Public Theater: A Q&A With Kathleen Chalfant

Since her breakout role on Broadway in Angels in America, the actress Kathleen Chalfant has given life to a wide range of compelling characters on stage and screen.

Perhaps her most celebrated role was as a cancer patient in the Off Broadway play Wit, and she has become a recognizable figure in films such as Kinsey and television shows including House of Cards and the new Showtime series The Affair.

City & State Albany Bureau Chief Jon Lentz spoke with Chalfant about her support for Green Party candidates Howie Hawkins and Brian Jones, her disappointment with Gov. Andrew Cuomo and how hard it was to play Ronald Reagan.

The following is an edited transcript.

City & State: You are supporting the Green Party’s Howie Hawkins, who is running for governor of New York, and his running mate, Brian Jones. Why?
Kathleen Chalfant: The person I know best on the ticket is Brian Jones, who is the candidate for lieutenant governor. Brian and I have done a fair amount of what I like to call rabble-rousing, human rights work of one sort or another, together in New York in the last few years. That’s my immediate connection to the ticket.

My reason for supporting the ticket actively is that I think it’s important at this time that there be an alternative on the left to the mainstream Democratic Party, because it seems to me that Gov. Cuomo has moved, certainly, far to the right of his father, and seems to be leaning right from the progressive parts of his announced positions. And I’m particularly concerned about the issue of fracking. I’m afraid that if there is no significant anti-fracking pressure, that [Cuomo] will bow to the rather fierce forces arrayed on the side of fracking—an activity which I think will do no good to anyone. At the very least, we can stipulate that there is no shortage of natural gas in the United States.

Brian is also a teacher, and very much opposed to the Common Core testing regime that our public schools have fallen under in the last few years. I’m from California, so I went to the California public school system, and graduated from it in 1962, from kindergarten through the 12th grade. It was one of the great educational institutions in the world, as was the New York public school system. To have watched all these years the public school system in the country be under attack, because people have forgotten that all of the children belong to all of us, it seems to me that school choice is an extremely shortsighted and unpatriotic way of educating our children, because the public school systems were where the best of America was nurtured.

C&S: You have been in a number of performances with political themes or overtones, notably Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, which sparked public discussion about HIV and AIDS. Do your own political views come into play at all in your acting?
KC: Yes, they do. When you’re a working actor, it’s sometimes difficult to exercise your principles. It’s not so much in the theater, since nobody gets paid in the theater anyway. But in the movies and television and sometimes doing things like commercials, I have now— because I’m old and have worked for a long time and have Social Security and two pensions—the luxury to turn things down if I feel they’re in conflict with my political views.

I, for instance, never auditioned for the show 24 because I thought that it was part of the problem and not part of the solution during the Iraq War. A couple of times I was offered some Law & Order episodes early on that seemed to be in the same way not helpful—although I’ve been on Law & Order quite a lot, and it’s a wonderful show.

C&S: You’ve had any number of politically oriented roles. You played Ethel Rosenberg, among other roles, in Angels in America, and you were Nancy Reagan in Larry Kramer’s Just Say No—
KC: I’ve actually played Nancy Reagan twice and Ronald Reagan once. And I have to say that playing Ronald Reagan was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

C&S: Really?
KC: Yes, because I was having a hard time finding my way into the character, because for someone of my generation— I’ll be 70 in January—Ronald Reagan was the beginning of all of the drift to the right in American politics, starting with tax reform that was the beginning of the dismantling of the public school system, and a lot of other things. So I had serious political differences with Ronald Reagan, and so trying to be Ronald Reagan was very hard. And I realized that I was looking at it from the outside, and so I started looking at YouTube video of Ronald Reagan, who was, his politics aside, quite a nice man! Everybody liked him. And he liked himself. That’s what I had to discover in playing Ronald Reagan, that no matter what I thought of his politics, he thought he was swell. That was the thing I had to do. In that same play, I was playing Queen Elizabeth I and Hitler, but still, Ronald Reagan was the hardest one.