<\/p>\n
By Dan Heching, celebrity.land<\/p>\n
(celebrity.land) \u2014 <\/b>For someone who\u2019s played a menacing collection of pretty bad dudes on screen for over three decades, Tony Goldwyn is a really nice guy.<\/p>\n
When we spoke by video around the holidays, the actor and director was smiling and laid back, excited to talk about a number of things, including his latest big-screen role, which sees him leading a band of white supremacists in Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s \u201cOne Battle After Another.\u201d The buzzy film is heading into Oscar season with a slew of Golden Globes<\/a> to its name, including best film.<\/p>\n Tall, composed, with classic good looks, Goldwyn has made a career of playing what he calls \u201cmorally frightening human beings.\u201d He got his big break in the 1990 hit film \u201cGhost\u201d playing Carl Bruner, an incidentally homicidal precursor to the finance bro archetype that we know (and mostly abhor) today.<\/p>\n \u201cCarl definitely set a kind of trajectory for me,\u201d he said. \u201cWeirdly, at that time\u2026 I was more worried about getting pigeonholed as the all-American boy, milquetoast-y kind of hero. So the idea of playing a villain like that was super attractive to me.\u201d<\/p>\n In the ensuing decades, Goldwyn has appeared as a slew of similarly reprehensible but smooth-talking bad guys, in films like \u201cThe Pelican Brief,\u201d \u201cKiss the Girls\u201d and \u201cThe Last Samurai,\u201d as well as in the arguably villain-adjacent role of Fitz on the small screen in Shondaland\u2019s hit 2010\u2019s show \u201cScandal.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIf you can play a villain and make him find his humanity and make the audience think he\u2019s a great guy, and then he turns out to have no moral compass, then that\u2019s\u2013 that\u2019d be really fun,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n His turn as the wildly named Virgil Throckmorton in \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d has taken his particular brand of well-mannered villainy to new heights. (\u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d is a production of Warner Bros. Pictures, which is owned by celebrity.land\u2019s parent company Warner Bros. Discovery.)<\/p>\n \u201cVirgil, I see as a little bit different,\u201d Goldwyn said. \u201cI think Virgil Throckmorton and people of his ilk \u2013 which is what makes him really scary \u2013 is they have great moral certitude, certainty. Virgil Throckmorton has no self-doubt about his morality. He\u2019s very clear about what\u2019s right and what\u2019s wrong, and the way the world needs to be.\u201d<\/p>\n In \u201cOne Battle,\u201d Goldwyn\u2019s epically charming Throckmorton heads a nefarious, covert racist organization whose members call themselves the \u201cChristmas Adventurers,\u201d a group of white supremacists whose exclusivity and elitism is matched only by their terrifying ideals.<\/p>\n \u201cI loved Virgil Throckmorton because he is a villain, but he\u2019s so charming, and who wouldn\u2019t want to be a member of that club?!\u201d Goldwyn said about how he approached the character, a kind of caricature-like nightmare. \u201cThat was absurd and terrifying at the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course, Goldwyn doesn\u2019t only play suave bad guys. He has become a mainstay in the \u201cLaw & Order\u201d universe as a DA managing all sorts of criminal and legal mayhem, and the character he plays on \u201cHacks<\/a>\u201d is the (just so) slightly less morally compromised network exec Bob Lipka. Beyond that, he is a seasoned director, having helmed several episodes of \u201cScandal\u201d along with other well-known series and films, including \u201cDexter,\u201d 1999\u2019s \u201cA Walk on the Moon\u201d and the more recent \u201cEzra,\u201d<\/a> which featured his \u201cGhost\u201d costar Whoopi Goldberg.<\/p>\n With all that range, Goldwyn is unbothered by the notion that his career has been influenced by any sort of typecasting.<\/p>\n \u201cIt helped me support my family and I just stopped worrying about it, you know?\u201d he said. \u201cI kind of broadened my career so that I wouldn\u2019t be at the mercy of other people deciding who I was or what I was about.\u201d<\/p>\n That might be something Goldwyn has thought about for a while. The grandson of legendary studio creator Samuel Goldwyn<\/a>, he is, technically, a nepo baby himself.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a term he takes issue with.<\/p>\n \u201cThis whole nepo baby<\/a> thing kind of is irritating because it\u2019s so pejorative, and haven\u2019t people gone into the family business in every field throughout history?\u201d Goldwyn \u2013 who in fact comes from a show business dynasty<\/a> on both sides<\/a> \u2013 asked. \u201cIsn\u2019t that kind of a natural thing to move into what your forbearers did and to take that on and build on what they did?\u201d<\/p>\n