name Smiley Hogburn?” I said to him, “Because my character never smiles and that’s why they call him Smiley!” And then he was like, “My bad. That’s pretty tight.” [ Laughs ]

That was just interesting enough and different enough from anything I played. It’s so hard to not repeat yourself, especially if you just do as many jobs as I do. Sometimes I’ll pop up in something and maybe it doesn’t work. I don’t think my villain in Jumanji —it’s hard for me to watch because there’s no character there.

Did you feel that at the time? Or is it more looking back at it?

I did. My role might as well have been called “Bad Guy.” I tried to find as many colors as I could, but I don’t think that they had thought that character through as much as the other characters, let’s say. Jack [Black] is so great in that movie, that ensemble is so good. But I’ve played better bad guys than that guy. Ironically, that’s the one they pay you for. That’s the big huge studio movie. Those kinds of ironies are not lost on me. My whole career, I’m like, “I guess I’ve got to do this.”

I was talking to Pacino about that last yesterday. We went for a walk and we were talking about the words—if the words aren’t there, if the script’s not there, there’s only so much you can do. And unfortunately, it’s no secret that sometimes with these bigger projects, that’s the sacrifice you make. You take the exposure and the money, but the role’s not as interesting or dimensional as you want it to be.

You just reunited with Richard Linklater on Blue Moon , which I’m sure does not fall into that category. It’s set on the opening night of Broadway’s Oklahoma! right? What can you tell me about it?

It’s about Lorenz Hart. He’s coming into the bar at Sardi’s on opening night, and he’s trying not to have a drink. I’m the bartender at Sardis. It’s a great role, because he’s there at the bar vomiting his anxieties about the evening and about this woman that he’s in love with—and he’s gay and he’s confronting all of his insecurities, and I’m sort of like his shrink. It was an incredible experience. I’ve never seen Ethan [Hawke] be better. He’s one of my best friends. I’ve worked with him a ton of times, and the fact that we went all the way to Ireland to shoot this movie—it’s on one set, it takes place in New York City, and we were just really locked in. All we had to do was shoot that movie. We rehearsed for three weeks and we improvised in those rehearsals.

I do love the idea of a longtime New York actor like yourself doing a film set at Sardi’s—and filming it in Ireland.

[ Laughs ] We would crack up about it. We didn’t really think too much about what would be strange about it until all the background was in. All the background is Irish, and it’s something small like that—the audience isn’t going to notice, right? You feel like you’re in cahoots. Because you don’t want to talk to them too much because they’re all Irish, and you’re trying to get into the mode of being in New York. It doesn’t help that 55 background [actors] are just talking about Irish shit. Everybody in the cast, except for Margaret Qualley and Ethan and I, are English or Irish.

But Ethan and I have spent a lot of time at that Sardi’s bar—the real one before. It’s funny, Sardi’s is still a place that people come in and you go, “Wow.” Every time Ethan and I would go there, somebody would walk in. The last time we went there, we were like three drinks in, and Patti LuPone walked in. We got there right around 7:30 so that we could get there when everybody was leaving to go to the theater. Patti walked in at like 8:20—she had left a show because she had gone to see a particular actor who had called out, and so she didn’t want to stay. [ Laughs ] She came into Sardi’s and spent all night there. It was like a parallel to this movie. That happens every time we go there.