‘Can you take another story?” asks the veteran actor Bruce Dern towards the end of our talk, as though every tale is a drink and the landlord has called last orders. He doesn’t want to keep me and knows we’re running out of time. It’s just that one memory sparks another and these tales won’t tell themselves. He says that the next one is a doozy. “It’s about Marilyn Monroe.”
Throw out all the questions and turn the clocks to the wall. One does not interview Dern so much as say hello, hit record and sit back. The man began his career acting alongside Montgomery Clift and Mary Astor and has collaborated with everyone from John Wayne to Tom Hanks, Hitchcock to Tarantino. He’s the lawless survivor of American movies, blown in from the past, and talking 19 to the dozen. “I’m 90 fucking years old,” he tells me. “So I’m not going to be around to see all this AI shit or whatever. But I don’t consider myself old. I still walk and jog every day.”
