The prolific career of Robert Duvall spans seven decades in theater, film, and television punctuated with seven Oscar nods and one win. But while growing up and struggling in school, little did Duvall know that he’d become such an accomplished actor. His life would take a turning point when he studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theater. While rooming with Hackman, Duvall sorted mail at the post office, clerked at Macy’s, and worked as a truck driver, but he kept his acting dreams alive as he dedicated himself to learning the craft. “If you don’t daydream and kind of plan things out in your imagination, you never get there. So you have to start someplace,” Duvall famously said. Here are two of Duvall’s fundamental beliefs about quality acting.
The Most Important Aspect of Acting
Besides the essential research required for a given role and mastering the skills that the character must be able to perform, such as horseback riding or sword fighting, Duvall sums up the most important aspect of acting as talking and listening. “It all begins with and ends with talking and listening. I talk, you listen; you talk, I listen. And it goes from there. From me, Bob Duvall, as an actor, doing that, that’s the journey in an individual scene, where that will take you. Rather than going for the result, you let the process take you to the result—even if you end up with zero.” For a performance to register as authentic, it’s got to emerge naturally from the characters’ speaking and listening to one another. As Duvall says, “There’s no right or wrong; just truthful or untruthful.”
It’s Gotta be You
When playing the country-western singer Mac Sledge in Tender Mercies, Judge Joseph Palmer in The Judge, consigliere Tom Hagen in The Godfather, Augustus McRae in the miniseries Lonesome Dove, or Lieutenant Colonel “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” Bill Kilgore … Duvall is known for the authenticity that he brings to each of his roles.
In the documentary Miracles and Mercies, he explained, “You can’t concoct or push ahead something other than what you have at that moment as yourself, as that character. It’s you at that moment in time. … Between action and cut, it’s a nice world, but you can’t force that any more than you can force it in life.”
When called to tap into the darkness within his characters, Duvall once described his approach as “all about percentages”—perhaps 80-percent negative personal qualities and 20-percent positive on one day, “and the next day, you reverse it.” He told the SXSW audience in 2014, “You always have to find contradictions, you always have to find that vulnerability within a guy. … You just try to find what’s in you legitimately that parallels what the script calls for. It’s gotta be you—something in you, not something out there.”
What’s Next for Duvall
At the age of 90, Duvall’s career is still cooking. The legendary actor continues to have projects in the works including the upcoming sports drama Hustle alongside Adam Sandler and Queen Latifah, as well as the upcoming drama film The Ploughmen written and directed by Ed Harris. Still, Duvall reflects, “I hope I left behind a legacy that people will enjoy. But whatever they want to say, I can’t predict.”
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