I recently interviewed Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning actor Tom Berenger on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:
Adam: Our guest today is a Golden Globe and Emmy Award winner and an Academy Award nominee. Tom Berenger starred in Platoon, Major League, The Big Chill, Sniper, Gettysburg, and Inception, and is the narrator of the new documentary Ronin Three: The Battle for Sangin. Tom, thank you for joining us.
Tom: Thank you. Glad to be here.
Adam: You grew up in Chicago, and growing up, you were anything but an aspiring actor. You studied journalism at the University of Missouri, and you wanted to be a sportswriter. Can you take listeners back to your early days? What early experiences and lessons shaped your worldview and shaped the trajectory of your success?
Tom: My dad was a printer with the Chicago Sun-Times, and he got drafted three days before Pearl Harbor. Also, he had perfect grammar, perfect spelling, perfect punctuation, and he read a lot. So his vocabulary was big. He could do little, certainly corrections, but even sometimes little rewrites for the reporters. Some of them were not always great spellers. They were good writers, but not spellers and stuff. But he could correct it. Also, he was a history buff. I knew everything about Alexander the Great and Napoleon, and I guess Julius Caesar and stuff. That’s what I would read, the American Revolution, and he took us to Valley Forge, Lexington and Concord, and Boston. Then, of course, we went to D.C. I mean, he would do all these trips because he wanted to show us the country, and we learned geography and maps and national parks and all that stuff. We saw it all, and he would do that in the summer when he was free, and he would drive and drive and drive and drive, which he did as a salesman. He had covered Illinois, Indiana, and Missouri as a salesman. So I wanted to go to West Point. That didn’t happen. Two guys from my class got appointments. That’s a lot in one school, so I said, “Oh, the hell with that!” Then I said, “Journalism. I’ll go to the University of Missouri.” I had visited there with my dad once because he also sold printing equipment to the university there. I didn’t intend to go into acting; I thought it would be journalism. But when I got in college, just on a lark, I heard an ad on the radio that the university theater was going to do a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and I went. I saw the movie at the theater, and this was the play form that originated on Broadway. And I told my roommate when we were just lying around on our beds and bullshitting like you do, and he’s over there having a cigarette and a coffee and stuff, and he said, “What are you doing that for? You’re not an actor.” I go, “Well, who is before they start?” And I said, “Look, I’m not playing a sport here anymore. I’m not in any extracurricular activities.” He said, “Try it.” I came back the next day. He said, “How’d it go?” And I said, “Well, I got them laughing, and they thanked me very much. So maybe I’ll find out tomorrow.” [Unclear.] It was a four-character play, four hours long. Learned a lot doing that, and that was the beginning.
Adam: I love it. So many great lessons there. Starting off with you don’t know until you try, and sometimes you need that push from someone else. Sometimes you need to step outside of your comfort zone, and that push comes from within. But ultimately, you’re never going to know how great you can be at anything unless you try something.
Tom: Exactly, and when you look at kids, you always think that. You go, “How do they know? They don’t know yet, but one day they’ll have to make a decision to try something and try several things.” What the hell, right?
Adam: You tried acting. You discovered you were pretty good at it. How did you become great at it?
Tom: Well, I worked very hard at it. Yeah, I did take classes in it in New York, and I did a couple other plays in college, and I did plays in Kansas City. I did some other plays, and then ended up going to New York and just doing it, just persistence. It’s a little bit like being a salesman, which I swore I would never be, like my dad was. And then when you look at all the travel involved with it, you go, “Oh my God, I’m a traveling man like him.” It’s like, geez, this is rough. Your family and everybody.
Adam: It’s a great analogy comparing being an actor to being a salesperson, and right at the heart of it is your ability to persuade. It’s really hard to be a successful salesperson if you can’t persuade customers. It’s really hard to be a successful actor if you can’t persuade audiences.
Tom: Yeah, my dad had some success at it, but not just because he was smart, self-taught, well-read, and all that, and he’d also served in the war and stuff. So that’s always something to bullshit about when you’re back in the composing room with the guys. He had a lot of advantages there because when he got past the secretary and the publisher or whatever, he was then working in the composing room with those guys, right? He’d be in there, and on a number of occasions he took off his suit coat, rolled up his white shirt sleeves, and crawled under the Linotype machine and repaired it. Whoa! Did that save them some time that day or week? You betcha! And they didn’t have to order any parts or anything on that one. He would get a sale out of that because he had been a printer before he was a printing salesman.
Adam: And it comes down to understanding your audience, understanding the people who you’re selling to, understanding the people who you’re in front of, the people who you’re trying to persuade, and speaking to them in language that they can understand, speaking to them in language that’s going to resonate with them, and that’s a great example. I know what their pain point is. I can solve it pretty easily. I’m going to roll up my sleeves and do it. Going back to your journey, you discover you’re really good at acting. You take the steps required to be great at acting. How do you break through in such a competitive space? How do you ultimately land those first big roles that put you on the map?
Tom: I was pretty good at auditions. I never tried to exactly memorize the script. It’s tough. You can’t really do that in that short a period of time, and they know that. But at cold readings, I would do something, I don’t know, maybe unusual, an unusual choice, but effective. I know once I just picked up the actress and I threw her over my shoulder and walked off the stage. They started laughing, and then I came back and [unclear] and put her down. But she was laughing because she didn’t expect that. And then, when you did an audition, even if you didn’t get the job, they remembered you, and they would tell somebody else, or they would tell the casting people, and word would get around. There was a real grapevine in New York City, and I’m sure there was one probably in L.A. But there was a real grapevine. The casting people start hearing about you, and then they request that you come in. Your agent isn’t necessarily doing that. He says, “Oh, they want to see that [unclear].”
Adam: Tom, there’s a great lesson there, which is that if you’re so focused on trying to fit in, you’re going to blend in, and you’re not going to stand out. And the only way to stand out is by being yourself, being you. And every single one of us is unique. Every single one of us is different. Every single one of us can be memorable if we show up as our authentic selves.
Tom: Right. I’ve played plenty of characters. I go, “This is not me.” But you get into that. It’s fun. It’s kind of, “Can I do this a bit? This would be an interesting choice. I’ve never done this before, but I think this will work.” But since they’re different characters, they’re different people, and that’s what you’re portraying. Playing real characters is interesting because there are some restrictions and outlines on that. I played Teddy Roosevelt, and that was one of my favorite parts. It was called Rough Riders, about the famous regiment, the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War, and the charge up San Juan Hill, et cetera, et cetera. But before that, and immediately after as well, I read all the books on him. He was extremely funny. The press loved him. Manic. It’s like, when do you sleep? When does that guy sleep? And like Trump, he’d be calling somebody in the cabinet at 3 o’clock in the morning because he wakes up thinking about something and he paces around and he goes after it. And everybody’s running around trying, including his [unclear]. She called him [unclear]. Nobody else did. In fact, they didn’t call him Teddy. [Unclear] called him Theodore. But she said he would come home from a huge day of work at the White House, and he’d get home, and he would take all his kids out in the backyard and play before dinner. And she’s like, “When do you ever sit down? Do you?” She says, “You’re like a two-year-old boy,” and he never stopped being that.
Adam: There’s a mythology around our heroes. There’s a mythology around the greatest leaders, and when you look beyond the surface, you realize that they’re people like we’re people. They have frailties like we have frailties. We’re all human.
Tom: Yeah, they have their faults too. Maybe their great points, but they also have their faults, and you have to incorporate all of those because that makes a real, real person, probably closer to the truth of what they were like. With Teddy Roosevelt, I noticed that there were silent movies because the camera had been invented. Actually, it was down there in Cuba during the Spanish-American War as well. But there was, I remember, one shot, and it’s when he was president, and he was walking down a beach in Florida alone, and he’s in one of those old period swimsuits you see in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the swimsuits of that time, and he’s walking down the beach in one of those, and so you could see his legs and his feet. He’s not wearing shoes or boots or anything, and he’s heading down there. I was looking, and I saw his right foot sticking out to the right because you never saw him barefoot in any other footage. Of course, probably. I went through the whole movie like that, and it gave me a gait. I also watched how he shook hands with people. He pulled them into him, and I’ve seen other people do that. But I go, “Well, how did he talk?” Well, a friend of mine said, “Hey, I think there’s like three cassettes of Roosevelt’s speeches.” I go, “His speeches? I mean, I’ve got photographs and I’ve got playback, active playback of old silent footage and stuff of giving a speech. But what about his voice?” Well, there it was.
Adam: What was the most challenging role that you played in your career, or the most challenging experience of your career, and what did you learn from it?
Tom: Well, he was the most exhausting. I was worn out. I was worn out from that, but I thought I accomplished it. Platoon, people might think Platoon, except I always felt I was right on it. I thought I had it nailed early on. [Unclear] had to change something here or there, yeah, before we got to the scene or something like that. Yes, there were a few things, [unclear], but I thought important.
Adam: Many of your most iconic roles were portraying soldiers, including in three different movies portraying Marines. Your latest project, Ronin Three: The Battle for Sangin, is a documentary that tells the story of a group of Marines fighting in one of Afghanistan’s most dangerous Taliban strongholds. What drew you to this particular project, and what have you learned from your time spent over the course of many decades with Marines?
Tom: Yeah, I know a bunch of Marines. Dale Dye, the Marine captain that trained us as well. He’s his own kind of star when he’s worked on so many of these films, but they’re really well-trained and they’re tough, and they’re usually pretty funny. You never know what’s going to come out of it. All that Marine slang and stuff is pretty good. Yeah, and their cadence songs are kind of amusing too. I had a friend from high school that quit high school almost like his senior year, and he joined the Marine Corps because his dad had fought with the Marines in World War II in Iwo Jima and Guam and all those island battles and stuff, and his dad was just torn by all that. He was an only child; only sons didn’t have to go, but he decided to. And I had had a couple of friends from grade school that were killed in the Nam, and then he made it back all in one piece, and he was a machine gunner at Khe Sanh. But I remember going over to his parents’ house, and I would go there once or twice a week and just drop in on them and talk to them because I knew how lonely they were, and his [unclear]. Yeah, we had newspaper articles, magazine articles covering, trying to find where his unit was all the time, maps and stuff like that because there was nothing else you could do, really. Letters and stuff like that were spaced out, outdated by the time they got them or by the time you got them. My sister, much to my surprise, sent his platoon a bunch of brownies a couple times, and I never knew that. And he told me about it when he came back. I went, “She did that?” He goes, “Yeah.” I go, “She never mentioned a word to me.” I said, “How did she get your address?” He goes, “I don’t know, but we were really happy to get it.” I go, “Yeah, yeah, I’m sure,” but his parents, I could tell, were just wrecks, and I would just go over to talk to them because they had an empty nest in one respect, and I thought it would help their morale. Anyway, he got home, so it was a happy story there.
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Adam: Tom, what do you believe are the key characteristics of the very best leaders, and what can anyone do to become a better leader?
Tom: What I’ve seen from really good senior sergeants, NCOs, as well as generals or colonels, et cetera, is you have to take care of your men. That’s first and foremost. You must take care of your men. They sleep and they eat before you do. Napoleon was that way too. He would wander around campsites and he would know sergeants and top sergeants and corporals by name sometimes because he had an almost photographic memory as well, and I know that Alexander the Great was very, very close to his troops as well, and both of those guys, they were in love with their armies, and in the case of Alexander the Great, he cried when they wouldn’t fight anymore, and they wanted to go back home. Some of these guys were getting old, and they now had grandchildren. They hadn’t seen their children get married or grow up. They left them, and then here it was years later, and they’re in India, and they go, “No more. We can’t go anymore. We go home,” which they had every right to. And Alexander cried, and they probably cried too. “But we’re not going.” And they turned around and went back to Greece.
Adam: The best leaders take care of their people. The best leaders are connected to their people. The best leaders love people. You brought up great examples of historic leaders who were deeply in love with their people.
Tom: I think Patton was like that. He was a hell of a general, and Eisenhower was a real good general too. I remember that footage of all those paratroopers lined up to do that night jump on D-Day. It’s like [unclear] stuff.
Adam: You also shared something interesting, which is that the best leaders aren’t afraid to be vulnerable. You shared a couple of examples of famous leaders who weren’t afraid to cry in front of their men. Vulnerability is one of the greatest strengths in leadership.
Tom: And of humans. Yes.
Adam: How have you seen these characteristics and traits manifest themselves over the course of your career in Hollywood? I would imagine you’ve been around some great leaders. I would imagine you’ve been around some really bad leaders. What have you seen? What have you learned?
Tom: I’ve seen some really great directors. I’ve seen some terrible ones, and I go, “How did they get that job? And what am I doing here?” That’s the worst thing. It’s like, “Oh my God, what have I gotten myself into?” And that can happen at any time. You get there and [unclear]. “Oh, I made a mistake.” I can kind of tell things the first day. They’re not surprises two, three weeks into it. Anything can happen. But it’s like, “Who’s running the show here? Why isn’t the first AD taking care of this? What is that producer doing?” I did a show that had 13 producers. I saw it on a call sheet. I go, “I saw this. Look at 13 producers,” and the first AD goes, “Yeah, yeah,” and the second AD goes, “Yeah. A lot of them have already been in the movie.” I go, “What? You mean they’ve been in the movie? Like, in it?” He goes, “Yeah, yeah, they’re not [unclear].” I go, “Speaking parts?” “Well, no, not all of them, but maybe a couple lines here, there, or something.” I go, “This is amateur night in Dixieland. This shit, I’m, oh boy, we’re in trouble,” and there were problems. There were problems. Really good directors always make sure they’ve got a first AD. And I had a producer tell me, “Berenger,” he said, “I think there’s a line producer or something in you.” I go, “No, no, it’s a first assistant director calling everybody to camera and jumping on everybody’s ass.” That’s what I am. Those are the guys, to me, that make it all work. They save a director so much stress, and they get the set quiet. They have a couple assistants too, dealing with big crowds and all that sort of stuff. But it’s like they’re just around camera, and they’re watching sound. They’re watching props. They’re watching costume. They’re watching hair and makeup. On top of all those different departments, and a guy like that is like a sergeant major in the British Army or something. You know what I mean?
Adam: Yeah, it starts at the top when you have a competent leader. In your case, you’re talking about a competent director. You know it. Everyone on the team knows it. When you have an incompetent leader, in this case, an incompetent director, everyone on the team knows it as well. And you walk into the project on day one, and you know this is going to be a success or this is going to be a disaster. And even though it starts at the top, it continues all the way through the organization. It requires a great team. The best leaders build great teams, as you just shared. It’s not just the director; it’s who the director surrounds themselves with, everything going on behind the scenes. Who is your favorite director that you worked with, and what made them great?
Tom: Well, [unclear] was pretty big because I could see him living or reliving a lot of stuff we were going through. I remember one time, he and Dale, we did this scene and I finally finished it. I’m finally to a point where we can’t keep acting, can’t keep improvising, and I look back and I see them walking away. And what happened was, it was in that village, and they heard all those Vietnamese voices, the kids and the women yelling, and all this kind of stuff. And it’s like hearing the language. In the meantime, I’m yelling, and I go, “Throw that Willie Pete in there, big heroes.” This, this, there, that. With guns going off and shit and bombs going off in holes and stuff going in. It’s like they just walked away. They didn’t even say, “Cut.” I asked Dale about that later. He goes, “Yeah, we kind of had a mutual flashback watching that.” I went, “Ooh.” He goes, “Yeah.”
Adam: Who were your favorite actors that you worked with over the years, and what did you enjoy about those experiences?
Tom: Well, one was Marcello Mastroianni. I did an Italian film many years ago, and I got to know him really well, and it was interesting because the Italians just loved him. And I don’t mean just our crew; it’s just anywhere in Italy, like out on the streets. I mean, they adored him, and he was really cute. He was funny. He was very funny, and he was very sweet, very kind. That came out whenever he worked with an Italian crew and just different people he worked with, like myself. And he said, “I mean, I’ve done, I think, over 100 films.” I went, “Ah.” “But I have to tell you this: I am a maestro of patience.” I go, “Yes, you are. Yes, you are.” We were shooting in North Africa, not Italy, because [unclear] lived in Rome while we were shooting there, but we’re in North Africa, and he would have a day off. He would come down and spend it on the set with the group, and he knew all of them. He knew everybody in Italy. He really was a national treasure, and the other was Richard Harris. I told my [unclear], and I said, “Steve, Richard Harris died.” He goes, “Oh no,” because he loved Harris too. He had met him in Ireland, right? And I go, “A lion has died today.” I loved Harris. He was so much fun, funny, yeah, but I mean, what an actor!
Adam: The actors you’re talking about, and you’re a great example of this, have been able to enjoy longevity in their careers. What are the keys to being able to enjoy success over time?
Tom: I don’t know. It’s mostly your work. It’s got to be memorable, and not all of it is, I guess. But you want that to be memorable because that’ll be here long after you’re gone. It’s like a legacy. But it’s kind of like sometimes I just want to quit. But then what? I’m not sure what I would do. I don’t know. I don’t dare think about stuff too much.
Adam: And sometimes that’s the key to success: just doing and not overthinking.
Tom: Just live day to day, day to day.
Adam: I often think about the story that Billy Beane told in Moneyball, the book, not the movie, and you were the star of one of the best baseball movies of all time, Major League. Billy Beane was a can’t-miss prospect, and he wasn’t a very good Major League Baseball player. And one of the reasons why was any time he would step up to the plate, he would overthink things. He was in his head the entire time. And there’s a great story about when the Mets were playing the Phillies and they were facing Steve Carlton, the legendary pitcher for the Phillies. And Billy Beane is up there, and he’s thinking the entire time, “My God, I’m facing Steve Carlton. This is unreal. What do I do? How do I react?” And of course, he gets out. And then Lenny Dykstra gets up to the plate and hits a home run. And he asks Lenny Dykstra, “Man, what were you thinking when you were facing Steve Carlton?” And Lenny Dykstra said, “Facing who?” He had no idea who Steve Carlton was. Billy Beane was like, “Man, this is an all-time legend.” Lenny Dykstra had no idea who the pitcher was, and he showed up to the plate, swung the bat, hit a home run, and that difference in mentality, that difference in approach, made all the difference. It wasn’t about talent; it was about mindset. What was the highlight for you in making Major League? Years later, reflecting on that movie, what do you take away from that experience?
Tom: I’m gonna tell you one thing: we saw it again. It was one day in Los Angeles, and the director, he was gonna show it to us all again. And it’s been a while, and we all just happened to be in the area, me from out of town. Then we went to this theater that does old movies, and they put it up for us, and we watched. And then we did a little talk afterwards for other people that were there. And I said, “That song in the beginning.” I forget what the name of that song is, but I just love that song. It’s like an old, old slow ballad, and they got the river there. And I said it kind of took me back to being a kid, the way it used to be. And I said every time I watch that movie, I get teary-eyed at the end when they win the pennant. It just hits me. And this is a comedy, but I get teary-eyed at the end of that, and that song, I said, kind of does it to me in the beginning when I’m listening to that song, and they show an old river with the steel mills and all that kind of stuff. That’s kind of emotional to me.
Adam: And that’s how baseball is for so many of us. It brings us back to our days as a kid, and…
Tom: Yeah, when we were like that.
Adam: Yeah. And no matter how much older we get, there will always be that connection.
Tom: Yes, that’s true.
Adam: Tom, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful personally and professionally?
Tom: You got to learn your craft. Every job is a craft, and you got to try to know every angle of it. Look around the corners, and then check behind it and underneath it. Just learn everything you can about it, and then just put out and do the best you can. Everybody’s going to have heartbreaks. That’s for sure. Everybody loses some.
Adam: There are always going to be setbacks along the way, but it’s about how you respond to them. It’s about how you face them. Are you viewing a setback as a terminal moment? Are you viewing a setback as a bump in the road? As something that I have the capacity to overcome, that I will overcome, and that’s a huge part of success. Tom, thank you for all the great advice, and thank you for being a part of Thirty Minute Mentors.
Tom: Thank you.
