Marton Csokas Interview (The Equalizer)
What attracted you to this project?
You’ve got some very good people working on it: Denzel Washington, Antoine Fuqua, and [cinematographer] Mauro Fiore; that triangle that did very well with Training Day. As an actor, to work with Denzel is a great privilege and was a great pleasure. And, as I discovered, working with Antoine was a very enjoyable trip.
And Mauro, as well. It was all very friendly, you know? It was friendly, it was easy – and it’s not always easy. And it’s not always enjoyable. But I ended up having a really good time, so I’m very happy to be a part of it. I was lucky, as far as I’m concerned.
How did you prepare to play this character?
I didn’t want to cast him in a typical mold. That was the challenge: how to do something different [and] hopefully do something new; or, at least, unique. And that was the pleasure of this: to go and do the research on psychopaths and sociopaths. There’s a great many books that have been written on the subject: “The Wisdom of Psychopaths;” “The Psychopath Test,” “The Sociopath Next Door,” [and] “Without Conscience.”
These are very informative books and I could bring a lot of that stuff – a lot of the behavior and the psychology – to the role and to [screenwriter] Richard Wenk’s text, which had lots of anchoring points. And Melissa Leo’s character says my character, Teddy, is “a sociopath with a business card,” so I really hooked into that one. And then I just messed with the text a lot. I just tried to take it off the obvious and it ended up going into an interior world [and] a psychological world primarily based on the behavior and thinking of a sociopath.
What was it like working with director Antoine Fuqua?
What I loved about Antoine is that we could sit and talk about things. As is inevitable, you all come from different perspectives. It would be a pretty boring time for everybody to sit down in a room and go, “I think this,” and “I think that, too.” Where do we go from [there]? Antoine has very strong opinions on things.
I mean, sometimes, he would come in and just go, “This is what I want him to wear. No, no. I definitely don’t want that. I want this.” But that comes at the end of a process whereby you sit and you talk and you offer up ideas. What I loved about him was that he was not totalitarian, which is an easy habit to fall into and just a damning approach for the creative process. He was honest, he wasn’t manipulative.
We just sat and we talked. And I don’t say this to undermine him at all but sometimes he’d say, “I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.” And you go, now there’s a friend. Because I do the same [thing]. You’re seeking; you’re trying to find…you want to find the best. If we knew what the answer was, why bother to make the film? And he understands that.
And he understands that every actor is different. I saw him working with different people while I was on the set and I complimented him on it because it’s rare. He treated different people differently. Actors are not all the same and he understands that. So, I had a good time with Antoine. I have a great respect for him.
Available on Blu-ray, DVD & Ultraviolet January 22nd 2015
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