The Sunday Conversation: For Danny Huston, it’s good to be king

Being a chameleon comes easily to third-generation Hollywood scion Danny Huston — son of director John, grandson of actor Walter and half brother of actress Anjelica. The nimble actor recently played Jack Kevorkian’s flamboyant lawyer, Geoffrey Feiger, in the HBO film “You Don’t Know Jack,” starring Al Pacino. And he’s on the big screen as King Richard I in the action adventure “ Robin Hood” with Russell Crowe.

How long did it take you to become Richard the Lionheart in “Robin Hood.” That looked like pretty intense hair and makeup.

It was. And contact lenses are really hard to deal with.

Why did you wear contact lenses?

Because Richard the Lionheart was known as having red curly hair and piercing blue eyes. My brother in the film, the soon-to-be king [Oscar Isaac] also wore contact lenses. We don’t really have a scene together so it was a way to genetically bring us together. But also living up to this romantic character that Richard I has become. There’s a statue outside Parliament in England where he’s riding a horse and it’s very regal and romantic. And [director] Ridley Scott speaks very much in painterly terms. So that was an image that he also had in his mind. Hence the contact lenses.

Was the shoot fun? Did you have to learn how to sword fight?

For “Robin Hood,” no I didn’t. Usually they ask actors if they can ride horses and actors say they can and then they get on the horse and they’re terrible. I will boastfully tell you I think I’m quite a good rider and may have impressed a few people on the set. So a lot of that riding is me on the horse, and picking up the flag and charging the castle was enormous fun. A little uncomfortable with the contact lenses and the beard and the helmet. Also because there’s a lot of weight with the armor.

Was that real chain mail?

Yeah. The one beautiful thing about working on a Ridley Scott movie is that all this stuff is wonderfully accurate, and I think you do feel the weight of the props and the wardrobe. Again, that painterly eye that Ridley has. I love to spend time on the set and observe directors work. Really, that’s why I got into acting. I was writing and directing my own films, and years were going by waiting for the eternal green light.

But you did get it with “Mr. North.”

I did, but I was going through development hell. At the time, directors out of the kindness of their heart gave me small parts in their films.

I think it’s interesting that the usual path in Hollywood is acting and then everyone wants to direct. And you took the exact opposite path. I assume you started out as a director because you were influenced by your father.

Yes.

Now that you have more clout in Hollywood as an actor, is that something you want to go back to?

Oh, I’m itching. I was just putting the finishing touches on a script last week. It’s a seedy tale of south of the border, in Tijuana. It deals with border issues and the hunt for the leader of a big drug cartel who we call the Fat Man. It’s based on a book by a man called Kent Harrington – “The Day of the Dead.”

I did the title sequence for [ John Huston’s film] “Under the Volcano.” I used to prepare my father’s cocktails for the daily rushes. In Mexico, he was drinking cuba libres. I brought him a rum and coke and he was not happy with it because it had too much Coca Cola in it – [in his father’s voice] ‘the coke should only color the rum’ – so I brought him a new drink. And we were looking at the title sequence and they were all very static, using papier-mâché dolls from the Day of the Dead. And he said, “Danny, why don’t you try to make this work? I want movement.” And I knew about this new snorkel camera that was sort of like a submarine upside down, so I could travel through the figures. And “Day of the Dead,” the story I have, has images like that throughout it. It would justify shooting the film in a slightly unconventional way.

In “You Don’t Know Jack,” was it trickier playing someone who’s still alive and did you meet Geoffrey Feiger?

I had the great luxury of meeting Geoffrey Feiger who was very invested in how I would portray him. He has a very generous heart and magnanimous ego. I met him two or three times before I started the film. Also just to hear him talk in such a loving way about Kevorkian made it evident that in a way it’s a love affair between these two characters.

You’ve worked with your sister, Anjelica, several times. Did you guys actually grow up together or did you become closer as adults?

We became closer as adults because of the age difference, so my youth in Ireland was 10 years later than her youth in Ireland. So my image of Anjelica as a child was this really cool girl who knew the Rolling Stones and was living in London. We didn’t really know who our parents were in relation to Hollywood. We just knew them in relation to projecting these scratchy prints of their work with a noisy projector in Ireland.