John Turturro on Channeling Grief for Pedro Almodovar’s ‘The Room Next Door’ and Turning Down ‘The Penguin’ Because of the ‘Violence Towards Women’
“Do you stick it out, or do you run away?” John Turturro asks.
When it came to his brother Ralph, Turturro remained by his side through his struggles with mental illness and his battle with cancer. Every time Ralph underwent another round of radiation, Turturro outfitted him in sunglasses and a hat. “It was important to him to look good,” he says.
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And he’d get on a microphone and talk to his brother throughout the treatment, assuming different voices and characters to keep Ralph distracted. “I would pretend I was Arnold Schwarzenegger, because he was my brother’s favorite,” says Turturro, who is 67. “After 12 sessions, I’d start to run out of material, but I made myself keep going to help him.”
Ralph died in 2022 at 70, and the experience of nursing him through that final act stayed with
Turturro as he took on his latest role in Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door.” In it, Turturro
plays Damian, an academic helping his lover, Ingrid (Julianne Moore), as she assists her terminally
ill friend, Martha (Tilda Swinton), who has decided to commit suicide.
“Grief is part of life,” Turturro says, looking down ruefully at his espresso during our chat at a Brooklyn coffeehouse. “When you get older it becomes more frequent. You don’t completely get over loss, so you have no choice but to incorporate it.”
“The Room Next Door” also gave him a chance to work with Almodóvar, whom Turturro met in
Cannes when he was there with his 1992 directorial debut, “Mac,” and the Spanish auteur was a
jury member. “We stayed in touch, and whenever he would tell me about a movie he was writing,
I’d always say, ‘Is there a cameo for me? I’ll learn Spanish; I’ll play a mute. Anything.’”
Language barriers weren’t an issue with “The Room Next Door,” which marks Almodóvar’s first feature in English. The part was small, but Turturro felt he could do something with it. Though well intentioned, Damian is pompous, consoling Martha while lecturing her on how humankind’s inability to curb its carbon footprint has made global warming unstoppable — and ecological catastrophe unavoidable. He’s a lot.
“I understand him,” Turturro says. “If you’re promoting something or doing lectures, it’s hard
to get off that train. When I came home from a junket, my wife would say, ‘You’re not on a press tour anymore. Relax.’”
Turturro, much more muted in real life than the incandescent characters he plays in films like “The
Big Lebowski” and “Miller’s Crossing,” shows no signs of slowing. Next year, he’ll return for the second season of “Severance,” a twisty thriller set largely in a mundane workplace. Turturro loved his role as
Irving, a corporate drone who is a stickler for company policy, even as he balked at the constraints
of being on a multi-episode series.
“I didn’t like being in that office — the light there drove me insane,” he says. “I did my second go round, but I feel like I’ve had a full meal.”
He has enjoyed worked with Ben Stiller, one of the show’s driving creative forces. “He’s very demanding, but also brilliant,” Turturro says. “We really grew as collaborators — we learned to trust each other and found the right rhythm. I keep joking to him that we need to remake ‘The Odd Couple’ or something.”
There are several projects that Turturro hopes to bring to screens, including “Sabbath’s Theater,” an adaptation of Philip Roth’s libidinal novel that he’s performed onstage, and a film of “Is There No Place on Earth for Me?,” Susan Sheehan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning look at a schizophrenic woman.
However, Turturro won’t reprise his role as Carmine Falcone for spinoff series “The Penguin.”
Instead Mark Strong will take on the Mafia don that Turturro played in “The Batman.” “I did what
I wanted to with the role,” he says. “In the show, there was a lot of violence towards women, and
that’s not my thing.”
Falcone radiated brutality in “The Batman,” but in the 2022 movie, his cruelty is implied rather than illustrated. “It happens off-screen,” Turturro says. “It’s scarier that way.”
Turning down a return to Gotham was also partly the reality of there being more opportunities than time. “You can’t do everything you want to,” he admits.
And a desire to work on projects that resonate strongly is what drew Turturro to “The Room Next
Door.” His character is nearing senior citizen-dom, but he still harbors the passions of youth.
“He wants to be alive,” Turturro says. “He still wants to have sex and be engaged. He knows that
the world is going to hell, but there are still things that make life worth it, you know?”
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