“That’s all I ever wanted to be was a human being because of a movie I saw called Little Big Man.”
Matthew Modine sat down in Thornfields in County Limerick to recall the time he spent learning the art of acting and the how he spent his tender years in multiple homes.
He recalled that his acting teacher Stella Adler told him when he first started out that she would not teach him to be a movie star, but rather to be a human being.
He told the Limerick Post that in his early years he watched a movie called Little Big Man where the western expansion was shown from the perspective of the native Americans.
The movie depicted the native Americans as victims of attacks by white cavalry, which the actor referred to as ‘barbaric’.
“We were living in Utah at the time and I was going to school with a lot of Navajo Indians. I felt so ashamed of the colour of my skin for being a part of that history and that lineage,” Modine added.
He told the Post he felt a burden of white man’s guilt and wanted to associate with the idea of being a ‘human being’ instead, which is what the native Americans called themselves in the film.
“So when I came into the class and she [Stella Adler] said that if I’m lucky I’ll teach you to be a human being, she had no idea what that meant to me. I started crying and then she accepted me as a student.”
Modine explained that growing up he did not have a place to call home for very long and instead spent his formative years moving from drive-in to drive-in.
“We moved about every year and a half to a new drive-in and lived there for a little while and the economy collapsed around it. I lived in about 11 different homes growing up,” he said.
Modine added that actors are often accused of being too liberal and said that it is often difficult not to be.
“Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ says you never really understand a person until you get inside their skin and move around in it, and that’s what actors do.”
He said that actors cannot help but become liberal because they have to try and understand why a person does what he or she does.
“If it was Gary Oldman playing Winston Churchill you would try to understand his way of thinking, read his books, read books that have been written about him, look at decisions he made and those things tell you something about a man’s character,” Modine added.
Matthew Modine is the youngest of seven children and has acted in films like Full Metal Jacket and The Dark Knight Rises.
He is currently working on The Martini Shot in County Limerick and County Clare, directed by Stephen Wallis and is set to release in the autumn of 2019.
