Paul Bettany (L) plays Andy Warhol opposite Jeremy Pope as Jean-Michel Basquiat is “The Collaboration,” now on Broadway. (Photo from Manhattan Theatre Club’s website)
NEW YORK (AP) | Paul Bettany has long been an admirer of art superstar Andy Warhol, from a distance, like an art lover wandering a favorite gallery. But when he was initially offered a chance to get much closer and play his hero on stage, he declined.
“I don’t know how you get underneath the wig and the glasses and the carefully curated public persona. I don’t know how to do it,” Bettany recalled thinking. “I think there might be a reason that Andy is always a cameo in films.”
Persistence on the part of a producer and reading Warhol’s diaries convinced Bettany that he might at least try. Now he finds himself on Broadway eight times a week underneath a wig, wearing glasses and making the very art onstage that he long admired.
Bettany stars in “The Collaboration,” Anthony McCarten’s fictional account about the real period in the mid-1980s when Warhol was compelled to work with new sensation and potential rival of the New York art world, Jean-Michel Basquiat, played by Jeremy Pope.
They were different men — one white, one Black; one older, the other younger. Warhol, 58, was a conceptional artist whose Pop Art explored household brand objects like Campbell’s soup cans and celebrities like Marylyn Monroe, while Basquiat, in his late 20s, was a neo-Expressionist, concerned with colonialism and racism. “We speak different languages,” Basquiat says in the play.
The work explores what may have been their dynamic as both men try to figure the other out and visit each others’ studios, and deals with race, commercialism, police brutality, addiction and the artist’s soul. The audience watches them paint together, too.
Long before the role came along, Bettany had been a fan of both artists and visited a remounting of their collaboration at the Whitney in 2019. He hopes audiences go home after seeing the play and think about each man in a different way.
His Warhol is droll yet vulnerable, needy and yet sometimes haughty, curious and also competitive. He is threatened by the younger artist and feels old. “I am afraid. Not of death, of life,” he says in the play.
Bettany is filled with praise for his subject. “If Warhol hadn’t existed, it would be like the Beatles not existing. Music would just sound different now and things would look different — magazines would look different, the posters would look different, design would look different,” he says.
The way Bettany shades his performance is clever, giving the audience at the beginning a glimpse of what they came IN expecting — a clipped, chilly Warhol in a turtleneck who then gradually unwinds as the play progresses into a fluid, fully fleshed-out person.
