Robbins Takes on Pudding With Politics, Humor

My guides are full of hushed enthusiasm as they usher me down a winding staircase to the basement on Feb. 17, warning me that I will get four and only four minutes with my subject. After a moment, I am escorted anxiously into a small room where bright lights shine and cameras whir.

And in this heightened atmosphere, Tim Robbins is…chilling. Slow down, he urges me as I begin rushing through questions. Leaning back in his seat, wearing a black t-shirt and an easy grin, the acclaimed writer, actor, and director looks very, very comfortable.

And why shouldn’t he? Elsewhere in the 12 Holyoke St. building, the members of the Hasty Pudding Theatricals (HPT) have meticulously prepared a shower of insults. To kick off the opening of its 157th annual musical, “Terms of Frontierment,” the Pudding has invited Robbins here to be mocked, ribbed, joshed—and, finally, to be rewarded with the cross-dressed kisses and golden Pudding Pot which are the true deserts of the oldest student company in the nation’s Man of the Year.

But Robbins will brush off their acerbic bons mots with aplomb, even firing back a few choice barbs of his own without missing a beat—and after winning an Oscar and a Golden Globe last year for his supporting turn in Mystic River, mounting a stage to receive a gilded statuette must be old hat.

Of course, that’s not to suggest that Robbins is in any way jaded. In fact, a film career entering its third decade seems to have left him more energized than ever, with three films in post-production for 2005 releases—The Secret Life of Words, the children’s fantasy Zathura, and Steven Spielberg’s update of War of the Worlds.

Robbins’ good humor is all the more surprising considering the powerful moral conscience that goes along with his earnestly dapper looks and rakish charm. Those qualities could have bought him a breezy, pleasant kind of stardom, but Robbins has chosen the high road with weighty films like 1995’s death-row drama Dead Man Walking and 1999’s Cradle Will Rock, about leftist theater in the Great Depression, both of which he wrote and directed.

Offscreen, too, Robbins and long-term partner Susan Sarandon have spoken out against pre-emptive war, censorship, the death penalty, restrictive immigration policy, police brutality, and unfair labor practices, to mention only a few issues. In 2000, the Green Party members risked alienating many fans, even those who consider themselves liberal, by endorsing Ralph Nader’s presidential bid; last year, they argued passionately against their former champion, urging progressive voters to support John Kerry instead.

These very public politics have earned Robbins a roast much less friendly than the Pudding’s in the conservative press. In one notable April 2003 incident, as the United States entered its second month in Iraq, the Baseball Hall of Fame planned a Cooperstown celebration of 1988’s Bull Durham featuring members of the film’s cast and crew. The event was cancelled when Hall of Fame president Dale Petroskey declared that recent remarks by Robbins and Sarandon—who were busy advocating for peace 15 years after starring in the minor-league diamond drama—“ultimately could put our troops in even more danger.” (Robbins hit back at the time, suggesting that Petroskey belonged with “the cowards and ideologues in a hall of infamy and shame.”)

Few stars as acclaimed and successful as Robbins find themselves the target of so much vitriol. But his advice for creative students who want to follow in his politically-active footsteps is simple: lighten up.

“No one wants a lecture when they go into the theater,” he tells me. “Find a way to entertain while raising questions…Always have a sense of humor about it.”

This sense is amply on display during our interview and the Pudding ceremony, where Robbins free-associates political quips that are never pedantic. At one point, talk turns to Embedded, a film Robbins made from a play that he wrote and directed last year. After describing Embedded’s cast of characters—shady pols leading the nation to war in Iraq, tamed journalists, and a trio of soldiers—Robbins could easily opine further on the heavy matters dealt with in the play, or whine about the very mixed reviews critics gave his theatrical production, which was a popular success. Instead, he wryly acknowledges the film industry’s unwritten rules and leaves it at that.

“It’s not going to get major release…across the nation,” Robbins tells me, leaning in and laughing.

On, then, to more mainstream projects. What about Steven Spielberg’s take on H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, awaiting a June 29 release, in which Robbins shares the screen with Tom Cruise, Miranda Otto, and Dakota Fanning? The residents of late-Victorian Britain felt the brute force of interplanetary colonialism in Wells’ classic science fiction novel, and Robbins is the first to admit that Spielberg’s contemporary update, set in America, might have some underlying relevance to the current geopolitical scene.

But push him for details, and he demurs with a grin.

“I kind of prefer that people find it on their own,” Robbins explains.

—Staff writer Simon W. Vozick-Levinson can be reached at vozick@fas.harvard.edu.