"I’m not an LA person,” says Chris Cooper. “I’m just, um, doing my thing.”
He lives far away from the bustle of the film industry in Massachusetts. He’s been married to Marianne, his college sweetheart, for 25 years. The couple are strident advocates for exceptional children.
I probably didn’t need to sit next to him in an Edinburgh hotel to realise that the 56-year-old is a pretty straight guy. But it certainly brings it home. Over the past two decades a series of impossibly impressive performances have earned Chris Cooper an Academy Award and a reputation for being Everybody’s Favourite Character Actor. In the flesh, despite his success, he’s the closest thing to a Real Life Person you’ll ever meet amongst his particular guild.
That aura of realism coupled with a quietly authoritative manner has landed him multiple roles in period dramas (Lonesome Dove, Matewan) but oddly, for a fellow who describes himself as being politically “to the left of the left,” he frequently finds himself playing an architect or cog in the military industrial machine.
“I don’t know what it is,” Chris tells me. “People say I have ‘lived in’ features or that I look like somebody from the Depression Era or a war veteran. And I guess that suits me just fine.”
Following similarly gruff turns in American Beauty, The Bourne Identity, Jarhead, Capote and The Patriot, Mr. Cooper’s latest film, Breach, sees him essay Robert Hanssen, an FBI operative whose sullen manner masked his extra-curricular activities as America’s Worst Ever Spy.
Hanssen, a devout Catholic and member of Opus Dei, was finally brought to justice in 2001 after selling secrets to the Russians for almost 20 years. A sensational trial culminated in a life sentence, a flurry of headlines and a made-for-TV movie starring William Hurt. Breach, however, is an infinitely classier affair. A taut espionage thriller from Billy Ray, the director of Shattered Glass, Breach is already generating ‘Oscar buzz’ thanks to a cracking central performance from Mr. Cooper. Even Ryan Phillippe, who plays Eric O Neill, the young FBI upstart assigned to shadow the older double agent during his final months on the job, may be in with a shout for Best Supporting Actor.
As an old pro famed for his intense groundwork for each role, Chris found himself spoiled for choice when it came to research material. Investing Hanssen with charisma, however, was rather trickier.
“I had to work hard to find it,” says Cooper. “Eric O Neill, who was assigned to shadow Hanssen during his last days at the FBI, was available to us before the film and there were lots of biographies that came out just after the story broke. I guess I must have read four or five of them covering everything from his childhood to his capture. But doing research the picture that emerged was someone who didn’t smile, who was regarded as being rather boring among his colleagues, who had no charm. He didn’t respect the people around him - he thought he was smarter than all of them. And they, in turn, called him names like The Mortician behind his back.”
For all his meticulous preparation, Mr. Cooper can only guess at Hanssen’s motivations for spying, let alone the agent’s unhealthy preoccupation with Catherine Zeta Jones.
“There are a number of things we touch on in the film,” says the actor. “There were psychological issues dating back to Robert Hanssen’s relationship with his father. There was a fear of failure. There was a bitterness toward the agency as he had been expected to rise a lot higher in the FBI than he actually did. But he’s in a supermax maximum-security prison for the rest of his life. So who can know, really?”
A thoughtful chap, not inclined toward glib or easy responses, you really do wonder how Chris Cooper wound up in this line of work. Born in Kansas to Mary Ann, his homemaker mother, and Charles Cooper, who served as a doctor in the US
Air Force while simultaneously operating a 1280-acre cattle ranch, Chris would study both drama and agriculture at the University of Missouri.
“I would have been happy doing either,” he smiles. “Really I would. I would have been happy working the ranch but at the same time, I was really fascinated by theatre. I worked in community productions as a stagehand and doing bit parts. And I just knew I had to give it a shot - even though it wasn’t the sort of thing that boys were supposed to get involved with – or I was going to regret it.”
He joined the US Coastal Reserves to avoid the Vietnam draft before heading off for the bright lights of New York where he trained under Stella Adler, America’s foremost acting coach. He became a regular on the stage in off-Broadway productions but it was 1987 before he made his screen debut as a noble union rep in John Sayles’ Matewan. The film was a critical hit, though it took two series of Lonesome Dove, the television horse opera with Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall, for offers of work to really start flooding in.
Still, Mr. Cooper has always remained cautious about committing to any given project. He reads scripts “three or four times” by his own account and always reads up on the credentials of those involved.
“If I read a good script I jump on it,” he says. “Breach is the first screenplay where I only had to read it once. And I always check who else is onboard – the actors, the director, the director of photography – if it looks like a winning team I’m there. Recently I’ve worked with some first time directors but if you know who else has signed up it tells you quite a bit.”
That doesn’t mean you won’t find the odd curveball on his CV. He won his Oscar for Adaptation, one of Charlie Kaufman’s twisted specials, and has even done a tour of duty with low-brow champions, the Farrelly brothers.
“With Adaptation we had something like six or seven weeks to finish this monster sized production,” he recalls. “They were long days and we were really working. But working with Meryl (Streep) was marvellous. She is a lot of fun. And I said ‘yes’ to Me, Myself And Irene because I knew it was unlikely that I’d get cast in a picture with Jim Carrey again. And it was really great watching him. He does one take and then he’ll add a little something during the next and expand on it and build on it. His process is genuinely fascinating, though it makes it extremely hard to keep playing the straight man across the room.”
Sadly, Chris Cooper’s late success has been tinged with great personal tragedy. In 1987 his only son Jesse was born three months prematurely with severe cerebral palsy. The family would later move to New England to avail of the best facilities.
“It’s one of those times when you say, ‘Thank God for Ted Kennedy’,” says the actor. “Massachusetts is years ahead of New York in terms of special needs. And Jesse was a bright boy. He made it into a mainstream school even though he had very limited movement.”
Jesse died of complications related to cerebral palsy two years ago. Understandably, his father moistens a little when he speaks of it.
“I work in a very self-absorbed profession,” he says. “So Jesse was always around to remind me there are more important things. He’s still there to draw on when I’m working. It sounds callous but in a way it means he’s still with me. And we still live in the same house which I’m glad of. It never feels like he’s too far away.”

Breach is on general release.