The actor: Robert Davi, a veteran character actor best known for playing bad guys, heavies, and dirtbags in movies like 1985's The Goonies, 1995's Showgirls, and the 1989 James Bond film Licence To Kill. He's also played his share of lawmen in movies like Die Hard and the '90s television show The Profiler. Davi makes the transition from actor to writer-producer-director with The Dukes, a genial comedy/drama/heist film that again casts him as a small-time criminal, though this time, he's also the hero. Davi is also an outspoken conservative who recently appeared in David Zucker's An American Carol and a commercial for Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman, alongside fellow Republican entertainers Stephen Baldwin, John Ratzenberger, Victoria Jackson, and Pat Boone.
The Dukes (2008)—"Danny"
Robert Davi: Well, people that know me say that's probably the closest role to who I am. Danny is an absolute character, but it's not me playing an FBI guy. I mean, I've sung. I've had kids. He's a lot closer to me in terms of just being a regular guy who's more like who I am than a lot of the characters I've played, for good, bad, or indifferent.
I grew up watching Italian neorealist films with my Italian immigrant grandparents. So I always looked at those films, I'm talking about [Vittorio] De Sica, [Roberto] Rossellini, [Luchino] Visconti, and [Federico] Fellini—all these greats. I always looked at these films not for performance as a young boy. I was interested in the guys telling the story, the whole auteur aspect of it. So I had that impulse back then. I've always written to some extent. When you're playing a character, you write down tons of information about the character. I've always worked on the scripts for roles I've played. Even movies like Goonies, the opera singing was not part of Chris Columbus' script. Then in the '70s, when I was studying with Stella Adler—
AVC: How old was Stella Adler at that point?
RD: Oh, Stella was in her early 60s, late 50s. She was really at the top of her game. She was absolutely astounding, Stella, at that time, because she was just a magnificent person. She wanted to impart. She had the knowledge of all her life's experience and technique, and she really wanted to give it to the students. So she was just so impassioned. I remain very close to her. But anyway, I read an article about steel workers getting laid off, and people doing something in their lives and then no longer being able to do that. It was kind of a shift in me. Kind of made me aware that not everything is secure. Then my dad got laid off, and then I read a book by Alvin Toffler called The Third Wave, where he talked about the Industrial Age and the Technological Age, and how in the transition, there was going to be a whole shift in the economy, people and jobs and workforce. Then I did a film, Contract On Cherry Street, and I met Jay Black, who was a part of Jay And The Americans. I then said "You know what would be interesting? To tell a story about this, people losing what they've held onto, but tell it with a sense of fun, a sense of lightness and unpretentiousness, and use a doo-wop group as a backdrop." I wrote the first draft in 1986. I wrote about 80 pages with scenes and character descriptions. Then I met my friend, a guy who's collaborated with me since then, James Andronica. We wrote the first draft in 1986.
AVC: So this is something you've been carrying around for decades?
RD: Yeah, I have. Then I got the financing a couple of years ago. My cousin who ran two big hedge funds—one's for 11 billion, the other is for 9 billion—graduated number one at Columbia University and has his Ph.D. in political science, and he basically told me the economy was going to tank. He said something was going to happen and be pretty devastating economically, and he knew about The Dukes. When I got the financing for the film, I did one more draft with the cast and everybody, and also with the economy being difficult. So it has a timely message.
Charlie's Angels (1978)—"Richie"
RD: My God.
AVC: What do you remember about that?
RD: Giving Farrah Fawcett a foot massage. We were just sitting down waiting—you know, Tommy Lee Jones did a Charlie's Angels. When I found out that he did it, I said, "Okay, absolutely." It was the one where there was a reunion and all four girls were there, you know what I mean? So it was a big thing and we're sitting there with Farrah and just chatting, and I kind of think toes are cute, and one thing led to another, and we were on the set, and I gave her a foot massage. I remember that, and I remember getting dunked in the Marina del Ray, where the boats are. Farrah was the thing back then. She was the "it" girl.
AVC: What can you say about your character?
RD: Beyond being a bad guy, I couldn't tell you much about Richie. I don't have a strong recollection of Richie. What I remember mostly was giving Farrah that foot massage.
The Incredible Hulk (1979)—"Rader"
RD: Rader? Was he a guard? He was a guard. He was a guard of a prison. I put somebody in a hot box. I remember that. I remember wearing some kind of uniform. I remember doing some kind of subtle Southern accent on the character, making him a kind of good ol' boy.
AVC: When you're doing that sort of role, are you concerned with making it as memorable as possible?
RD: Well, there's two different trains of thought on that. One is "Let's make something memorable," but that doesn't necessarily service the piece. I try to play a character as truthfully as possible. That's why some roles, you remember it and they stand out, and other roles, they don't. Also, it's how they're written and positioned. You did it for exposure. You did it to make money, to make a living. You put everything you could creatively into them, but they weren't things that you necessarily invested a lot of yourself into.
The Gangster Chronicles (1981)—"Vito Genovese"
RD: Yes, that was a series we did: about 13 episodes. That was a real character based on historical fact, and that was very interesting to me.
AVC: Did you do a lot of research?
RD: I did a tremendous amount of research on it with whatever I could find. The Internet was not accessible at that time, but I read all the books and did all the research and spoke to all the people that I could about Genovese and about the time period. Over the years, I've met people that have seen that, and they still remember that performance. People loved that show. I was told Meyer Lansky used to tape the show and watch it on his Sunday afternoon. It got back to me that he liked my performance very much.
City Heat (1984)—"Nino"
RD: What I remember there was, initially, I was hired by Blake Edwards—who I then worked for, years later, alongside [Roberto] Benigni. But initially, Blake Edwards had seen The Gangster Chronicles in Europe. He was in Switzerland. I got a phone call from my agent. It says, "Blake Edwards wants to meet you." I go to meet Blake Edwards, and Blake Edwards says, "I'm sitting in Switzerland with Julie and your face comes on the TV set. I want you to do my next picture, Kansas City Jazz, with Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds. You're going to play the bad guy." I say, "Terrific. Absolutely." So we made the deal. During the interim, Blake was a terrific guy and Clint was a terrific guy, but they didn't get along. They didn't see eye-to-eye for whatever reasons. I don't know what happened there. Blake left the project. Clint took it over. They got Joe Stinson, who I became friends with from there, who wrote "Go ahead. Make my day." Remember that line in Sudden Impact? Joe Stinson had written Sudden Impact, and he was now rewriting this picture. The character that I had was initially much bigger and was the bad guy. They then rewrote it. Made it two older guys to play the bad guys, and I was then delegated to a smaller character throughout the whole picture, playing this character Nino. My agent said, "Look, you got to pay or play. You can take the money and not do the part, or you can do the part and it's Warner Bros. and Eastwood and everybody, and it may be very beneficial in terms of contacts." So I took the part.
The creative, fun part that you'll find is that there's a scene in there when I get pulled by my tie. In the script, the Clint Eastwood character, who is a detective, comes over to the car and he motions for me to roll down the window. Then I roll it down and he grabs me by the tie and ties it to the outdoor mirror, to kind of disable me and take me by surprise. Well, I felt that that moment had two things. Clint Eastwood has such a huge mythical presence for the moviegoing audience. Also, him being a detective in the circumstance we were at in this picture, City Heat, we would have known about his reputation. So I said to the director, Richard Benjamin, who had taken over the picture over as director, "I want to try something." He said "We're going to try it to see what Clint does," and that was a big step, because he was Clint Eastwood, but I'm the guy who did my first movie with Frank Sinatra, so I'm not too intimidated. I'm respectful, but not intimidated.
So Clint comes to the door, and he motions [In Eastwood's rasp.] "Roll down the window." And I didn't roll it down all the way. I only rolled down an inch and a half. [Chuckles.] And he gives me that Clint Eastwood look. He goes [Eastwood rasp.] "Roll it down some more," which is in the picture. So I roll it down all the way, and then he grabs me by the thing, and he ties my thing up to the thing, and I'm there choking. And the other thing was, if I was going to humiliate myself that much, or if I was going to be that humiliated, then what was going to be a challenge was making the director and the crew think I was actually choking to death at a certain point. So as the car drove away, they were all getting panicky and yelling, "Cut! Cut!" because they actually thought I was choking to death. So that's my recollection from that. There's a ton of stories, but that's enough there.
AVC: You'd imagine having Eastwood and Reynolds in the same movie together in 1984 would mean an automatic blockbuster.
RD: Yeah, it wasn't.
AVC: Why do you think it fell flat?
RD: You know, you never know in that kind of thing. I think that the idea of… Richard Benjamin was a terrific guy and a terrific director, but I think what maybe Blake Edwards had in mind might have been an interesting… Who knows what would have happened? It's hard to say. Blake at that time was still very vibrant, and it really could have struck gold. I don't know all of the inner workings there. I liked the Kansas City Jazz script. I even like the title Kansas City Jazz, so I assume it would have had a different atmosphere and different tonality, and for whatever reason it became what it is. So to analyze the needs of those two stars at the time, I couldn't really. One of the things I think is, they should have kept the bad guys younger, because that would have made the nemeses more lethal. Who knows?
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