Jeffrey Dean Morgan: The WATCHMEN Interview

Under the Hood: The Tears of the Comedian

With the long-awaited arrival of Watchmen, it’s a whole new ball game for both the super hero film genre, and for actor Jeffrey Dean Morgan.

By Terry Keefe

(Note: This article is appearing in this month's Venice Magazine.)

Watchmen was the first comic to make me a little bit scared of super heroes. It also abruptly killed any lingering childhood fantasies of ever wanting to be one. Having read super hero comics since literally the day I could put the words in the thought balloons together, Watchmen arrived as a comics fan’s equivalent of a neutron bomb, not to mention a major reality check, during my mid-teens, in 1986. (And yes, they were still called comic books then, as the term “graphic novel” took many years to catch on, even though Watchmen was to eventually become the most revered graphic novel of all time.) Written by Alan Moore with art by Dave Gibbons, Watchmen was the first comic, along with Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, to actually explore what type of people would choose to be costumed adventurers, and the answer wasn’t a pretty one. The masked heroes in Watchmen are many things, including psychopaths, megalomaniacs, fetishists, murderers, and rapists. The character who attempts to rape a super heroine in the Watchmen, in flashback, is also the one whose murder in the opening scenes by an unknown assassin drives the main plot: the Comedian, aka Eddie Blake. And, as you surely know from the billboards everywhere, Watchmen is now a huge motion picture, directed by Zack Snyder. The Comedian, featured on bus stations across town lighting his cigar with a flame thrower, is played by actor Jeffrey Dean Morgan. A feature film of Watchmen is something that fans of the novel never really expected to see, much less one which was great. As an unabashed fan who was not going to be satisfied easily on this one, I’m thrilled to say that both the film and Morgan’s performance are sensational. More on Morgan’s work as the Comedian in a minute, but first, a quick rundown on his character’s complicated backstory is in order. (Just a note to Watchmen neophytes: there are a few spoilers throughout the article.)

As mentioned earlier, the Comedian is murdered as a 69-year old man in his New York City apartment in the beginning of Watchmen, which takes place in an alternate universe version of 1985, similar in many ways to our version of the 80s but with some crucial differences. The main plot then kicks in as a murder mystery of sorts, as the last active costumed vigilante, Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) starts to investigate what he believes to be a conspiracy against all the masked heroes who were active years before, prior to the passage of the Keene Act, which outlawed costumed vigilantes. Rorschach’s investigation brings him back in touch with former colleagues and teammates Dan Dreiberg, aka Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson), Silk Spectre II, aka Laurie Jupiter (Malin Akerman), Ozymandias, aka Adrian Veidt (Matthew Goode), and Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudrup), the only one of them to have actual super-powers. And in flashback, we also learn of the forefathers of this last group, the Minutemen, who were the first costumed heroes back in the 1930s, when the novelty of the masked adventurers made the heroes popular and they were treated for a short time like film stars. The Comedian joined the Minutemen when he was just 16-years old, and he had the devil in him, to say the least, even then. After a meeting at “Minutemen Headquarters,” he brutally beats and tries to rape Sally Jupiter (Carla Gugino), the original Silk Spectre and the mother of Malin Akerman’s character. When costumed heroes are banned, the Comedian starts to work directly for shadowy parts of the U.S. government as the ultimate special agent, and he becomes a pivotal part of some of the more notorious moments in this fictional U.S. history. The Comedian is revealed as the shooter on the Grassy Knoll who kills JFK, and then, along with Dr. Manhattan, he helps win the Vietnam War for the U.S. in just a few months, committing many more atrocities along the way. Without the Vietnam War to drag down the march to power of the military-industrial complex, President Nixon is re-elected to five terms of office. Something very bad happens to Woodward & Bernstein along the way, also likely at the hands of the Comedian. He’s one part Captain America, the iconic Marvel Comics hero who represented all the classic virtues of truth, justice, and the American Way, but crossbred with the neocon philosophy, to create a masked monstrosity whose life story parallels that of this version of America. Triumphant and embolded by victory in WWII, the Comedian helps the U.S. achieve greater hegemony worldwide, but he is scarred by Vietnam, even though victory in this reality is swift. As the story of Watchmen begins, the United States and Russia are on the brink of nuclear war. An elderly Nixon huddles in his War Room with the nuclear football. And the Comedian himself is murdered….by an even far more insidious force looking to take over power in the world.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan has perhaps the most difficult role in a film which is filled with them. The Comedian is the one main character whose life straddles the multi-decades of the story, although thankfully he has some of the best lines as ammunition along the way. A complete nihilist, the Comedian deals with his embracement of man’s darkness by telling jokes about it, although they aren’t exactly of the “knock-knock” variety. Life itself is one big cosmic gag to him, and in that regard, he’s one part Joker, one part Loki, one part Robin Goodfellow, with a touch of Rambo. Morgan also succeeds at the tremendously challenging task of making the Comedian a somewhat sympathetic character. It’s the Comedian who discovers first what the world is about to become in the climax of the story, and even he is horrified by it. It turns out that the ultimate black hole of a man has a heart after all, which he reveals in a teary breakdown during a late-night break-in of the apartment of his former enemy, the cancer-stricken Moloch. His time has come. He’s a leftover. And he knows that what is coming down the pike is going to make him look like Clark Kent.

It’s shaping up to be a huge, career-redefining year for Morgan, who up until this point was best known for his role as Denny Duquette on “Grey’s Anatomy”, as well as his work as John Winchester on “Supernatural.” He is now poised to become a significant leading man in features.

I started our talk off by handing Jeffrey the dog-eared, original graphic novel of Watchmen that I purchased back in early 1987.

Here’s proof that I’ve been preparing for this interview for a very, very long time, Jeffrey. 22 years.

Jeffrey laughs and eagerly flips through this classic edition.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan: Hey, man, that's fucking brilliant, man! It’s got that old...smell to it, you know? I fucking love it. That's awesome! It’s so well-worn.

Many reads. When was it that you read the entire graphic novel?

Yeah, you know, my heyday was the '80s, I guess, but I didn't know about this thing. I got a call from my agent one day, who said Zack Snyder, the director of 300, is doing this thing, Watchmen, and they're interested in you for the role of the Comedian, and we're going to send you the material. And I was very excited, because I had just seen 300, and I thought what an amazing director he was, and instead of sending me a script, which, you know, that's what we see as actors are these scripts…it was a Xerox copy of the graphic novel, black and white, thick as a phone book, and I was like, “What the hell is this thing?” [laughs] I mean, literally, I was almost angry, like, “They expect me to read this?” You know, you could barely read it, and you couldn't see the pictures, really, and then I did read it, and opened it up, and on page three, the Comedian gets thrown out the window! And I called my agent -

You’re like, “I'm dead!”

“I'm dead, man!” I mean, what the hell? And on page three, no less! Not much of a run on this film. But, you know, it was made very clear to me that I was being a jerk-off and that I should continue reading. And I did, and I remember I got to the last page, and I put it down, and I was like, “What the fuck did I just read?” [laughs] And I put on a pot of coffee, and I started over, started on page one again. And I read it three times in about a twenty-seven hour period, and then went and had my meeting with Zack. And I went into this meeting now knowing the material pretty well, and I met this guy who has so much energy and so much enthusiasm, and I think I said two or three words. I said, “Hey, I'm Jeff.” That was really the extent of the conversation that I had, and then watched him for two hours, bouncing around this office, and when I say bouncing, I mean literally he never sat down. He had sketchbooks out, conceptual costume stuff at this point, pictures, you know, panels from the actual graphic novel art, floor to ceiling his office is just covered in this stuff. And at the end of the meeting, he looks at me, and he finally sits down, and he's like, “Are you in?” And that was the beginning of a tremendous ride. We're nearing our finish line now. It's been two years of my life kinda dedicated to this, and I've become, like you, a huge fanboy of Watchmen, and actually saw the movie for the first time two weeks ago. At a little screening room at Warner Bros. And it blew my mind. And for the first time I can remember - I'm hyper-critical of seeing myself onscreen, I generally don't like to see myself - but I watched this movie, and there were no signs of me in it. You know, it was the Comedian. And I was just watching this experience. I don't know how else to explain Watchmen. Even if you're not familiar with the comic book, what you're looking at here is a massive filmgoing experience. It transports you to this alternate reality that is scarily similar to what's going on now, which is crazy, since this came out in 1986!

History repeats itself over and over again. And there's the classic “Big Lie” at the end -

That's exactly right.

- and the masses buy that lie. They just go with it, because society would fall apart otherwise.

Mm-hm. You're a Watchmen fan [laughs]. You know it, you know it.

(The Watchmen graphic novel's version of the Comedian, above.)

Did you give the Comedian much backstory yourself, other than what was in the source material?

No, I mean, having this as the source material, there's so much there. It's really fleshed out in the pages. It's a lot to work with. And you never have that as an actor, you know, something like this. I mean, you could turn to a page [in the graphic novel] on any given scene, and I knew where to start the scene, I knew where to be sitting, I knew the posture to have. You’d think that would be kind of constricting, confining in a way, but I didn't find it [that way] at all. I found it to be this kind of amazing reference point, because then you start filling in the gaps between these panels. And bringing the Comedian to life, you know, what I found most fascinating about this particular character…..was I didn't hate this guy.

He’s done horrible things, but even the original Silk Spectre loves him.

Yeah, Silk Spectre loves him…and I loved him, and when I read it….why would you love a guy who commits the atrocities that he commits, the horrible acts that he commits? Even to the person I think he's in love with. I think he's completely in love with Sally Jupiter. He just…he's just a screwed-up motherfucker. I mean, he's just a brutal, cruel, nihilistic, amoral man, but I had to find the humanity in him, and I did in reading it. There was a…you almost feel sorry for this guy, you know? But as an actor to try to bite into that - because what's in the script, if I threw this graphic novel away, and didn't have this as a reference, and just saw the script - I don't know how I would do that. But seeing in the graphic novel, the scene with Sally Jupiter, when he finds out about Laurie, the pain that he's going through….Trying to get ahold of that as an actor was thrilling and a challenge and I loved every second of it.

Obviously, a lot of effort was made to match some of the graphic novel panels that are iconic from the book. It’s good to hear that it wasn’t limiting, because one can imagine that you spent a lot of time on the set matching your blocking to the panels.

Absolutely. It's funny, you know, people ask me about the script all the time, and they did a great translation. You saw the movie, they did a very faithful translation from book to script, but, you know, there was never a script around. I don't remember even looking at a script on the set.

You don't have to when you have this graphic novel.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And, you know, another dog-eared copy of this [lifts up the graphic novel] and when I say “dog-eared,” I mean beat to shit, was sitting on Zack's monitor for six months, and someone had it in their hand at all times. If it wasn't us, the actors, it was Zack, if it wasn't Zack, it was our D.P., Larry Fong, or it was our costumer, Michael Wilkinson. I mean, this was the bible on this movie, more so than anything I have ever seen. It was an amazing tool to have, as filmmakers.

What's tragic about the Comedian, and one reason why you do feel sorry for him, is that his time has passed. He represents the dark side of America, but an America that’s going to be phased out, for something far worse.

And he knows it. And I think that realization really hits him in a much harder way than I think you anticipate when you start this story. I think he realizes in that the mistakes that he's made in his life, too. But it's such a telling scene, you know, the scene with Moloch when he says to Moloch, “You're the closest thing to a friend I got -”

Right. And Moloch was his enemy.

His arch-enemy. I think that is so incredibly telling, and fucking sad, that here's a man that's lived sixty-nine years of a life of adventure, and out of that sixty-nine years, he is completely alone. And it's his fault. And it hits him in a hard way. So, that journey of discovery, from being a sixteen-year-old vigilante in the Minutemen, to this sixty-nine-year-old beaten-down monster of a man, is an amazing roller-coaster ride.

The scene where the Comedian attempts to rape Sally Jupiter. I remember reading Watchmen as a teenager, getting to that scene, and being completely stunned. But at the same time, realizing that someone had finally acknowledged what had always been a major unspoken element of the stories of costumed adventurers. They dress up in leather costumes, as bats, cats, and owls, and then fight each other. Of course these people would be fringe personalities and worse! Of course they have sexual perversions and are into S&M and are fetishists.

That's right. It's a fascinating thing about this graphic novel….when this came out in 1986, nothing like this had ever been done. Comic books, graphic novels, they were very much geared, I think, toward a younger crowd. And the characters kind of, were all living with their aunts, and drinking milk. Watchmen comes along, and they're these flawed, drunk, you know, rapists - people that should be in prison or a mental hospital. What would really happen if we had super heroes? Who would be those people that donned these costumes?

(Morgan and Carla Gugino's Betty Page-inspired Silk Spectre, above.)

Yeah, it was twenty-three years ago when it came out in the comics world, and now mainstream America is finally going to see it as a movie. I think it is going to blow people’s minds all over again, on a much larger scale. Movie audiences have never seen a hero like Batman naked and having sex, and people are going to see the equivalent of that here.

Yeah, I think it's gonna change the landscape. I think much like this comic book changed the landscape of comic books, I think this film's gonna change the landscape of the genre film especially. But maybe film. Zack, you know, we've been giving Zack shit all day for these posters which are up all over saying, you know, “The Visionary Director,” but, the fact of the matter is, you can't argue it. He is a visionary director, the way he has a grasp on technology, and film, and beyond that, he's an amazing director to work with as an actor. Compelling, and he works with you, and it's very much this team effort too.

This takes him to a whole different level. He’s going to be at the top of the A-list now. Because everyone knows what a tough adaptation this was.

“The unfilmable graphic novel.”

Terry Gilliam couldn’t get it made.

Yeah, and Greengrass.

Paul Greengrass, right. There have been a lot of actors attached over the years as well.

And everybody walked away shaking their head, “Can't be done.” And, you know, I didn't know it going in because, again, I didn't know this [indicates the graphic novel]. And so, going in, you know, you kind of go in wide-eyed, and I was just happy to fucking get out of bed, and not play a nice guy. But in a very short time-span, you figure out that Watchmen fans are a very special breed. They're very intelligent, and very smart, and they they’ve got really high expectations. So, I figured out very quickly, we all did, what this meant to people. You know, they weren't all real happy with Zack as director, or with us as actors. Just the fact that this was being turned into a movie offended a lot of these fans, so we felt a kind of a huge responsibility, to kind of do this right. I mean, more than anything I've ever been a part of. This thing is so specific, Zack was so specific in making this for the fans of this, that it felt like it was a little independent movie that we all had our own money sunk into, the way people cared about this.

Tonally, what type of direction did Zack give you all to make sure you were all on the same page? Because this is one big cast to manage in that regard.

You know what the great thing is….he hired a cast that a lot of people were [initially] disappointed with. He could have gone, I've heard him say, the Oceans 11 way, and gone with big-name people. It probably would have made people much happier, initially, that were fans of this. Maybe they would have felt safer. But what he did was…he hired, I think really good actors, that he trusted. There were no egos.

That might have been one of the secrets to making something this size work.

By putting us in it, the people that weren't the Tom Cruises or Jude Laws of the world, what you do is…you make this material the star of it. And that was more important than anything else. And Zack knew that well before any of us did. Visionary. You know? [laughs]

Let’s talk about the fight scene at the beginning of the film where the Comedian is murdered by an unknown attacker. Zach decided to show a little bit more of the attacker than is shown in the graphic novel, where the attacker is mainly seen as a pair of hands. Did you shoot it a few different ways so there were editing options of how much of the attacker to reveal?

Well, the attacker was always supposed to be in shadow. But what Zack really wanted to do was start this movie off with a huge bang.

It's one kick-ass fight scene.

(The iconic murder of the Comedian, above, complete with blood-stained Smiley Face button.)
Yeah, yeah, unbelievable. I trained, I was in Vancouver two months before we started shooting this movie, just training for that fight. Just the choreography of that fight. It’s a hell of a way to start a movie. Between that and the opening montage, I think we're off to a hell of a start.

That opening montage is also incredibly well done.

Yeah, it tells a whole history of these guys, in a seven-minute span.

And it mixes in this super hero world with re-creations of our actual history. That’s something which we’ve seen in comics but which is very new to the screen. Zack added a lot of great imagery of his own for the montage, using the novel as a jumping-off point. Such as the twisting of the iconic photo of the WWII soldier kissing the girl in Times Square, only now it’s the lesbian super hero, the Silhouette, and her girlfriend. And then there’s JFK. The JFK Assassination is only mentioned in passing, in the novel, as you know. But here, you see it. Now we know who was on the Grassy Knoll!

When we shot that, I was like, “Holy shit. This is gonna stir up some stuff!” But what a cool scene to shoot and see. Amazing.

Another of the most disturbing scenes in the film is in the bar in Vietnam where the Comedian shoots the pregnant girl in front of Dr. Manhattan, who has the power to stop the bullet but doesn’t. I assume Billy Crudrup, as Dr. Manhattan, must have been covered in motion capture devices. Let’s talk about shooting that scene with him.

Billy was basically, in essence, wearing white pajamas and a white skullcap, that was covered with blue LED lights, and he had black spots all over his face. You know, what's so amazing about his performance is it's all in his face. And you don't even see his eyes -they're these white sockets, you know, so that expression, you can't even see that. So everything is done with his face, and it's just another performance that knocked it out of the park. And acting with him, you know, there were the initial giggles that you get, when you saw him, because literally it was the human diaper, with blue LED lights. And basically, he was a lighting source for actors. And, you know, it's to his credit, he never broke. He could have easily gotten pissed at us for having giggles, and a lot of actors would. But to his credit, he knew that his tool was his face - the crack of a smile, the squint of an eye - that was his performance. The tilt of his head. And he was so in it, that very quickly, after like one day of working with him, you forgot about the silly outfit that he was wearing, and you bought him as Dr. Manhattan, man. He just had his shit down.

You played the Comedian at a lot of different ages. Mentally, how did you change it up?

You know, I'd like to say there was a point when he was maybe more naive in his younger years, but he was so kind of brutal, always. And cynical. You know, the minute he kind of crosses that line in the CrimeBusters meeting, there was really only one way to go with him….until he figures out the Laurie situation, I think, really. I mean, that's kind of the first moment when, you know, I'm searching for this human side. But the age thing, I mean, the makeup guys, everybody involved in this movie was so meticulous. When I looked at myself in the mirror at the age sixty-nine, man….

Really?

It was a scary reality. “Fuck, this is what it's gonna look like!” [laughs]

Let’s talk about another one of your co-stars, Jackie Earle Haley. He’s fantastic as Rorschach.

I've been sitting with him for the past three days. His portrayal of Rorschach is...scary. It's just scary, and spot-on. And, you know, the minute he opens his mouth and starts speaking from his journal, it sent chills up my spine. Unbelievable performance. I think everybody was just on the money…but, yeah, his performance, you brought him up, is just insane.

One of the trademarks of the novel is that there is so much detail that you pick up little new pieces of information each time you read it, both visually and in the text. The film is like that too. One example is at the end, when we’re outside the office of The New Frontiersman - you see a car parked there, and they don't make any big point of it by zooming in, but it's an electric car. The background detail of the shot subtly tells you of some of the smaller changes in the world since the big climax.

That's right. The car is plugged in and charging. And there are things in this movie like that…you'd probably have to watch the movie twenty times, like the book. You notice something new every time. I still notice things and I've probably read the thing forty times. I think the movie is filled with these Easter eggs, these nuggets. The attention to detail is just insane.

You’ve also recently shot Taking Woodstock, with Ang Lee.

Yeah, yeah, that's done, that's in the can. It’s kind of the behind-the-scenes of Woodstock and how that came to be. Working with Ang Lee. Are you kidding me [laughs]? It’s an amazing, amazing story. And working with Ang, I was like, pinch me, somebody pinch me. The last year has been one big “somebody-pinch-me” moment, you know?

And you're also starring in All Good Things, which was directed by Andrew Jarecki.

Andrew is one of the smarter people I think you'll ever meet in your life. This movie, the documentary he did, Capturing the Friedmans, scared the crap out of me. An amazing piece of work. So, this was his first [fiction] feature film, you know, and I was working with Ryan Gosling, and Kirsten Dunst, and Frank Langella.

Did you deliberately seek out material during the past few years that was very different from your role on “Grey's Anatomy?”

Absolutely. Sure. But I didn't know if somebody was going to give me the chance. Certainly, you know, I remember when I read Watchmen, I was like, “You know, they're never gonna fucking hire me for this.” And I think that's kind of the part of Zack that is so brilliant. He was like, “Fuck, you can do it, man.” He trusted me. Most directors would be like, “Are you kidding me? That's about as far away from a guy that can play this character as anyone I've ever heard of.” You know, wiping Denny out of people's minds is a hard thing to do. He made such an impact on so many people, but I think if anybody could do it, it's the Comedian, you know?

(Morgan and Katherine Heigel in "Grey's Anatomy," above.)

Will you do any more appearances on “Grey’s?”

No, as far as I know, I am dead. And I'm busy doing other things. But I owe that show everything. Shonda Rhimes is a brilliant writer and a good friend, and I wake up every morning and I thank her for giving me that opportunity. I owe everything to her, I really do, and I know it. You know, between that and “Supernatural,” it was a really great way to kind of kick-start a twenty-year career. Yeah, and I loved the opportunity, and I had so much fun working with the people over there, especially Katie [Heigel]. The chemistry we had was completely unique and special, and it was worth every second of it.

Let’s talk a little about your background and your path into acting.

Sure, I grew up in Seattle, outside of Seattle, a little city called Kirkland, Washington, then lived in Seattle, downtown Seattle, for years during the big grunge movement.

Good time to be there.

It was a great time to be there. I knew all those guys.

Did you?

Yeah, yeah. I knew a lot of Mother Love Bone. They turned into Pearl Jam, I knew them. Some of the Soundgarden guys.

Were you a musician at all?

I was, but I had no musical talent whatsoever. I just couldn't do it. Believe me, at that time, everybody was a musician that I knew, and I just couldn't do it. No, I fiddled around, kind of made a living with various ridiculous jobs, and then on the side I was painting, and I used to sell my artwork at coffee shops.

Do you still paint?

You know, I haven't in a while, but I would love to. I had moved to New York for a little while, did some graphic art, went back to Seattle, continued doing graphic art, and then I moved a friend down to L.A. I drove the U-Haul down, and he was an actor, and I met somebody who said, you know, you should give this a shot. And I did, and I got this horrible Roger Corman movie really quickly after being in Los Angeles. And I didn't know really what a mark was, or anything, but I fell in love with it. I loved the art of acting, and wanted to learn. I embraced it, and spent twenty years chasing that dream, and really kind of came to the end of the rope. And then, you know, in a quick six month span of one summer, my life changed. And here I am talking to you.