On the Money
He might be reprising his infamous role as corporate raider Gordon Gekko yet Michael Douglas tells us: “It’s gone from career-kids-wife to wife-kids-career”
WORDS | FREDERICK AGGER
Photography: © Corbis
AN OSCAR-WINNING ACTOR-PRODUCER WITH A 30-YEAR BIG SCREEN CAREER and a decade-long marriage to one of the most glamorous actresses in Hollywood – you could be forgiven for thinking Michael Douglas might be a touch arrogant. Indeed, I imagine him arriving for our interview dressed in a designer suit and puffing away on a large Cuban cigar, flushed with success. So it’s something of a surprise when he turns up in a well-worn casual ensemble – black jeans and collared jumper.
“All my clothes are from the movies,” he grins, running his hand through his still-thick mane of greying swept-back hair. “That’s the good thing about doing movies.”
Given most Hollywood stars refuse to wear outfits more than once, let alone recycle used clothes from film sets, this frugal behaviour from a man whose fortune is estimated at around $240 million is somewhat unusual. But, now 65, Douglas is not your typical headline-grabbing star – even if he still regularly fascinates the tabloids. In the past, there have been stories about treatment for sex addiction (entirely made up in the wake of Douglas’s hit thriller Basic Instinct by “a very smart British editor,” he says) and bouts of cosmetic surgery. More recently, his son Cameron, from his 23-year marriage to first wife Diandra, pleaded guilty to selling drugs – a charge that sees him facing a possible 10-year jail sentence.
Not that this has affected his mood. With his wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones, 40, currently starring in the Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, and their two young children in school, Douglas has taken time out to fly to Europe. Partly to attend the Goldene Kamera awards in Germany, where his good friend Danny DeVito was receiving a lifetime achievement award. Partly to come to Paris, to take part in a conference about nuclear disarmament – a subject that’s remained close to his heart ever since he produced and starred in the 1979 film about a disaster at a nuclear power plant, The China Syndrome.
He’s also in town to discuss his latest project – which sees the much-anticipated return of his most iconic character. Many actors have a signature role. One part that, above all others, is beloved by the fans and favoured by the critics. For Douglas, it’s unquestionably Gordon Gekko, the villainous, sharp-suited corporate raider at the heart of Oliver Stone’s 1987 classic, Wall Street. Gekko was the character who single-handedly made red braces fashionable for that decade. Roaring across the big screen with nuggets like “lunch is for wimps”, he won Douglas an Oscar, and the respect of real-life traders everywhere. As the actor puts it: “He’s like a rock hero to them.”
Admitting it’s been the “most quoted part” of his career is saying something when you consider Douglas has been in such zeitgeistdefining films as Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct and Disclosure. But it’s not hard to picture the scene – Douglas in a bar, surrounded by a posse of city boys. “Usually, they’re a little drunk,” he admits. “They come up and go, ‘You’re the man. You’re why I got into this!’ I’m like, ‘But I was the bad guy!’ And they go, ‘Nah, nah, nah! A little larceny is OK.’ They love the power. They love the sexy clothes. They like it that this guy has such confidence.”
It’ll be interesting to see how they feel when they rediscover their hero for the long-awaited sequel, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. With Stone again at the helm, this time we see Gekko fresh out of prison after an eight-year sentence. The film was due to be released in April, until distributors pushed back the date back to fit in around Cannes. Yet this delay doesn’t dampen its star’s enthusiasm for his old role.
“Basically, I think he’s been spending his time in jail reviewing his personal life,” says Douglas. “He’s so empty over what’s happened.” Unable to trade, he is looking to make amends with his estranged daughter (Carey Mulligan), who is dating a young city trader (Shia LaBeouf).
While the original film symbolised the excess of the ’80s – not least in Gekko’s own claim that “greed, for lack of a better word, is good” – the sequel arrives with the world having suffered a brutal economic crash. Douglas agrees that recent events made it the perfect time to bring Gekko back. “The first one, it was rock’n’roll. The market was wonderful. The big difference was that back then your crooks were individuals, in terms of insider trading, and now it’s almost done by companies.”
Douglas admits he lost around 40 per cent of his own investments during the recent downturn. Fortunately, he sat tight. “I didn’t do anything. I just looked and stared! Then it all came back – at least to where it was. Then I got out.” He explains that up until last year he used to manage his own money. “I’ve decided, with my age and all that, to try to find a trustee. I don’t feel very exciting, very dangerous, now. I feel very old fashioned. No more rock’n’roll for me. All of a sudden I like Australian bonds, at four per cent!”
If this suggests that Gekko and Douglas are not so alike, there’s no question that the character fits neatly into the actor’s body of work. Flawed alpha males litter Douglas’s career – from his unfaithful husband in Fatal Attraction to his unhinged white-collar worker in Falling Down, to his troubled tycoon in The Game. “I don’t believe in heroes,” he says. “Maybe because I don’t see many. I’m a product of the Vietnam War. I’m not a product of World War II, where there were good guys and bad guys. The Vietnam War was a much more grey area. So I like to do parts about characters that dig a hole for themselves and are redeemed.”
Given Gekko reinvents himself in this new outing, I wonder if Douglas feels he ever has. “I guess my best reinvention was my wife!” he smiles. “That’s a reinvention!” He seems as smitten with the Chicago star as the first time they were introduced at the 1998 Deauville Film Festival. “I told Catherine the first time I met her that I wanted to be the father of her children – on the day that I met her!” he laughs. “That was pretty stupid! It worked out OK! I think it was because I found that we had the same birthday. It wasn’t too hard, y’know?”
The pair wed in November 2000 – and have since become parents to Dylan, now nine, and Carys, six. Douglas, whose divorce to Diandra was finalised just six months before he tied the knot with Zeta-Jones, admits his priorities have “reversed” since he wed for a second time. “It’s gone from career-kids-wife to wife-kids-career. Catherine being 25 years younger, in the prime of her career… all of that. I always try to be flexible. If you have children at my age, you want to be around to enjoy them.” So what’s the secret of a long-lasting union? He grins, impishly. “You mean, besides Viagra?”
The only thing they haven’t produced is an on-screen partnership. While they both featured in the Oscar-winning drugs drama Traffic in 2000, they shared no scenes. But acting together is something they’ve considered. “We had a picture we were developing we were going to shoot in India – a caper along the lines of [his 1984 hit] Romancing the Stone. Except, she was going to have some young, good-looking stud as a leading man, and I was going to play the villain. I’d keep looking at this guy when he’s seducing her – like I’m going to kill him!” It’d be a brave actor indeed to make out with Douglas’s wife right in front of him.
Douglas, of course, has been a producer almost as long as he’s been an actor. While he got his first break as a television actor on cop show The Streets of San Francisco, he left it after four years to produce an adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel about an insane asylum, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. “I never wanted to produce. I just loved that project and how it worked out. I finally got the financing together for Cuckoo’s Nest, and I told the producer I wanted to leave the show. And he was like, ‘You want to leave a hit show?’” In the end it was a wise decision – with the resulting film scooping Douglas a Best Picture Oscar.
Not that this helped his acting career. It wasn’t until 1987 – with the release of Wall Street and Fatal Attraction – that he finally emerged from the shadow of his legendary father, Spartacus star Kirk Douglas. “Before that I was a producer, and a television actor trying to make it in movies,” he says. Even Romancing the Stone and its 1985 sequel Jewel of the Nile weren’t enough to raise his profile. He recalls John Carpenter’s Starman, which won star Jeff Bridges an Oscar nomination: “I produced it. But I was not approved by the studio to play the role. I was a television actor.”
You might think he’d resent his father – who never wanted him to become an actor – for overshadowing his career for so long. Not only that but Douglas, one of four sons, rarely saw Kirk during his East Coast childhood. He shakes his head, though:
“I admire him so much. I have a lot of love for him. How he’s conducted the third act of his life…” He points out that his father, now 93, who has had a pacemaker fitted and both knees replaced, has just finished performing a one-man show that he wrote. “The truth is, we get along pretty well. There’s never really enough to write for the press. Love stories, they don’t sell, right? What we want is some good conflict!”
Still, it’s evident the father-child bond weighs heavily on Douglas – with his first wife accusing Douglas of not being “a proper father” to their son Cameron when they divorced. Echoing Gekko’s need to make amends with his daughter in his new film, perhaps this is why he’s put his career second to his new family. “The luxury of waking your children up in the morning, having breakfast with them, taking them to school… these are little joys that accumulate in creating a bond,” he says. “This is part of our business. We’re gypsies – we’re away a lot.”
Douglas is next set to reunite with Steven Soderbergh, who directed Traffic, for a brief role in Knockout, a hardcore martial arts picture, and there’s still a chance that they may get together for a biopic about the flamboyant American pianist Liberace. He admits he also still wants to produce. “Every once in a while, when I think I’m going to close my office up, and not keep producing and just be an actor and wait until a part comes, I can’t. It keeps you busy. It keeps you active. It’s something you can do rather than just react.” Even so, would he ever be happy dropping off the A-list? He shoots me a look. “In Hollywood? No! Who wants to be on the C-List?”
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is released in the UK on 24 September
