Q & A - RADAR

Trigger Happy
20 years after mind-fucking military recruits—and audiences—in Full Metal Jacket, Hollywood hothead R. Lee Ermey steps into a new maniac's shoes
By Jebediah Reed  

QUEERS AND STEERS In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, R. Lee Ermey plays "a sexually perverted homicidal maniac." The actor rewrote a scene to show his character dragging a corpse out of the woods while buttoning his fly. Producers declined

LITTLE BIG MAN "Ken and Barbie are dolls. Mine is a motivational figure," says Ermey

 

R. Lee Ermey is a doll. Literally. His brutal performance in Stanley Kubrick's 1987 war epic Full Metal Jacket—as a menacing, spit-spraying drill instructor whose sadistic bullying leads one "maggot" recruit to take revenge in one of modern cinema's most mind-blowing scenes—has earned the 62-year-old former jarhead a special status as the scariest authority figure of our time. Almost 20 years later, Ermey's iconic on-screen persona still sticks, attracting friends in high places (he regularly golfs with members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), nifty firearms endorsements (he's a spokesman for Glock—now semi- and fully-automatic!), and, yes, a deal for a 12-inch molded plastic figurine in the likeness of his infamous alter ego, Gunnery Sgt. Hartman. Just like the original, this tiny bastard spews searingly cruel but totally kick-ass catchphrases on command ("You are the asshole in charge of your own destiny!"). Radar sat down with the alarmingly candid, somewhat paranoid, and totally irrepressible actor on the eve of the release of his latest pic, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (October 6), to let him sound off on the story behind his most timeless Full Metal insults, the biggest nitwits in Hollywood, and a never-before-heard confession from Kubrick days before his death about how Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman destroyed Eyes Wide Shut.

RADAR: It's hard to think of another actor so defined by a single role as you have been by Gunnery Sgt. Hartman.
R. LEE ERMEY: It was film number five for me, and as far as I was concerned when I was making it, it was the one that was gonna put me on top of the heap. When you have that attitude and motivation, you get the job done with a lot of class.

One of many memorable lines is when you call your recruits "unorganized grab-asstic pieces of amphibian shit." That's almost like a line of surrealist poetry. Where'd it come from?
I wrote almost everything I said in that movie. It's just the way a drill instructor talks. I had Drill instructors in boot camp, and I was also a drill instructor for three years—that's how I would talk to recruits. I have to admit, though, that one of my more famous lines didn't come from anything I heard in the military: "I bet you're the kind of guy that would fuck a person in the ass and not even have the goddamnned common courtesy to give him a reach-around." I forgot my lines one day and it just came out of the sky. God sent it down to me.

One of the great cinematic insults.
Drill instructors are strange animals. Someone speculated once that an eagle shits them out on a rock and the sun hatches them.

Your character in Chainsaw, Sheriff Hoyt, is Freddy Krueger evil. Did you have to visit scary places inside to be that vicious?
Every role I do, I push the character as far as I can. I'll take him right to the edge. In fact, I'll take him over the edge until the director pulls me back in. That's why I loved doing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There's no fucking falling over the edge with Sheriff Hoyt. He's a sexually perverted homicidal maniac. I mean, come on, where's the edge? And there's not a writer in Hollywood who can identify with that type of character. Sexually perverted homicidal maniacs just aren't doing any writing in Hollywood these days. So I try to improve the entertainment value.

Did you succeed in this new film?
I tried to get the producers and directors to go along with my sexually perverted version of Sheriff Hoyt, which is something I came up with, and it worked great. But, no. I lost, and it really upsets me. As a matter of fact, I rewrote a scene so that Hoyt comes out of the woods dragging a corpse and buttoning his trousers up. Maybe it's just a little too tough for 'em, you know? They say shit like, "I don't think the audience is ready for this." And, "We'll have to save this for the DVD," or something. It really pisses me off.

After working on Seven, you called David Fincher "a little chicken shit." I'm assuming you guys aren't discussing a second project?
As far as I'm concerned, if a director won't even listen to an actor, that's a black mark. Fincher stuck to the script even when actors came up with ideas that were 10 times better. One of the most important aspects of acting is bringing something to the fucking table. And most actors don't. They just show up, the director says, "Action," they say the words the writer has written, and, for them, that's good enough. But it's never good enough for me. That's what made Stanley Kubrick. If anyone had any idea, he wanted to hear it. If you saw Full Metal Jacket as it was written, you would understand what I'm saying.

Did you and Kubrick become close while shooting Full Metal Jacket?
Very close. Stanley called me up all the time. He'd call at three o'clock in the morning and say, "Oh, it's 10 o'clock over here." [Laughs] "Yeah, well, it's three o-fucking-clock in the morning here, Stanley. Oh well." He called me about two weeks before he died, as a matter of fact. We had a long conversation about Eyes Wide Shut. He told me it was a piece of shit and that he was disgusted with it and that the critics were going to have him for lunch. He said Cruise and Kidman had their way with him—exactly the words he used.

WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON, SON? Ermey hates him some Hollywood liberals

What did he mean?
He was kind of a shy little timid guy. He wasn't real forceful. That's why he didn't appreciate working with big, high-powered actors. They would have their way with him, he would lose control, and his movie would turn to shit.

Have you worked with any actors who would make it in the military?
A few. John McGinley [a cast member of Scrubs—on which Ermey has appeared—who had a supporting role in Seven] would have made a great master gunnery sergeant. Would have never been financially happy though.

You were in the Marines for 11 years and were wounded in Vietnam. What do you think of people making comparisons between Iraq and that war?
That's kinda cute. I think whoever says that is a fucking idiot. That's where I come down on that.

So we're going to pull it out in Iraq?
I've been over there a couple of times. We're doing just fine. The problem is, the Communist News Network and all of the media—which is run by totally off-the-wall, clear-off-the-deep-end liberals—are on the wrong side. They're with the bad guys.

You think the media is siding with radical Islam? That's kinda weird.Every time I turn around the media is screwing something up. Here we are, hot on the trail of Bin Laden, right up his ass. He makes a phone call, and we know exactly where he is. Well, one of the embeds shoots a message to his boss saying that some PFC told him they're tracking Bin Laden using his cell phone. Then it's all over the New York Times and every liberal paper in America. Well, Bin Laden hasn't made a cell phone call since, has he? The media is taking the tools of the military away from us.

Or not. But assuming you're no fan of the Communist News Network, where do you get your information?
Well, I hang out with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I play golf with 'em. I hang with the military. When I need a social evening I pack up my stuff and go to Camp Pendleton, to the NCO Club. I don't go to some bar in Hollywood. There's nobody there I care to talk to.

You haven't had trouble getting work from the so-called Hollywood liberal elite?
There are a lot of logical people in Hollywood. But a lot of nitwits too. I've had actors look me in the eye and tell me that no matter who was in charge of government—say, China or Russia took over this country—life would be just the same, and their government wouldn't be any worse than the one we have now. That is sick. So I just keep politics out of it. I don't talk politics with anyone in Hollywood.

These have to be challenging times in the military. How's everybody holding up?
Morale is second to none. I go to Bethesda/Walter Reed Hospital a couple of times each year, and those kids are laying there with their legs shot off and can't wait to get a prosthetic so they can get back to their unit and keep fighting the war. They're patriotic kids. One thing I can tell you: You don't find any lefties in the military. Lefties are not patriotic people. Remember the '50s, when we put the kibosh on the communist party in America? I think all they did was change their name to liberals. Shame on those people.

One academic critic suggested that Sgt. Hartman had lost himself in his persona, that he couldn't distinguish his essential self from his role as a Marine drill sergeant, and that's what made him a monster.
That movie is pretty much how the military was. You have to be tough. You can't treat new recruits with kid gloves and baby 'em and coddle 'em. But one thing we didn't show in Full Metal Jacket is what happens after the platoon graduates: The DI relaxes and has a nice chat with them before he sends them off.

The same critic described Hartman's barracks as a "homoerotic paradise." Do you consider that insightful commentary?
It is! There's nothing but men in those barracks. It's nothing but id. And the marines are the only branch of the service that still doesn't train men and women together. We train men to kill and win wars, and we train women to support those men.

Did you enjoy your gay make out scene in Saving Silverman?
There was no tongue involved, no reach-arounds. It was business. We had to do it for the movie, and we pulled it off. Jack Black's a fun guy to hang out with, and there's not a gay bone in his body, so I felt very secure.

Was it the first time you'd kissed a man? Or should that be under the "don't ask, don't tell" rubric?
No, that would be the extent of my male connection. Other than that there has been none and there will be none. The old Gunny won't be coming out of the closet anytime soon. I love tanks and things that make loud explosions.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning opens October 6.