The Fabelmans: Judd Hirsch Reflects on Steven Spielberg's Story, Falling in Love With Movies
Legendary TV actor Judd Hirsch returns to the big screen in The Fabelmans, an upcoming, fictionalized story about the life of Steven Spielberg that casts Hirsch as an unpredictable uncle who helps lead Sam -- the film's stand-in for Spielberg -- to his love of filmmaking. Hirsch, who has a long list of iconic roles from Taxi to Independence Day, described the movie as "every kid's dream," and said that jumping on board was a no-brainer.
The movie is a callback to the Golden Age of Hollywood, which is when both Hirsch and Spielberg really came of age, watching movies in the 40s and 50s. For that reason, Hirsch found it easy to step into the shoes of his character.
"I go back a long way, so it was those earlier movies in the forties and fifties that we always wondered about somebody else's life," Hirsch told ComicBook.com's Brandon Davis. "They were never like us, but if we happened to see in a movie, something that looked and felt like our life, we joined the character. The most effect a movie would have on you, is to see almost yourself in the movie. You see a kid growing up, and you're 11 and so is he. You see him playing basketball in the street, and you go, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah.' So, I'm more interested in that. Then came the fantastic performances. So when we were blown away, we were blown away by performances like Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire and whatnot."
"And those were moments -- there were absolute moments of realization that there's something great about movies and about acting," Hirsch added. "Maybe somewhere in there it was like 'I could do that,' or, 'No, I don't know. I really don't.' I didn't start off as an actor. I started off as an engineer....In fact, I probably would've needed some kind of inspiration for me to actually change my mind from being a technical person to a persuader, if you wanna call it actor, until I realized that I had to be with people. I can't be with pencils and papers. And so I became the funniest kid in class, and everybody joined me, and so I said, 'Hey, This is great.'"
Boris, Hirsch's character in The Fabelmans, bursts into the movie as a flurry of energy, injecting life into every scene he's in. And while that was based on a person in Spielberg's real life, Hirsch says he was trusted to build the character more or less from the ground up based on the script.
"I don't think he visited very often. I don't think [Spielberg] knew him that well," Hirsch said of the inspiration for Boris. "I mean, he didn't impart that to me. It always sounded like a rare experience when he was there. So, there was nothing to go on. I took it as a more or less, almost [like this was the] first time in his life. I mean, just to do it right, appear out of nowhere. The kids, by the way, a little older than maybe when he saw him earlier, he might have been a younger kid....'Oh, you heard about this guy. Pretty dangerous fellow. Did some crazy things.' So the first question was 'I understand you were lion tamer.'"
The Fabelmans is in theaters now.