Tommy Lee Jones: Hollywood cowboy

By Benjamin Secher 12 January 2008 • 12:01am

With an Oscar and more than 50 films to his name, plus two more due for release this month, the formidable Tommy Lee Jones tells Benjamin Secher how he is really just a Texas rancher at heart

'I love cinema,' Tommy Lee Jones says, looking ill at ease in the chi-chi surroundings of the Beverly Hills Hotel. He takes a hasty sip of vodka and orange, wipes the back of his hand across his moustache and glances restlessly around.

'I love cinema,' he says again, 'and I love agriculture.' His clipped Texan growl lends the simple statement a peculiar gravitas. Only moments before, Jones had arrived at the table looking harried, hunched and - dressed in a pinstripe suit and shades - like a man in disguise.

But as he talks, he removes the dark glasses to reveal one of the most formidable faces in film. His humourless, hangdog features are instantly recognisable as those of Harrison Ford's tireless pursuer in The Fugitive, of the sinister Clay Shaw in Oliver Stone's JFK, of Will Smith's unflappable partner in Men in Black. But, in spite of his international fame and long and distinguished career, it is a face that seems out of place in Beverly Hills.

Jones has never been like other film stars. Sure, he has the swagger, the shades, the Oscar (for The Fugitive), the multi-million-dollar paydays and the multiple marriages: all those standard signifiers of a Hollywood success story.

Since his debut in Love Story in 1970, he has appeared in more than 50 films, generating a combined total of nearly $2 billion worldwide. And this month, at 61 years old, he can be seen giving two of the finest screen performances of his life: as a world-weary Texan sheriff in the Coen brothers' Oscar favourite No Country for Old Men, and as a grieving father in Paul Haggis's anti-war drama In the Valley of Elah. But, for Jones, cinema remains, as it always has been, only half a life.

Down in the hardscrabble heart of Texas, where he lives with his third wife - Dawn, a camera assistant, whom he married in 2001 - the locals don't think of Jones as a movie man but as 'a rancher, a neighbour' and that suits him just fine.

'I don't expect any of them have seen my recent films,' he says. 'My home town is very small and very remote and we don't have a movie house. Agriculture is just about the only thing anyone does down there.'

Jones breeds beef cattle and horses on a substantial ranch in San Saba county, three miles from where he was born. Throughout the interview he refers to the place as 'the headquarters', perhaps to distinguish it from his three other Texan ranches and properties in Palm Beach and Buenos Aires.

For Jones, a ranch is no millionaire's plaything: he is an expert horseman, a dab hand with a lasso, and a no-nonsense manager of his estates. 'You've got to be careful with those cowboys and those ropes,' he says firmly.

'Those guys will rope the cattle just for fun. They can really put a lot of stress on the animals. So as a cowman, a rancher, the boss, I discourage that. I've even gone to the boys on some occasions and said, "Fellas, you need to leave those ropes in the bed of that pickup when we ride off from here, unless you intend to hang yourself while you're out there."'

This sounds like a punchline, but Jones delivers it with an unwavering grimace. 'It can be a hostile country,' he continues. 'There's nothing living in those mountains that won't sting or bite or stab you. If you molest the plant, the plant will spike you. If you molest the animal, the animal will bite you. If you disrespect the country, it will cripple you. But I am very comfortable there. It's my home.'

It is also the backdrop for Jones's latest screen role, in the Coen brothers' masterful adaptation of No Country for Old Men. The film, based on Cormac McCarthy's gripping novel, is the story of a three-way pursuit across the inhospitable Texan borderlands, a chase that begins when Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles on the bloody scene of a drugs deal gone wrong, and flees with a suitcase full of money. Two very different men are soon on his tail: Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a terrifying serial killer set on retrieving the cash at any cost; and Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), the old-school sheriff determined to get to Moss in time to save him.

Co-director Joel Coen says that Jones was really the only candidate for the role of the sheriff: 'Bell is the soul of the movie and also, in a fundamental way, the region is so much a part of him, so we needed someone who understood it. It's also a role that requires a kind of subtlety that only a really, really great actor can bring to it. If you put those two criteria together you come up with Tommy Lee Jones.'

Jones hesitated before accepting the part - he felt he had been cast as an officer of the law too many times before - but ultimately he couldn't resist the opportunity to act as a mouthpiece for McCarthy's words. 'Cormac's language is perfect,' he says. 'He is in my view the greatest living American prose stylist.'

McCarthy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All the Pretty Horses, is a fellow Texas resident and an old friend of Jones's.

'We were having dinner at my house one day,' Jones says, 'and I began to tell him my theories about the growing interrelationship between prose and American cinema. I started with Proust and Joyce, proceeded through Faulkner and worked my way up to [McCarthy's 1973 novel] Child of God. I went so far as to tell him I thought it was his most screenworthy book. I thought I was being rather articulate, brilliant actually.' The shadow of a smile flickers beneath Jones's moustache. 'And when I was through he said, "I don't know, Tommy Lee, I didn't read it."' He tips back his head and lets out a sudden bark of laughter. 'I haven't spent a lot of time talking about literature with Cormac since then.'

The film is already a frontrunner for next month's 80th Academy Awards, having picked up four Golden Globe nominations. The supporting actor nod has gone to Bardem in the more flamboyant role as Chigurh - but it is almost impossible to imagine how the film could have worked without Jones. As a moral man, increasingly adrift in an amoral world, his character's melancholy is the story's keynote; an affecting sadness that ultimately envelops the whole film.

For In the Valley of Elah, the second film from Crash director Paul Haggis, Jones gives yet another impressive study in buried emotion. This time he plays an ex-army man determined to find out why, and in what circumstances, his soldier son was killed shortly after returning from a tour of duty in Iraq. Jones is near faultless in a role that demands that he somehow convey the emotional devastation that his buttoned-up character cannot put into words.

'Old Hank is the kind of character that I, personally, would dismiss,' Jones says, gruffly. 'He's most certainly ethnocentric and blindly, unquestioningly patriotic. I looked upon him as typical of the sort of person who can be led by the nose by jingoistic headlines into a fraudulent war.'

Haggis took a more benevolent view of the character. 'I was really interested in the more disgusting aspects of the man,' Jones says, 'and he was more interested in the human element. The good things. That's what I mean by human.'

When I ask how the two men reached a compromise in where to draw the lines of this character, Jones sits abruptly forward in his chair. 'I don't compromise with directors,' he says. 'I try to find out what they want to see, and then that is what I do. I'm a blank page. As soon as I figure out what you want, I'm going to do it. The only difficulties I ever have are with the guy who doesn't know who he is or what he wants. And then that's a problem.'

Tommy Lee Jones never had much trouble figuring out who he was. He was born in San Saba, west Texas, on September 15, 1946, into the kind of rough, uncosseted world that soon turns boys into men. 'It wasn't unusual to settle one's conflicts with physical violence,' he says. 'If you got into an argument you settled it very quickly.'

His father, Clyde Jones, worked in the oil fields and he can still remember spending days as a toddler playing among the filth and noise of the rigs. His mother, Lucille Marie Scott, who married and divorced his father twice during his early childhood, was variously employed as a beautician, a school teacher and the county's first policewoman. His only sibling, a brother, was born about three years after him, but died in infancy.

When I say that these sound like pretty tough circumstances for a child to grow up in, Jones bristles. 'It's not a question of difficulty,' he says. 'You are going to grow up whether you want to or not. It requires no effort.' He pauses, and when he speaks again his voice is louder, fiercer. 'I didn't feel oppressed. I felt like the luckiest kid in the world because God had put me on the ground in Texas. I actually felt sorry for those poor little kids that had to be born in Oklahoma or' - and here his scowl softens - 'England, or some place. I knew I was living in the best place in the world.'

What convinced him of that? 'Nothing, I just knew it. What convinces you that the sun's shining?'

When Jones was 13, his father took a job in Libya and sent Tommy Lee on a sports scholarship to St Mark's boarding school, Dallas. Jones says now that the choice to stay behind was his own: a precocious athlete, he dreamt of a sporting career, and 'going to Libya didn't seem a very bright idea for somebody who wanted to play football'.

The contrast between his early years in the trailer he shared with his parents, and the rarefied atmosphere of St Mark's, where classes were populated by the offspring of the rich, was, he says, 'like night and day. At St Mark's one was expected to be a gentleman. It took a while to learn that, to figure out that I was in a different world.'

Jones's natural gifts as a sportsman - playing American football, soccer and baseball, riding horses and throwing discus - helped him settle in. But the real turning point came when, in his second year, he was given an annotated copy of Macbeth and told to buy a spiral notebook and write down in it the meaning of every word that he didn't recognise.

'At first I really didn't understand why I needed to know what "kerns and gallowglasses" were, but after a while the play started to take hold of me and I became interested in literature, really interested, and I began to believe in it.

'Then one day I was exploring the buildings around the school. I opened a door and it was dark inside and there was a shiny place at the far end of the large room. It was a stage. It was lit up and they were rehearsing a play. Then this kid walked across the stage and fell down. I heard the voice of the headmaster calling out of the dark in his British accent. "My dear boy," he said, "you're merely drunk, you haven't been shot, do it again." I thought that looked like a lot of fun, articulating literature as performance in that way. So I auditioned for the next play and I've been doing plays - and movies - ever since.'

From Texas he went on a scholarship to Harvard University, where he studied literature and continued to act and play sport. During his second year, he famously shared a room with the future vice-president Al Gore, and the two remain friends to this day.

A week after this interview Jones had been scheduled to host a concert in Oslo to mark the occasion of Gore receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, but, he tells me, he has had to pull out in order to attend to an urgent family matter. Jones has two children: a son, Austin Leonard, 24, and a daughter, Victoria Kafka, 16, both from his second marriage to the photographer Kimberley Cloughley. 'It's sad,' he says. 'I'd love to be with Al to celebrate this happy day in his family. But it's just a moment of peril in mine.'

After graduating from Harvard in 1969, he moved to New York where it took him a mere 10 days to find a role on Broadway. 'They put that in Ripley's Believe it or Not,' he says, bemused. 'I don't know why. By the time I got to New York, I'd done almost 40 plays, two summers of repertory theatre and I'd played to large audiences in difficult roles from Shakespeare, the Greeks, Brecht and Pinter, so I knew what the challenges were. It wasn't as if there was anything in New York to intimidate me.'

While in New York, he landed his first film role, as Ryan O'Neal's roommate in Love Story. A year later he began a seven-year marriage to Kate Lardner, the granddaughter of a famous sportswriter. Despite the apparent ease of his success, it was a hard time for Jones. 'I worried where the next job would come from,' he says. 'It's no fun to be a struggling young actor. It's a desperate thing, no way to be happy. If you have any alternative, you should take it. But I knew I wanted to act and I didn't care what it took.'

After seven years in New York, mostly spent appearing in 'mindless television shows that paid the rent', Jones moved to Los Angeles in pursuit of a fully-fledged film career, and almost immediately found himself cast opposite Laurence Olivier in The Betsey. A decade of lucrative television roles, and the odd movie, followed, including an Emmy-winning run as Gary Gilmore in The Executioner's Song.

Then in 1991 his spectral performance in JFK brought him his first Oscar nomination and rocketed him into Hollywood's major league. 'I started to make more money, and after a while it dawned on me that I could live anywhere I wanted to,' he says, 'so in my wisdom, I went home to Texas.'

Jones has rarely been without work since, taking an average of two roles a year for such plum directors as Joel Schumacher (The Client, Batman Forever), William Friedkin (Rules of Engagement, The Hunted?), Ron Howard (The Missing) and Robert Altman (A Prairie Home Companion).

In person, as on screen, Jones gives off a fearsome sense of authority that clearly impresses casting directors. Look down the list of characters he has played in the past decade and you will see a roll-call of power: chief deputy this, warden that, major, colonel, sheriff.

A person can only play so many men in charge before wanting to become one himself, so it was perhaps inevitable that Jones's eye would eventually drift to the director's chair. 'More often than not on a film set, a director is going to look over his shoulder and see me standing there and say, '?"Shouldn't you be in your trailer?"?' Jones says. 'And I'll say, "No, no. Don't mind me. I'm just here and I'm not going away." Over the years, I've made a very careful study of lenses and film stocks and lighting and rehearsal techniques.'

His big-screen directorial debut, a hard-bitten western called The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (scripted by Babel writer Guillermo Arriaga) premiered at Cannes in 2005 to some acclaim, and he is now writing the script for a second film, based on Ernest Hemingway's posthumously published Islands in the Stream. 'In the 1970s it was made into a bad movie,' he says. 'I reckon there's a good movie in that book and that's the one I want to make.'

Jones says this, and everything else, with an unshakeable air of certainty. With his forceful face and a voice that seems always to mean exactly what it says, he gives the impression of a man who has always known what it is he wants. Did he never doubt that he was capable of achieving the success he sought?

'Oh, I haven't yet decided what to do when I grow up,' he says enigmatically, as he gets up to leave, 'so it is hard to answer that question.' Before he walks away, he pauses to shake my hand. 'You know, I still think probably the only thing I'm suited for is being a boy from Texas.'