The Victim: against the ropes with Nick Stahl

LOS ANGELES MAGAZINE – JULY 1, 2003

Leaning against a brick wall, the actor Nick Stahl suffers one lost layer of blush to the tip of his snub nose, gently administered by a seasoned professional. Most noses hovering amid the heavy bags and jump ropes of the La Brea Boxing Academy this morning haven’t enjoyed such a tender fate. The tough old trainers and Golden Gloves alumni wear their twisted, flattened monuments to past pain and cruelty right between the eyes. At 23, Stahl stands 5 feet 11 inches, nearly as tall as Mike Tyson, but he’s slender enough to be a welterweight. He crouches beside the academy’s center ring, where an ex-rugby player is smashing the head of his sparring partner. Turning a sensitive gaze toward the camera, Stahl seems in need of the kind of protection Arnold Schwarzenegger will be providing him in this month’s Terminator 3, in which he plays the latest incarnation of John Connor, humanity’s ultimate savior against the evil machines.

Stahl’s love of boxing is a love of beautiful wounds. The first Mike Tyson-Evander Holyfield fight–the one free of ear mutilation–hooked him on the sport. While he has more respect for Holyfield’s career, he’s attracted to Tyson’s pathos. “When Tyson lost to Lennox Lewis, he was like a child. He was truly humbled,” he says. “He gave Lewis a hug, and he was like, ‘Please let me fight you again.’ I see Tyson as an innately smart guy, but it’s filtered through this mask of problems that he has, so that’s what people see.” Stahl is at least as captivated by the punishment boxers endure as by the pain they inflict. “Some people are born with this ability to get hit, and it doesn’t faze them,” he says.
“Some guys, you hit them once and they’re done.”

In the movies, Stahl is usually done in. In Terrence Malick’s 1998 film The Thin Red Line he lasted just long enough for the audience to glimpse, in languid succession, his terrified face aboard a ship, his terrified face on a battlefield, and his corpse riddled with rifle fire.

For In the Bedroom, his breakthrough film of 2001, Stahl fared worse. The sweetness, the guilelessness, the androgynous fragility he lent to his role as a love-struck New England college student made his murder by a jealous husband something worse than horrifying. “It seems more times than not I die in the movies. I’ve died something like ten times,” says Stahl, now smoking a cigarette in the gym’s parking lot. “It’s odd–it’s kind of my forte or something. I moved here when I was 16. That’s when that whole teen craze was around. Those roles were just a celebration of teenage idiocy. Coming into the room and jumping around and being a crazy, zany guy–I never did well at that. I feel like I’m much more suited to pain than pleasure onscreen. It’s much easier for me to do something like cry or be upset than to have fun.”

As a ten-year-old in the Dallas suburb of Richardson, Texas, Stahl landed the role of one of two sons led to the slaughter in a production of Medea. “I don’t think I had a line,” Stahl says. “There was me and a white kid with this giant Afro. Medea follows us. We’d go offstage and scream as if she was stabbing us, and then we would be carried out covered in corn syrup.”

The stage violence insulated him for a time from other afflictions. When Stahl was two, his father left him, his mother, and his two sisters. “I actually met him twice as a kid in kind of weird roundabout ways, but he wasn’t around,” Stahl says. “I didn’t have a happy childhood. I always wanted to be an adult. I felt that I was missing out on something. I feel like I’m in therapy right now. But I never linked it directly to my father. It might have more subconscious weight than I realize, but it was never a burden on my shoulders.” Searching memories of his hometown, Stahl singles out the drinking and the drugs, the pointless physical confrontations and frustrations, the time he was loitering on a street corner when a good friend had a 40-ounce beer bottle broken over his head–”a gruesome occurrence,” he calls it.

In a few of those films where his life has been spared, Stahl plays fatherless boys redeemed by male guardians: the forlorn Latin student uplifted by a mutilated Mel Gibson in 1993’s The Man Without a Face, and now John Connor taking cover behind Schwarzenegger in Terminator 3.

In Stahl’s own extracurricular art, the father-son dynamic rarely works out happily The actor is also an amateur painter who is drawn to tragedy, mythology, and the Bible. He considers only two of his canvases to be completed works. One that he’s still working on is a scene of Abraham taking the knife to Isaac at the altar. “Which is ridiculous,” he says, “I know.” Stahl finished a screenplay a few years back that has yet to be produced. He wrote in no less than three father figures to torment the antihero he created with himself in mind. There’s the absent biological father who’s just escaped from a mental institution and may or may not be coming home. There’s the unhinged stepfather who chases Stahl’s character around the family trailer with a baseball bat. Then there’s the flamboyant cockfight promoter who takes the boy under his wing like Fagin in some latter-day Oliver Twist and orders him to kill his best friend in a test of loyalty.

The mental institution escapee, for his part, does eventually show up as his son’s would-be rescuer. “He wants to take the kid,” Stahl says. “He kind of claims that he’s reformed and he is a changed person. He wants to give this kid a better life and take him out of this world, but it’s too late really, and the kid is too far gone into this situation. So it ends kind of tragically.” Not with the best friend’s murder, of course. In this, as in many other films, the corpse at the grim conclusion is Nick Stahl’s.