THAT chiseled jaw, those denim-blue eyes . . . not for nothing has Ed Harris become the Marlboro man of the movies: studly, strong and silent.
Lately, though, the one-time John Glenn and Jackson Pollock is a regular chatterbox – and no one’s more surprised than he is.
Blame it on Neil LaBute, whose monologue “Wrecks,” opening tonight at the Public Theater, is all Ed, all the time.
“After I do this show, I’m a lot more talkative than I usually am,” the 55-year-old says.
“I have a certain willingness to chat, chat, chat and let things just come out of my mouth, which I usually don’t do – ’cause the guy just talks!”
The guy, in this case, is a widower at a funeral home, who talks (and talks) about his late wife alongside her casket, breaking off now and then to light a cigarette.
“They’re herbal,” Harris confided at an Upper West Side café the other day. He was wearing a button-down shirt buttoned all the way up and a baseball cap pulled down low, but the waitresses were still thrilled when they recognized him.
“They’re not quite as toxic as real cigarettes, but they’re pretty brutal.
“I’m a smoker, but I promised my daughter I’d quit after the show.” He smiles ruefully. “The last time I promised that was when she was born, and that was 13 years ago.”
His daughter, Lily – his only child with Amy Madigan, the actress he married 23 years ago, when they were filming “Places in the Heart” – is one reason you don’t catch him onstage more often.
“If you’re doing Broadway, it’s a minimum six-month commitment,” he explains. “And my daughter’s growing up – I’d hate not seeing her for six months.”
And so, when LaBute sent him “Wrecks” – along with the offer to play it for just two weeks in Ireland (“I love Ireland!”) – he said yes. (Little did he know the New York run, originally about a month, would be extended three weeks, to Nov. 19.)
“I’m still getting used to this theater,” Harris says of the Public. “The night before, a lady in the front row had a cellphone that rang about six times. She couldn’t hear it – I think she was deaf. So I said, ‘Answer it,’ and she finally turned it off.
“The next line [in the play] was ‘in the silence of that moment’ – so at least it kind of worked!”
What also drew him to the play was the challenge of holding a stage, solo, for 75 minutes straight.
“I just try to keep doin’ things that interest me, that make me stretch a little bit,” he says. “I like to be a little bit scared of stuff – that’s always fun.”
That is why the next film you’ll find him in is “Copying Beethoven,” opening next month. And yes, he plays Ludwig – albeit with brown contact lenses and a curly gray wig.
The physical transformation was just part of it.
“I was like, wow, good luck – it was daunting to me,” Harris says. “I mean, he was the greatest musician who ever walked on the planet, arguably. I knew some of his major works, but . . . I didn’t know about him.”
So he learned. He read everything he could – he recommends the Maynard Solomon biography, by the way – and took lessons in piano and conducting. He even took violin lessons, to the chagrin of those around him.
“My dog would literally go like this,” he says, putting his arms up over his ears and wincing.
It was a big switch for a guy who sold the baritone horn he played in the Tenafly (N.J.) High School band to buy himself an MG Midget. For years, he says, his passion was football – until it stopped being fun.
“I was playing up at Columbia University,” he says. “You’d take a bus 100 blocks to Baker Field to practice, and the coaches [were] kind of stupid.
“It was 1969, 1970, and a lotta other things were going on in the world . . . I just didn’t care enough. I saw some theater that summer [in Oklahoma, where his parents had moved], and thought, literally, ‘Well, maybe I could do that.’ ”
In a career studded with Oscar nominations – and producing and directing credits – he has, he says, no regrets.
Well, maybe one:
“Stanley Kubrick asked me to play the sergeant in ‘Full Metal Jacket,’ and I turned it down,” he says, shaking his head.
“I don’t know what was going on with me at the time . . . but the chance to work with Kubrick! I don’t know what I was thinkin’!”