Still comfortably weird

One overcast spring afternoon, James Spader was lurking in plain sight, smoking a cigarette and talking on a cellphone with the producers of his NBC series, The Blacklist.

“Come, come in,” Spader said with eerie alacrity. He waved his hand, a gesture aimed at this reporter, although you never know with him: He could have been signaling any pedestrian who happened to make eye contact.

Up a few flights of creaky stairs to the home of this mercurial 55-year-old actor, who has played many alluring characters over a four-decade span: the manipulative preppies of Pretty in Pink and Less Than Zero; the sexual misfits of White Palace, Crash and “Secretary”; the flat-out kooks of Lincoln and The Office.

Even at a moment of maximum popularity for Spader, when The Blacklist has become a hit and he plays the title villain in the superhero epic Avengers: Age of Ultron, some essential part of him remains inscrutable and comfortably weird.

When he discusses the narrative challenges of The Blacklist, on which he plays reformed criminal mastermind Raymond (Red) Reddington, Spader might as well be describing his general outlook on life.

“You really can find yourself not being able to see the forest for the trees,” he said.
“And then,” he added, his voice rising without warning or provocation, “at times not being able to see the trees for the forest.”

His voice dropped to a confessional whisper: “Really, it can be complicated.”
But his acting career could not be simpler, Spader says, because there is no strategy or calculation behind it. “You can tell there’s no plan, can’t you?” he said with a gleeful laugh. “My trajectory has not been an unbroken line. It’s always been piecemeal.”

Age of Ultron, which Spader filmed in London on a rare hiatus from The Blacklist, was his first exposure to blockbuster-scale moviemaking since the 1994 science-fiction feature Stargate. It was not much of a break from his intense television series and required him to spend many hours wearing a cumbersome light-sensitive, motion-capture costume.
Joss Whedon, the director and writer of Age of Ultron, said: “Spader had to wear some silly clothes and a helmet that shined two lights right in your face. He said to me at one point, ‘I’m constantly reacting to things emotionally that aren’t actually happening.’”

Colleagues who have known Spader since his first flourishing in the 1980s say that he has always projected a mixture of confidence and eccentricity, naiveté and shrewdness.
Robert Downey Jr, who appeared with Spader in Tuff Turf and Less Than Zero, recalled that before they shot a frame of film together, Spader was ready to take him under his wing. “He’s already calling me Bobby and telling me what hotel I should stay at,” Downey said. Since then, Downey said that, although they may go months or years without seeing each other, Spader always talks to him like he is picking up from where their last conversation left off.

When The Blacklist was offered to him, Spader had been looking for another television role — ideally in cable, where the seasons are shorter — but latched onto this network pilot, which offered tantalising questions about his character.

Jon Bokenkamp, the Blacklist creator, said that at first, Spader “wasn’t a clear fit” for the Reddington character. But what he brought to the role and to the show, Bokenkamp said, was “a sense of humour that wasn’t initially there. It is a show that is rather dark,” Bokenkamp said, “and it would be insufferable if he couldn’t bring to it a lightness and a self-awareness that can be fun.”

That impulse, “to marry a certain irreverence with gravitas,” is what Spader said attracted him to the Avengers sequel, in which he plays Ultron, a malevolent artificial intelligence determined to wipe out humanity.

Whedon said he was “looking for somebody who could do deep, hypnotic, low-register evil that your giant robot generally requires.”“James can do that it’s-coming-out-of-the-subwoofer voice, and then he can do the most hilarious hissy fit and somehow make them part of the same character,” Whedon said. “As soon as I thought of him, there was never another name.”

Downey said he took a certain delight that Spader was about to join him in “the ranks of the overexposed,” so many years after they first seemed poised for Hollywood success.
When called upon to play a madman or a murderous robot, Spader said, “I’m trying to serve my own curiosity and imagination first.”

Betraying no emotion whatsoever, he added that whatever perception his performances create, “I don’t concern myself with that much — I just do the work.”