It was a warm summer afternoon and Corey Stoll and I sat together at a table on the terrace of a clean, well-lighted café, watching the crowd going by.
Stoll is not a household name but he is a major player in "Midnight in Paris," a movie so strong and true and funny that it has remained in picture houses all summer long and made more money than any other movie from the director Woody Allen.
The boulevard was busy and the trees moved slightly in the wind. We drank black coffee and talked about bullfighting and fishing and fighting, and then we had brandy and got in an argument that led to a fistfight. It was a fine day.
Some of that is a lie.
Here is the truth.
We were supposed to meet at a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, but I got tied up at work and we talked on the phone instead. We talked about acting and the motion picture business and how Stoll played Ernest Hemingway in "Midnight in Paris."
There was no whisky and there was no fighting. But it was still a fine day.
Your performance was so delicious that I have no choice but to write the introduction to this interview in imitation Hemingway style. Did you have any sense of the kind of phenomenon this movie was going to be?
No. I expected it to get the attention that Woody Allen movies have been getting over the last decade or so. I knew it was going to get out there, and I knew that even if it ended up being a minor Woody Allen film, it's still going to last. But you never know how many people are going to see it.
But it's funny, because my girlfriend knew. We were shooting it in Paris, and she saw the people and the costumes and everything and said, "People are really going to react to this. This is going to be a big hit." I think I had lower expectations, but I'm glad that she was right.
Do people recognize you as Hemingway now, or does the fact that you wear a wig in the movie and have a shaved head in real life prevent that?
It's only happened a couple of times in New York and L.A. What happens is that people recognize from my time as Detective Jaruszalski on "Law & Order: Los Angeles," and if they're business savvy they may know that I also did this movie.
Ae you getting more scripts now, and different kinds of scripts?
All of the above. In theater, people have been putting wigs on me for years, and within that community the idea that I have more visual range was a given. And now it's opened things up a bit in Hollywood, too.
