It's a tough job
Loggia shares showbiz tales and tips
If you take one look at actor Robert Loggia and think “rough, tough and gruff,” you’re not necessarily off the mark. It turns out his art — including roles as gangsters and heavies — sometimes imitates his life.
He once roughed up director David Lynch for keeping him waiting for an audition on an especially hot day. In turn, Lynch cast him as a gangster in Lost Highway. “I realized that I had auditioned for the part by rattling his cage,” Loggia told a crowd of Mizzou theatre students and others at Mizzou’s Rhynsburger Theatre on Oct. 23.
The lauded actor and 1951 journalism graduate, in town like other alumni for Homecoming, shared tales and valuable advice from a career students can truly aspire to — including 50 years of work in films, TV, theatre and even video games; a 1985 Oscar nomination for the thriller Jagged Edge; and two Emmy nominations for TV work.
Despite the Lynch story and others, Loggia isn’t all rage. In fact, range would be more accurate. In life, he’s just as likely to break into a song or a Shakespearean passage as he is to bully a geeky director. It shows in his work, too. Sure, he has played tough guys in Scarface, The Sopranos, and other films and TV shows, but he also has a playful and gentle side.
The classic example is the movie Big, in which he and Tom Hanks performed a duet of “Chopsticks” on a giant floor piano at FAO Schwartz. After both men practiced the scene to get it perfect, they showed up on set to find two professional dancers. They weren’t having it. They insisted on doing the scene themselves and got it right in one take. “Tom and I rose to the challenge,” he said.
In addition to other tales of stardust and success, Loggia offered some advice to the would-be actors in the crowd: Let the role come first, not your own personality. It’s not always the case with actors these days, but it’s how he learned and why he can play such a range of characters. “You’re not acting; you’re being,” Loggia said.