‘A lot of people had a crush on Ron’: Ron Vawter and The Man I Love
The late American actor Ron Vawter made a huge impression at the 1986 Adelaide Festival. A new film from Ira Sachs sees Oscar-winner Rami Malek play a character partly inspired by Vawter’s life and tragic death.
When Ira Sachs’s new film The Man I Love premiered in Cannes, it was hard not to see the central character of Jimmy George, played by Oscar-winner Rami Malek, as a version of the late actor Ron Vawter.
One of the founding members of the experimental New York theatre troupe, The Wooster Group, Vawter had been phenomenal in L.S.D. (…Just the High Points…) which The Wooster Group performed at Anthony Steel’s landmark 1986 Adelaide Festival. I loved it so much that I saw the production twice. Directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, it co-starred her then partner Willem Dafoe as well as a young blonde Steve Buscemi and Kate Valk, though Vawter was front and centre playing multiple roles.
Backstage footage of the actors in Adelaide can still be found on YouTube:
I later sought out Vawter and met him alongside his collaborator and partner of ten years, Greg Mehrten, in London for 1994’s Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, a version of a play he performed in, and it would be his final film after roles in Philadelphia and The Silence of the Lambs. He died shortly afterwards at the age of 45 following a heart attack related to complications from AIDS.
While Sachs, who previously made Peter Hujar’s Day and Passages, insists that the character of Jimmy is based on many men he knew, it was clear that The Mechanicals, the theatre group he belongs to with a woman director, was based on The Wooster Group. Jimmy refuses to play the victim and continues to work as Vawter did.
“Ron was someone that I had a crush on,” Sachs says. “A lot of people had a crush on Ron.”
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He admits that The Wooster Group was “a bit the model for The Mechanicals,” and that “we went down a kind of steep rabbit hole of Ron’s life and also found some beautiful backstage footage of Ron that we incorporated into the script in certain moments”.
“There’s a beautiful metaphor in his life in that when he did the play Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, he really was very ill, but he just loved being on stage. So he did one more production, which was a play called Philoctetes, which is a Greek story about a man in the military who’s poisoned, knows he’s going to die and takes himself off to an island.”
Sacks says Vawter took the play to Belgium.
“He was covered with Kaposi sarcoma at the time, which he was very comfortable with as part of the performance was his body. But he couldn’t finish the production.”
Vawter needed to get back to New York, so he got on a plane, Sachs adds.
“He died on the plane on the way back to the city. To me, it’s a breathtaking description of a man who’s committed and feels he cannot breathe without creating.”
Malek admits he immersed himself in everything Vawter did. “I was utterly fascinated by his refusal to give up, so for Jimmy I kept thinking about his stubborn refusal to disappear all throughout the production. Of course, there’s this undertone of death throughout the film, but predominantly, it’s about living.
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“Jimmy is a human being who’s bursting with life. He’s sharing the greatest intimacy in his relationships, his love, his friendships and his family, and extraordinarily so in his work, and that commitment to creating is almost a form of absolute survival. You can almost see it when you’re watching Ron or anyone from that period and also reading Borrowed Time.”
The latter 1988 AIDS memoir, written by Paul Monette, chronicles his 12-year relationship with Roger Horwitz, who died from AIDS.
In The Man I Love, which is set during the height of the AIDS crisis in 1980s New York, British actor Tom Sturridge plays Jimmy’s partner Dennis. He spoke to Mehrten, who he calls “an extraordinary man”, when preparing the role.
“The interviews that he’s given about Ron informed an enormous amount of how I thought about Dennis, and the backstage films also had a very particular influence on our relationship in the film. I feel that’s something very unexamined, the relationship between the artist and the non-artist, the love between those two people, and the profound creativity that loving an artist requires.
“It’s often perceived as passive, but it actually requires enormous imagination to allow the person you love to express themselves, to create and nurture an environment where they can be the fullest version of who they are. I think that that is a vocation and something to believe in and be inspired by and devote yourself to. And that’s what I found in him and in myself.”
The film follows Jimmy as he rehearses a makeshift theatre piece following a stint in hospital with pneumonia. A charming raconteur, during rehearsals he charms his friends in his apartment which becomes a kind of salon. Dennis has moved in to take care of him, but that doesn’t stop him from having a fling with his British neighbour Vincent (Luke Ford) who is infatuated with him. Malek paints Jimmy as a flamboyant narcissist, who sings and has a certain amount of talent, though not enough to make it big – which is where the comparison with Vawter diverges.
When considering the role, Malek was conscious of comparisons to Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, who Malek won an Oscar for playing in Bohemian Rhapsody.
“At first, when I read the script, I said, ‘Oh, I can’t do this. There are too many similarities,’” Malek recalls. “There was a certain sense of fear and I started to really think about what I was afraid of. Was it the singing? Was it what was going on in the period? I knew I had to address the fear because if there’s anything Freddie taught me it’s to always address the fear.”
Ultimately Malek knew he could rely on Sachs to “elevate” the story.
“I started to discover that these men who were similar, were also worlds apart,” he says. I mean you have an icon, a legend in Freddie who was really had a destination, whereas Jimmy is just searching for creativity and love and intimacy and joy and pleasure in every moment.”
As he prepared for the role Malek says he fell in love with Jimmy, with all his contradictions.
“I would come up to Ira and ask, are people going to like this character? He can be very selfish at times, he can be very narcissistic, which is very different to that other character [Mercury] that I love so much as well. There’s a great drive and passion that Jimmy has, and we would often refer to him as the guy who might not be featured in The New York Times, but he’d definitely be on the cover of The Village Voice. So there’s a soul in him, there’s a desperate need to create, and that’s what keeps him alive, and I could connect to that.”
The Man I Love screens at Adelaide Film Festival on October 17 and 22
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