Michael Douglas is one of the great movie stars. You go into a Michael Douglas movie wanting to see Michael Douglas be Michael Douglas, and he always delivers. He’s made a career out of playing confident, sexy men – adventurers, millionaires and politicians – who represent an ideal, either subverted or played straight. He knows how to wear a suit, he knows how to shoot a gun, and yet when you enter a hotel room with Michael Douglas at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, he still offers you a cookie.
I turned down the cookie, but I took him up on the offer for an interview about his new western Beyond the Reach, a contemporary film about a millionaire (Douglas) who turns on his guide (Jeremy Irvine) after a hunting trip turns deadly. With both his freedom and the future of his company on the line, he needs the only witness to die from what appears to be natural causes, so he strands him in the desert, strips him naked, and simply waits for the younger man to die. But neither man is willing to give up, and the tension mounts.
We talked about the new film, and his plans to adapt Shirley Jackson’s classic stories We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Lottery, as well as his experiences producing films like the Oscar-winning One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the somewhat less popular Romancing the Stone sequel, Jewel of the Nile. Michael Douglas says he is energized for what he calls “the third act” of his life, and his enthusiasm for co-starring in the upcoming Marvel superhero movie Ant-Man is infectious.
Beyond the Reach is now available in theaters and On Demand.
CraveOnline: There was something I was thinking while I was watching Beyond the Reach. Tell me if there’s an answer that I’m just not thinking of, but… have you ever played like a really nice, super happy millionaire?
Michael Douglas: [Laughs.] “Happy millionaire?”
Just super nice, like Santa Claus nice. Because you always seem to gravitate towards the guy who’s going to kill his wife or something.
[Laughs.] Well, I do like… I have to think about this… I mean, it sounds pretty homogenized, and I wouldn’t know what the story would be if the guy was that nice. Millionaires? No. I’ve done American President…
Yeah, I guess he could be a millionaire.
He wasn’t a millionaire but he was a good guy. But I like an edge. I enjoy an edge. I like the grey area, the grey area to dark. [Beyond the Reach] is the closest I came to an old-fashioned western in terms of black hats and white hats, but everything I do – and again, it’s not a conscious effort, I just realized, it had been brought to my attention – is contemporary. My entire career except for one movie has just been contemporary.
The Ghost and the Darkness?
No, that was contemporary to some degree. Shining Through is the one, you know? [Thinks.] No, I guess The Ghost and the Darkness is true. That’s true. There’s a couple.
It’s another hunting movie too. I was thinking about that too.
Yeah.
Did you get to whip out those old lion hunting skills for Beyond the Reach? Or was that a different beast?
[Laughs.] It was a different piece. Rather than walking through the jungles I had a six wheel, double axle Mercedes that nobody had seen, that I thought was just a great additional character to the whole piece.
Was that a request? “We’re going to get the car, and then I get to keep the car…?”
No, I wish. That was the only one around. They’re $600,000. This was the only one that was out there, it was sort of a prototype for I think mostly for Middle Eastern sheiks going falcon hunting. We sent them the script and they saw it was going to be a walking commercial for the car, and they had it shipped over, airfreighted over from Germany.
The toys are fun in this. You get some cool toys. Even the gun, and I’m not a gun guy. That looks sleek. What is that thing?
I don’t know. Some new thing. It’s what I said it was in the movie, is what it is. But I’m not a hunter either so I don’t know what it is.
But you’ve handled a fair amount of guns in your time on camera.
I’ve handled a fair amount of guns. I’m just laughing now because promotion, I’m going this afternoon to do Ellen’s show, Ellen DeGeneres, and they just told me, “I don’t know how to tell you this,” he says. “Two things that Ellen DeGeneres hates, just deplored about, is hunting and guns.” I said, “Well, this should be an interesting interview!” [Laughs.]
What are you going to talk about, just hanging out in the desert with Jeremy Irvine shirtless?
I don’t know! [Laughs.] I don’t know, it’s going to be fun to see what happens. I love Ellen. As I said, as it was, it doesn’t seem like really the right show to be promoting for this movie, just because a woman’s audience and this and all that. But they told me and I just said, “Oh thanks, this is going to be a treat. This is going to be something.”
