Michael Douglas talks Beyond the Reach

Veteran actor and producer Michael Douglas teams up with rising British star Jeremy Irvine in what feels like a live-action version of Road Runner, Beyond the Reach

By Katherine Monk

TORONTO – It manifested instantly, a dust devil rising from the feet of Michael Douglas’s Italian loafers and swirling through Jeremy Irvine’s feathery mop of sandy blond hair: A howling acknowledgement of Hollywood’s discriminatory practices when it comes to weight and overall body image.

“A lot of actors are told they need to lose weight, or change their body. I was talking to Channing Tatum just recently and asked him why he was just drinking water, and he said it was because he had to go to the gym in two hours,” says Irvine, the young British actor who hit the radar in Steven Spielberg’s War Horse and now stars opposite Douglas in the new film, Beyond the Reach, currently playing in select theatres and available on-demand.

A cat-and-mouse thriller set in the middle of the Mojave desert, the film features Douglas as a – surprise – morally bankrupt Wall Street predator who cajoles a hunky young wilderness guide (Irvine) to take him to a remote location in the hope of bagging a trophy kill. When things don’t go as planned, the young guide is left to survive using his wits and glistening body alone.

Irvine says he had just wrapped shooting on The Railway Man, a Second World War drama set in a prisoner-of-war camp near the Thai-Burma railway. He was underweight and scrawny.

“I lost 30 pounds and was very, very skinny… and (director Jean-Baptiste Léonetti) was Skyping me, and he was pointing out what was lacking: ‘We must have the abs! We must have the abs!’” says Irvine, who looks perfectly chiseled on this particular afternoon.

“Yeah. We worked him over pretty good,” says Douglas, offering his best devilish grin. “You gotta be a hunk! You gotta be a hunk!”

Asked how he felt about the amount of attention focused on his physical appearance, Irvine answers with a bit of self-effacement. “I thought this was the ugliest role I have ever played. Pretty gross. Really. But I’ve always, ever since drama school, I’ve always had it drilled into me that vanity is what kills acting performances. If you’re worried about looking good, you’re not worried about playing the character.”

In this particular case, the character was a young, fit, outdoorsman. And for Michael Douglas, who also produced the movie, that’s why the hunky look was important. He says physical appearance is a fundamental part of the movie business and how it works. You can’t be naïve.

“Look, if the role in that movie is to be eye candy, and the director looks at you and says you have to take a little off because you’re going to be in bra and panties and you’re soft around the middle. Then absolutely, you tell that person,” says Douglas.

There isn’t a hint of hesitation when Douglas speaks, even upon entering the minefield of gender and body image. He’s got the walk, the talk and a quantity of cockiness that stops short of obnoxious and settles ever so softly on seductive.

It’s the reason why Douglas became the unlikely sex symbol of the 1980s and early 1990s, cooking up steamy scenes with every cover girl of the era, from Kathleen Turner to Sharon Stone, who is still famous for her sans-culottes interrogation scene in Basic Instinct.

“That was a good part for [Sharon],” says Douglas, who played a compromised good guy in the Paul Verhoeven-Joe Eszterhas classic.

Given the choice, Douglas says he prefers to play the darker side of the spectrum because that’s where the real drama lives, even if it’s on a comic book scale. Over four decades in the movie industry, Douglas has eluded the pubescent tent pole picture, but this summer you can find him in Marvel’s Ant-Man, starring Paul Rudd as a the title character, and Douglas as scientist Hank Pym.

“It’s more fun to play the villain. You get to do things nobody else gets to do. You get to be bad. Bbbbaaaad to the bbbbone,” says Douglas, doing his best George Thorogood.

“It’s great, you know, you look at most people’s careers acting-wise, and I mean my father was a sensitive young man. He was the sensitive young man for seven years until he was nominated for an Oscar in The Champion, in which he played a prick boxer. If you look at everyone’s careers, their biggest successes have come when they played villains,” says Douglas.

“So it’s fun and an audience can enjoy it. You know, nice guys are more difficult to play in terms of getting the edges and all of that, and I am not afraid. I enjoy the challenge of winning an audience over — of seducing an audience: If the audience hates you at the beginning of the picture but by the end goes wellllll….. he’s not so bad….”

Douglas offers his canine grin again and explains that the role he plays in Beyond the Reach is not exactly nuanced. He’s an old-fashioned bad guy because that’s what the original story demanded.

Based on the 1970s young adult novel Deathwatch by Robb White, Beyond the Reach explores the different faces of the American identity, in black and white terms. Douglas’s character Madec is morally bankrupt but immensely rich. Irvine’s noble Ben, on the other hand, represents all the best things about the U.S.A., from resilience and strength to tolerance and six-pack abs.

“Every piece is different,” says Douglas. “This is old-fashioned good guy-bad guy stuff. I see Jeremy’s character as an 18 or 19-year-old John Wayne. He’s the best of what America has to offer. And in my case, it’s about the worst America has to offer.”

Douglas says updating the 1972 book wasn’t too tough, given most of it takes place in the desert, which is timeless. But he did find a modern symbol of global trade and power: A one of a kind Mercedes-Benz truck that feels plucked from a Bond set.

“I think the truck added an element to this guy… But the hardest thing is translating a thriller: When you read it, it’s easier. But to visualize in broad daylight, in hot bright sunlight, with not a lot of things to hide behind in the desert, you worry: can we sustain suspense for an hour and a half?”

Douglas says in the ‘70s and ‘80s, there was a lot more room for, and interest in, the subtleties surrounding morality. These days, not so much: “It looks like the world has come back around that way… things are more polarized.”

Irvine says he often gets depressed about how Hollywood makes its decisions. But says he was heartened to see Beyond the Reach find financing.

“It’s so rare to find something which is exciting and edgy and dangerous that is going to get the financing and is going to go,” says Irvine. “For someone new to this industry as an actor, it’s incredibly frustrating when you read that script and you go, ‘This is genius! This is by far the best thing I’ve read all year!’ Yet that’s the movie that’s not going to be made? And yet this thing I’ve read a hundred times, and can barely get through the script, that’s the one that’s getting $200 million in financing? So yeah, I find it very frustrating,” he says.

Douglas’s mouth does a little snake dance that ends in his trademark smile. He says he doesn’t get frustrated because as a veteran producer as well as being an actor, he’s usually in control.

“Producing always comes first because producing is the entire movie,” he says. “And even when I am only an actor, I rely on my producing background in terms of breaking down the script, so that I know what my responsibility as an actor is to the movie, you know? Whether it’s to create a threat, to bring comic relief to the movie in the moment, or this or that, so producing leads,” says Douglas.

“I don’t want to act in a bad movie. I’d like to act in a good movie. You know? It’s always nicer.”

Beyond the Reach is available on VOD.