Frank Langella: actor vs. robot

On New Year’s Day, Frank Langella will be 75, but the film career of the towering actor has never been better. He single-handedly raises the level of the minimalist SF film Robot & Frank.

Robot & Frank is set in the near future and is about a former burglar who starts to become demented and whose son saddles him with a robot that does all his housework and keeps an eye on his health. Solitary Frank, however, has other plans with the intruder in his life. The fact that this fable about dehumanised society touches many people is entirely to the credit of Frank Langella. He is in the best form of his life. See the sinister man with half a face in The Box, and especially also the peerless performance as the president in Frost/Nixon. We ran into Langella at the American Film Festival in 
Deauville.

Have you not started suffering from any age-related ailments yet?
Frank Langella: Fortunately, I have been spared anything like that so far. I do worry every morning that everything still works. But at the moment, I feel strong and healthy. I do realise that that might change suddenly. But that might also happen to a four-year-old. You have to take life as it comes.

Were you able to give the director and writer any tips?
Langella: I liked the premise of the film. People don’t understand sufficiently what it is like to be seventy, and to have been walking around for six decades. The mind is still sharp, but the body starts to shut down. You get slower. You can’t do something as well as you used to and you get angry, then anxious, and then even angrier, at yourself and at the world. Not remembering how to spell a certain word, not being able to put the right name to a familiar face, being offered a hand to help you cross the road: I told Jake [Schreier, the director – NR] how it feels and he incorporated it into the character.

There are not many lead roles for people of your age.
Langella: That’s right. But I can’t complain. Over the past ten years, I have been offered the most interesting roles of my career. And it doesn’t stop. I will be on Olivier Dahan’s set to film Grace of Monaco soon. And I am at an age when you generally only get offered the role of a grandfather or a clerk at a desk.

When does that start to change?
Langella: I have actually always tried to play characters who are older than me. I always looked forward to the years that would follow my years as a leading man. I will probably always find work now because I am not as vain as I used to be.

You say that you have been lucky over the past ten years. Perhaps you were just unlucky in the preceding half century.
Langella: No, I wasn’t. But I have had precisely the career that I wanted. I have the career I have now because I was prepared to pay the price for my mistakes and for my tendency to isolate myself from the group. I am a loner. In my twenties and thirties, my contemporaries were more successful than I was. Instead of a film star, I became a theatre star. I was extremely arrogant and turned down quite a lot of films. But oddly enough, all those mistakes made me better. My contemporaries are written off, have started breeding horses, or have taken to drinking on the couch. I’m still working.

Robot & Frank ●●
US, 2012, dir.: Jake Schreier, act.: Frank Langella, Liv Tyler, Peter Sarsgaard, Susan Sarandon, 89 min.