One of our favorite film actors is currently appearing on Broadway in a play about one of our favorite visual artists. In the engrossing play Red, the role of transcendent artist Mark Rothko is filled by the great Alfred Molina, who has brought his considerable talents to movie parts ranging from Doctor Octavious in Spiderman to the treacherous Satipo who won't throw the whip to Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Molina is incendiary in the role, like a giant volcano erupting with passionate ideas about art, philosophy, and commercialism (the play takes place in Rothko's studio between '58-'60 as he prepares large-scale murals for a fat commission from the under-construction Seagram Building). Part of the fun is watching his ambitious assistant Ken (Eddie Redmayne) get burned by Molina's showering sparks—and when he musters the courage to return fire, the impact is doubly explosive. We recently spoke with Molina about bringing Rothko to Broadway.

It's very striking when the audience walks in and you're already there sitting onstage, staring at the paintings. Yes, we did that in London too, it has a very interesting effect on the audience at first, but when the audience starts to fill in people get very used to it. The first dozen people who come in sort of whisper instead of talk. They must be thinking, "We mustn't disturb the actor," or some such thing goes through their mind. One evening an elderly couple came and sat in the front row, almost directly behind me, and I heard the gentleman say, "That's Alfred Molina, he's playing Rothko, he's the one in the chair." [Laughs] And the lady with him said, "What is he doing?" and the gentleman said, "He's getting in the mood." [Laughs] I loved that. It kind of made me chuckle a little bit. You hear some strange conversations but after a while when it starts to fill and it starts to become just this general sort of buzz.

It seems like the show must be really exhausting. You're on stage well before it starts, and there's no intermission so you don't even have the chance to go to the bathroom. I have to time my bathroom breaks quite closely during the day, and I have to make sure no fluid goes in at least a half hour before the show starts and I have to make sure I go to the bathroom just before the it starts. It's like being back in primary school. The stage manager says he becomes my mother, "Have you been to the bathroom yet?" [Laughs]

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Alfred Molina and Eddie Redmayne, who plays Rothko's assistant. (Johan Persson)

What were your feelings about Rothko's work before getting involved with the project? Is he an artist who has been important to you? Well, I wouldn't say "important" in the sense that he wasn't an artist that I was obsessed or preoccupied with. But I certainly liked—which is obviously a word that he would hate—but I certainly appreciated his work although I knew very, very little about him. Before we started working on the play the only thing I knew was that he was born in Russia and he committed suicide in 1970 and that's about it. I'd seen a few of the murals that ended up at the Tate galleries in London, and I'd seen reproduction books, but that was about the limit of my knowledge. Then I began to research.

What did that entail? It just involved reading the books and trying to absorb as much information, as much appreciation of the work and so on, as much as I could. and once we started working on the play you work it all out and forget it. The last thing the audience is paying for is to watch you show off your homework.

Did you base anything on actual documentary footage of Rothko or audio or anything like that? There wasn't any audio, we couldn't find any audio apart from a two minute clip from a radio program in London on the BBC that he must have recorded in the very early '60s when he was in England. It was very, very hard to gather anything beyond that because he was clearly reading. I couldn't find any film on him though he is very well documented in still photographs, and so I went about looking at all these photos trying to get a sense of how he held himself, how he moved, very simple things like if there was any particular physical attitudes that kept popping up, among them of course was him with his hands on his hips, and another one was the way he holds his cigarette in a very specific way. So I tried to absorb all that but again you know it's the kind of search that when the audience is aware of it it becomes really very dull. It's something the actor just needs to absorb and make it part of his own DNA.

Have you heard any feedback from anyone who knew him personally? A few people who knew him or met him have been to see the play, and were very encouraging about it. I met with a couple of his students a few days ago, and I have had meetings with various people who at various times in the past were contemporaries of his. We met Frank Stella, who knew him very well and bought artwork from the artist when he was still alive. It's all very, very useful, that stuff, because it gives you an idea of if you're on the right track. This isn't a documentary, we aren't in the business of giving the audience a history lesson, but it's nice to know we've caught the essence, or the spirit of the time and character.

Do you feel like you've developed a greater insight into Rothko's work through doing the role? Yeah, I think that's inevitable really, especially when you're playing a person who actually existed or exists in time. And I don't think it's simply relegated to people in the arts, I think the same process happens when you play anyone who's a real character, a real person. The deeper you go into learning about that person, you can't help but absorb more and more of them and start seeing the nuances of their character or their behavior. Character as real people in real life are, they're all as contradictory and paradoxical as we can be and the same thing applies to the characters that we play on stage.

I love the first line of the play, it really sets things off in a very engaging way; "What do you see." Yes, yes.

I'm curious what you see when you look at Rothko's paintings. What I used to see was something very, very different from what I see now. I think that because I understand more about him, what his preoccupations were, what his prejudices were, all the good things and all the not so good things... What I see is a clearer understanding of how he makes me feel. And I think in a way that's really what he intended. He never, in the play, asks his assistant what he thinks about anything. He ask him what he sees and at one point asks, "How do they make you feel," and talks about art in terms of how it has an impact on people. He talks about Pollock, he says at one point that he thinks painting, mastered, can stop your heart, the idea that art demands a physical response as well as any kind of intellectual or objective response. I think what I've learned is that I can understand how he went about that much more than I could prior.

You seem to be developing a history of playing significant artists, why do you think that is? I'd have to disagree with you there, I've been working professionally for 45 years and I've only played an artist twice, I don't think that's a development, I think that comes under the definition of a coincidence.

Did those two roles reflect each other at all? When you're playing a character, you still have the same obligation as an actor, to make the character alive and as entertaining as you can. But if the character actually existed, there is the added responsibility which is to not misrepresent. So you have to do a certain amount of footwork; if the guy had an accent, you've got to try and get that accent. You can't just simply turn around and say, "You know what, I've got this great idea, I'm going to try and play Diego Rivera as an Irishman, because I think that could really work." You could do that with a fictional character to a certain extent, you can perhaps add something like that and it might illuminate something about the character.

But when you're playing a real person, it would be inconceivable for instance to play Mark Rothko without smoking, because he was infamous for his chain smoking and his drinking. It would be nonsensical to play him without a cigarette or a drink at hand. Things like that you have to kind of take on board. I always think that one day someone's going to play Obama, on a TV show, and the actor's going to have to learn to be a left-handed writer. You have to take yourself as much as you can to the character. Not do an impersonation, but just at least make the experience as authentic a one as possible.

I've never been to the Donmar [Warehouse, where Red premiered] but I'm assuming its quite different from Broadway? Yeah, its very different. Its almost a quarter the size, 250 seats, and the audience is on three sides. The audience is only about three or four rows deep. So the stage configuration is very different. We did a few adjustments for playing it to a bigger scene where we are now. The play is the same, certainly, though some details are different. If anything the move to the bigger stage has actually made it a richer experience because we've been able to fill the stage with more works by Rothko, so the experience for the audience of being actually inside a studio is more achievable.

Compared to other performances you've given, how does this compare in terms of the amount of energy expended? It is true, some plays are really quite easy physically. The first time I did a show on Broadway was Art in '98, and that was essentially three guys talking, we sat in chairs. I barely broke into a sweat in that show, it was only 90 minutes. It wasn't physically hard work, there wasn't any rushing around. Of course other shows are three hours long. But for a 90 minute show, or thereabouts, this one [Red] packs in quite a bit of work. I'm loathe to say it's tiring because that always sounds like I'm complaining and I'm not at all. But it is taxing, you do feel like you've done a nice bit of work at the end. It is, after all, a wonderful way to spend your life. But I'm loathe to sound like I'm moaning.

Towards the end of the play, Rothko talks about younger, newer artists coming out and he has some feelings about them. Can you relate to this at all as an actor? Yes, I think generationally it happens to everybody. I'm 57 this year and you reach a point in your life, in your middle age, when you start to think, "I've got maybe 15, 20 years left if I'm healthy and strong and there's a whole new generation out there," there's a sense of sort of passing it on somehow. There's a sense of making way, you step aside, but I think that's just life, that's nature. The grace that you display is in how you take it, how you handle it. A lot of people who have spent their lives being physical and then they reach a point where they start teaching, because that's a very active, a very proactive way of handing down.

I started teaching about 12 years ago; I work with young actors. It's a way of sort of positively handing down and saying "Okay, it's your turn, and for what it's worth this is what I've learned," and I think that's a positive way rather than sitting around and going "Oh these whippersnappers." There's room at the table for everybody. I think Rothko certainly seemed to have some difficulty with that. It's inevitable and unavoidable. Might as well embrace it.

I think one of my first memories of you is probably Boogie Nights, and there's a line that's become one of my favorite non-sequitors to work into conversation: "I make these little mixtapes!" When you're out and about, do you get people quoting some of the lines from your films? Oh yeah, I do, and what's interesting about it is that it absolutely gets broken down into generations. It's really interesting, people of my age tend to quote the line from Raiders of the Lost Ark, "Throw me the idol, I'll throw you the whip." That's the first film I ever did, so there's a kind of connection with that. The younger generation who saw Boogie Nights, they sort of say, "Loved that line, man, when you say 'Oh that's Cosmo...he's Chinese.'" And then of course there are the even younger people who remember things like Spider Man so its just very flattering in a way. I don't find it irritating, it means that I'm part of some sort of history in film, and that's flattering.