In the standard farce, explains Timothy Hutton, “people who are not supposed to be having sex are – and they’re doing everything to hide it”. Terry Johnson’s new play, The Sex Party, is an “incredible reverse” says the actor, who is making his London stage debut in the production, directed by Johnson. The characters “have come to a place where they would like to be having sex and, as events move on, they are doing everything they can not to have sex”.
Hutton read the play, which takes place in the kitchen of a north London townhouse, “and liked it immediately” he tells me on a lunch break during rehearsals at the Menier Chocolate Factory. He plays Jeff, a shady American businessman who, in Hutton’s words, “when asked what his occupation is says ‘import/export’. He has a Russian wife, and they are very experienced at this sort of thing.” What sort of thing? “Sex parties,” he says. “He is committed to a lifestyle that is very specific.” Is he a bit sleazy? “I’m not going to put a judgment on someone but I have definitely met Jeffs in my life,” he replies.
Rewind 40 years to 1982 and Hutton was on the covers of Rolling Stone and People in the same week. Annie Leibovitz shot the Rolling Stone cover, which was accompanied by the words: “Timothy Hutton Is Too Good To Be True.” At 20, he had won an Oscar for Robert Redford’s film Ordinary People in 1980, starring opposite Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore, in which he played a young man traumatised by the accidental death of his older brother.
His actor father, Jim Hutton, died from liver cancer aged 45 the month before filming began. “I went inward,” he says. “I became very determined that everything was going to be all right and that I was going to work.” It earned him an Academy Award for best supporting actor – he remains the youngest actor to win in that category. “To win at that age was so surprising and sudden and exciting,” he recalls. “I was wise enough to know that this is a very unusual, rare occurrence.”
He went directly on to shoot Taps (1981), a drama set in a military academy, with Sean Penn in his first film role. The film was intended to confirm Hutton’s entry into the Hollywood A-list but Taps disappointed at the box office and is remembered today more for starring a 19-year-old Tom Cruise. “He was unbelievable,” recalls Hutton. “During rehearsals he just took over the room. He took it and he didn’t let it go.”
Hutton and Penn went on to co-star in John Schlesinger’s 1985 spy drama The Falcon and the Snowman, and were both labelled part of the “brat pack” – the new generation of young male actors. “It became a thing, a box,” he says. “They must all live together and they have meals together and they all go out and they all had attitude. Did any of that have any relationship to reality? None whatsoever. It was a completely fabricated idea, almost a fantasy. It became sensationalised but I never felt part of it.”
Hutton’s film choices led him to work with acclaimed directors including Sidney Lumet (on Daniel and Q&A), Fred Schepisi (Iceman), John Sayles (Sunshine State) and Robert De Niro (The Good Shepherd). He ventured beyond acting to direct a music video for the Cars’ Drive, an episode of Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories series (Grandpa’s Ghost, based on a story he wrote) and a film, Digging to China (1997). He has two sons, one from each of his marriages – to actor Debra Winger and illustrator Aurore Giscard d’Estaing.
The film with which I associate Hutton is the comedy drama Beautiful Girls (1996), written by Scott Rosenberg and directed by Ted Demme. Hutton plays a New York based pianist, who returns to his home town for a 10-year high-school reunion. I tell Hutton that it has long been one of my favourite movies, one that I have repeatedly watched when in desperate need of escapism and joy, and he tells me: “I grew up in Boston and later northern California and Berkeley and [connected with] the theme of old friendships and coming back to town. It was one of the best experiences of filming I have ever had.”
When I first saw Beautiful Girls I loved it unconditionally but in recent years it has become a more problematic watch. It was produced by Harvey Weinstein’s company Miramax and starred Mira Sorvino and Uma Thurman, who both later accused Weinstein of sexual harassment. One of the film’s subplots concerns the friendship between Willie (Hutton) and his 13-year-old neighbour Marty (Natalie Portman). In one scene, Willie tells Marty she is prettier than his girlfriend and in another he tells a friend “this girl is gonna be amazing, she’s smart, she’s funny, she’s hot”. I tell Hutton that watching it now, with a daughter who is 11, none of this feels entirely innocent. “They [Rosenberg and Demme] wanted it to be an innocent thing,” he says. “Anybody who saw that connection between those two characters and thought it was uncomfortable or strange or weird kind of missed the point.” I remind him that Natalie Portman told one interviewer that she was portrayed as a “Lolita figure” in some of her early films. “I think, objectively, one can look at it and say I get why it might make someone uncomfortable,” he replies. “But that was not the intention.”
In 2010 Hutton starred in The Ghost Writer directed by Roman Polanski. How did he justify working with a convicted child abuser? There is a long pause. “People who I had respect for had worked with him,” he says. “The script was really quite good and I was thinking about this film-maker whose films I had seen.” He adds: “I could have said no. It is something I wonder about. I did that film but by doing so I was not endorsing or diminishing anything.”
In recent years Hutton has largely worked in television, including a role alongside Viola Davis in the legal thriller How to Get Away with Murder, the horror series The Haunting of Hill House, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan and the anthology drama series American Crime. From 2008 to 2012, he starred in the crime drama Leverage as Nat Ford, a former insurance investigator who becomes the leader of a gang of criminals who steal from the corrupt and powerful to avenge their victims. The series returned in 2020 with an eight-episode revival but Hutton was dropped from the reboot after he was accused by a woman of rape in 1983.
Canadian law enforcement found a “glaring lack of support and proof” for the accusation and he was officially cleared last year. “No one should have to have things out there that are not true,” he says, when I ask how it feels to have references to those allegations on the internet. “I am moving on with my life but even saying ‘moving on’ sounds like there was something to move on from and I don’t want to do that because I have not stopped. I have not stopped and I am working.”
The burger is finished and Hutton is being called back to rehearsals. The Menier Chocolate Factory’s artistic director David Babani describes the play as “poking fun at all things woke” adding that “it will offend everybody”. “Do I think it will be controversial?” says Hutton. “I don’t know, but the audience will experience something that no one has had in terms of seeing a play.” When Hutton describes the play as about “characters in a kitchen terrified of what their lives were and what they may become” I find myself thinking back to the young man who had the world at his feet in 1982. Hutton, Penn and Cruise had all starred in Taps together but their subsequent career paths had wildly diverged.
Hutton tells me a story about how, straight after Taps, he had been offered two scripts. “They were both filming at the same time and I could not do them both,” he says. “One was called Daniel – to be directed by Sidney Lumet.” Hutton liked the script and did Daniel which “no one went to see”. The film Hutton turned down was called Risky Business. Is there any part of you that feels regret or wonders about the road not taken, I ask. He shakes his head. “There is no way I would have been able to do what Tom [Cruise] did in that film,” he says. “The right person got it. I am totally at peace with the road I took.”
The Sex Party is at the Menier Chocolate Factory, London, until 7 January.
