Dreyfuss dishes on ‘Madoff,’ close encounters of the father kind

WASHINGTON — “Greed,” for the lack of a better word, has been “good” for a while.

But decades after Gordon Gecko uttered those famous words in Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street” (1987), Hollywood is once again obsessed with corrupt high finance, from Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013) to Adam McKay’s “The Big Short” (2015) and now ABC’s miniseries “Madoff.”

The two-part drama — debuting Wednesday and concluding Thursday — stars Oscar winner Richard Dreyfuss as notorious criminal Bernie Madoff, whose Ponzi scheme bilked $65 billion from unsuspecting victims for 40 years until his 2008 arrest and 2009 sentencing to 150 years in prison.

“It’s actually been timely for months and years in the past, but now the stars have aligned so blatantly that people really have to work hard to ignore it,” Dreyfuss tells WTOP.

The scope of the role recalls Carol Reed’s classic “The Third Man” (1949) where Orson Welles gazed down from a Vienna Ferris wheel as villain Harry Lime, staring at the specks of people below not as human beings but as mere collateral to be exploited for his own corrupt pharmaceutical profits.

Now, it’s Dreyfuss’ turn to climb into such sleazy skin with complete disregard for his fellow man.

How does such a jocular fellow off screen portray such a slimeball on screen?

“Wouldn’t it be funny if only nice actors played nice guys and only rotten actors played rotten guys? … It’s the actor’s obligation to find what he’s got to find and play it convincingly. … My theory is really simple, that inside us is Bernie (Madoff), Satan and Jesus, and you have to find the appropriate, comparable amount of Bernie inside of you already. … There’s no such thing as a perfect person.”

To explain mankind’s multi-faced morality, Dreyfuss gives the analogy of driving in traffic.

“When you’re in traffic, some guy cuts you off and you start screaming bloody murder: ‘How dare you?!?’ … Then you realize that you’ve yelled so long that you’re missing your exit, and you cut across three lanes of traffic and everyone starts honking at you and you say, ‘What’s the matter? Give me a break.’ … All of a sudden, in one exchange you’re both Bernie and Jesus,” Dreyfuss says.

Traffic and Biblical allegories aside, the most fascinating characters are often indeed the flawed ones. But even Dreyfuss admits he was surprised to find so few redeeming qualities in researching Madoff.

“When I first started in on this character, I assumed that I was going to find certain likable characteristics and qualities and I could empathize with him about those things, and I found out that there really weren’t. He was a done deal. He was already baked and ready to be wrapped. He just waited for the appropriate moment and he skipped across the line very comfortably,” he says.

Dreyfuss says it was a fun challenge to get into the mindset of a con man.

“You had to reassure your clients that you are comfy and fun to be with and smart, just like Uncle Bernie should be, not knowing — or at least the clients not knowing — that the next move was going to have you sign your name to a dotted line which was the equivalent of slitting your own throat.”

Even more compelling than the clients he fooled is his ability to con his own family, including his wife Ruth Madoff, played by veteran actress Blythe Danner (“Meet the Parents”).

“Blythe Danner and I have managed to work with one another at the very beginning of my career, at the top height of my career, at the fade of my career twice. We have an acknowledged comfort. We’re like old shoes. … We’re almost at the point where we finish one another’s sentences,” he says.

While Danner can practically finish Dreyfuss’ sentences, Ruth Madoff is serving a different sort of life sentence than Bernie. It may not be in jail like her husband, but her life has been upended with most of the family assets seized by the government, including their Upper East Side penthouse. She’s also endured the deaths of two sons, Mark by suicide in 2012 and Andrew from lymphoma in 2014.

The question whether Ruth knew of Bernie’s transgressions remains up for debate, with Dreyfuss and Danner taking their own approaches to the question. Dreyfuss decided to play the part as if his wife didn’t know a thing about his criminality, but he says he doesn’t mind if Danner thinks differently.

“She may have found reason to have Ruth know what was going on or not. I’m not really sure, nor is it important, for me to agree with her. What’s important is that the end characterization fits, and fits like a glove. I’m pretty sure that she does not feel the same way that I feel about all those characters. … In my opinion, Ruth Madoff and the boys didn’t know squat about what he was doing as a criminal.”

At this point, Dreyfuss proves his point by flipping the interview to ask me questions:

Dreyfuss: Where were you raised?

Fraley: I was raised in Frederick, Maryland, not far from D.C. It was just like “American Graffiti” except it was 1984 instead of “Where were you in ’62.”

Dreyfuss: And what did your father do?

Fraley: He was a carpenter.

Dreyfuss: Were you ever tempted to say, “I don’t believe you’re a carpenter. What do you really do?”

Fraley: Nah, I always believed it.

Dreyfuss: You always did, ’cause he was your dad. That’s exactly how Ruth (Madoff) felt and how the boys felt, and you’d be shocked out of your skin to find out otherwise. And that’s the way we were all raised. So if your father said such and such, you went for it. You bought it.

You may not think it from the surface, but themes of fatherhood have spanned Dreyfuss’ most famous roles throughout his entire career. In Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster smash “Jaws” (1975), it was Dreyfuss’ marine biologist Hooper who interrupts a beautiful father-son moment between Roy Scheider and his on-screen son, folding their fingers in loving mimicry at the family dinner table.

Two years later, he reunited with Spielberg in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977), where his Midwest father Roy Neary drew looks of concern from his wife (Teri Garr) and son by building mashed-potato mountains at the dinner table and actual dirt piles in the living room.

While his family thought he was losing his mind, we the audience knew he was tapping into extraterrestrial truths that would help him to save a neighbor’s son abducted by aliens.

The same year as “Close Encounters,” Dreyfuss won an Academy Award in Herbert Ross’ “The Goodbye Girl” (1977) as a struggling off-Broadway actor who moves into an apartment with a divorced dancer and her 10-year-old daughter, making for a different “father-figure” dynamic.

“All the characters that I played that had fathers in them that were made before 1982 were all practice. Consciously I was practicing being a good father. I just had to wait for having children.”

Even after his daughter’s birth in 1982, he continued to play father figures. Who could forget his short-tempered Dr. Leo Marvin driving his family nuts with Bill Murray in Frank Oz’s “What About Bob?” (1991) or his Oscar-nominated role in “Mr. Holland’s Opus” (1995) where he serves as a mentor for orchestra students with the support of his wife (Glenne Headly) and son at home?

We all knew Dreyfuss was a talented actor, but who knew he put so much stock in fatherhood?

“My daughter, who is the proverbial apple in my eye, called me once when she was in her early 20s and she said, ‘Dad, do you remember that time when I didn’t think you had any authority over me and I didn’t respect you and I didn’t listen to you and I thought you were a silly man.’ I said, ‘Yes, I do remember that,’ and she said, ‘I just realized I was wrong,'” Dreyfuss recalls.

When his daughter tried changing the subject to discuss Thanksgiving dinner, Dreyfuss pressed her further, and in doing so, provided a lesson for all of us parents — current or future.

“One apology doesn’t make up for 10 years of hell, so I made her detail her apology a little bit more and I said, ‘One day when you have kids, you’re going to see your wonderful child or children at the moment they turn 13 or 14, aliens will come down and leave a robot in place and take your kid, and that alien is programmed just to irritate, and you’ll know what it’s like.'”