By Gill Pringle
An intense, New York-born character actor with bundles of stage experience best known for his fierce performance as a ruthless military martinet in James Cameron’s Avatar, 64-year-old Stephen Lang really gets to go to town in Don’t Breathe. In this gritty nail-biter from Evil Dead director, Fede Alvarez, the imposing actor plays a blind military veteran who doesn’t exactly cower in the corner when three kids – Rocky (Jane Levy), Money (Daniel Zovatto), and Alex (Dylan Minnette) – break into his house looking for what they’ve been told is a fortune. Quickly turning the tables on his home invaders, Lang is soon revealed to be the real villain of the piece here, trapping and taunting the trio in his big, rambling house, which is filled with locked doors, dark corridors, and stashed firearms.
Delivering a richly physical performance, Lang is wholly believable as a blind man. “I did some very mundane things, like having to learn to do household tasks sightlessly first,” the actor says of his preparation for the role. “Within a day or so of having agreed to do the film, I was in my place in New York and I decided to find out exactly how well I knew my place. So I did it blindfolded. I went on an exploration of my apartment, and it turns out that I didn’t know it as well as I thought I knew it. I didn’t know how many steps there were, and right away, I thought, ‘Well, you’re going to need to know that.’ That’s when I learned that it was going to be all about me and my environment. My most important relationship in the film is with the house. That to me is a point of entry. It’s just a way of entering into the role, and from there, hopefully being able to explode and expand outward.”
There was also a more prosaic kind of research. “There’s the mechanical stuff of looking at the internet and seeing what blindness represents to people and seeing how they relate to people,” Lang explains. “Everything that you’re doing is really just an exercise in confidence building, because in the end, you’re going to make a leap of faith. When action is called, I am blind. Fede would look through the lens and say, ‘Lang, if you would drop your chin two inches and just cock your head that way, it would be perfect.’ I can feel it, but I can’t see what it looked like, and he could. He could really manipulate me, in terms of what was going on with the lights and the camera. That helped to – and I wish that I could find a better word for it – but to sell the blindness, which was what we wanted to do.”
With his lean, muscular physique and opaque contact lenses, Lang cuts a quietly terrifying figure in the film. “The eyewear actually contributed to the blindness because they remove about 60% of your sight,” Lang says. “We were also filming in low light conditions a lot of the time, and that also inhibits your sight. So to some extent, I was getting a bit of work done for me, so that’s all for the good. Were they uncomfortable? Occasionally, they could be dry but whatever. Out of all the discomforts that I’ve experienced making films, the lenses are not on the list. Other things about the film were tough…it’s a tough place to be, that particular mindset. That particular abyss that this guy’s facing is not an easy place to be. I felt that we reduced it so much of the time to what’s the real thing to do here – what’s the most authentic thing to do here, how’s the best way for this guy to react in terms of the truth of the character and in the more macro view in the truth of the story. We were problem solving the whole time.”
And in this age of terms like “whitewashing”, Lang was aware that now playing a character with any kind of disability brings with it a different kind of responsibility. “I tried to approach it all with respect, because there’s a legitimate debate that goes on now about who should play what,” the actor says. “Philosophically, I am of the opinion that any actor should be free to play any role in the world. Whether it’s a white guy playing Othello, or a black person playing a white character, I don’t care what it is. A woman playing Hamlet, I don’t care…it doesn’t matter, everyone should be available. But there are practical realities of opportunities for people, where some people are going to get more opportunities and other people are going to get less opportunities because of disabilities, because of sex…whatever it may be, and I understand that. But the fact is, I was cast as blind, so the only way that I could deal with that particular issue is to go at it with as much respect as possible, knowing that I have to be as credible as possible.”
Don’t Breathe is released in cinemas on September 1.
