Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan Watchmen Interview

MoviesOnline sat down with Oscar nominee Jackie Earle Haley and Jeffrey Dean Morgan to talk about their new movie, “Watchmen,” the big screen adaptation of the most celebrated graphic novel of all time, brought to life for the first time by visionary director Zack Snyder.  

A complex, multi-layered mystery adventure, "Watchmen" is set in an alternate 1985 America, a world darkened by fear and paranoia where regular human beings who once donned masks to fight crime now hide from their identifies and where the ultimate weapon--an all-powerful superbeing--has tilted the global balance of power, pushing the world implacably closer to nuclear midnight.   

Haley plays Rorschach whose psychology and sense of honor are reflected in the mask he wears, with shifting, mirror image patterns of black and white, like the inkblots of a Rorschach test. Morgan plays Edward Blake, aka The Comedian, a disenchanted killing machine who has spent his years doing unsavory jobs for the government in both war and peacetime and sees the world as a dark place where small acts of brutality or heroism alike make little to no difference. When Rorschach uncovers a plot to kill and discredit all past and present superheroes, he reconnects with his former crime-fighting legion and glimpses a wide-ranging, disturbing conspiracy with links to their shared past and catastrophic consequences for the future.   

Jackie Earle Haley has the rare distinction of being a successful child actor who, after virtually disappearing from Hollywood for 15 years, made an almost unprecedented comeback in back-to-back feature films: Steven Zaillian's "All the King's Men" and Todd Field's controversial drama "Little Children." Haley's courageous performance in the latter brought him numerous accolades, including an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. He was also honored with a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination and won Best Supporting Actor awards from several critics groups, including the New York Film Critics Circle and the Chicago Film Critics Association. This fall, he will be seen in the thriller "Shutter Island," in which he co-stars with Leonardo DiCaprio and Ben Kingsley under the direction of Martin Scorsese.  

Jeffrey Dean Morgan has emerged as one of the industry's most sought-after leading men. "Watchmen" is only the first of four very different motion pictures in which the busy actor stars this year. He next plays a detective who becomes emotionally involved in the case of a missing woman in the murder mystery drama "All Good Things," directed by Andrew Jarecki and also starring Kirsten Dunst, Ryan Gosling and Frank Langella. In August, Morgan stars opposite Emile Hirsch in "Taking Woodstock," a story surrounding the seminal 1969 music festival, directed by Ang Lee. The following month, he stars in the World War II period drama "Shanghai," with John Cusack and Ken Watanabe under the direction of Mikael Hafstrom. Morgan is about to start work on the suspense thriller "The Resident," playing opposite Hilary Swank. He also has a recurring role as heart patient Denny Duquette in ABC's smash hit series "Grey's Anatomy."   

Jackie Earle Haley and Jeffrey Dean Morgan are fabulous guys and we really appreciated their time. Here’s what they had to tell us about their new movie, “Watchmen”:

Q: How familiar were you with 'Watchmen' before you got involved with this project?

Morgan: The sacred text, what is 'Watchmen'. I wasn't. My introduction to it was Warner Brothers sending me over a Xeroxed copy of the graphic novel, saying, 'You're meeting with the director of "300" tomorrow.' I got to page three and I was like, 'Well, that's great. I'm dead already. Excellent choice, agency.' I then of course read the whole thing and was like, 'Wow.' Now I could probably recite the whole damn book to you, but I'm new to the comic book world and the graphic novel world and what an introduction, to be a part of 'Watchmen'.

Haley: Same thing. I realized that he was dead on page three.

Morgan: [laughs] And threw it over your shoulder.

Haley: I wasn't familiar with the novel. I was never a comic book fan when I was growing up. I could never figure out what you did first, read the words or look at the picture. These things were all off for me and I'm an incredibly slow reader, still to this day, but somewhere along the line – I don't know – when I was about thirteen or fourteen I started getting into sci-fi and started reading the big three: [Robert] Heinlein, [Isaac] Asimov, [Arthur C.] Clark and all those guys. But, in reading this novel, I think somewhere I crossed the line and started to geek out, especially towards 'Watchmen’. Then I've kind of gone on a little Alan Moore jag since then, reading 'V for Vendetta'. I realized that this guy isn't simply brilliant, he's a genius. I've been really kind of getting into the whole comic book world. I guess I thought that it was like a kid's medium and I didn't realize that it had this kind of depth and that it was just incredibly thought provoking.

Q: Jackie, can you talk about the challenges of performing in a mask and what happens when the mask comes off?

Haley: I really thought about it all a lot. I decided to really change nothing, I think. I think that maybe voice wise it might be toned down a tad. I really was kind of looking at this guy and realized early on in the book that this guy is Rorschach. Walter no longer exists. So, to me, he's still Rorschach sans the mask.

Morgan: He was blank underneath the mask as well.

Haley: Actually, I was making funny faces the whole time.

Q: Rorschach and The Comedian have traditionally been the characters that fans identified with the most because they're neither dark nor light. How did both of you go about figuring out how to play them?

Morgan: Well, for me, I think he's kind of light, The Comedian. I'm teasing, obviously [laughs]. They're vigilantes, right? The Comedian goes into this work early as a boy on the docks of New York. He had two directions he could've gone. I think this guy is amoral and nihilistic and probably should've spent his life in prison. Instead, he donned a superhero outfit and got to beat the crap out of people under the guise of being a superhero. Amoral and nihilistic kind of being the key words here, there is a certain humanity to The Comedian that was sort of the key for me. What I keyed into in first reading the role and reading the book was, 'Why don't you hate this guy that does these horrible things?' So, in going to work on it and the conversations that I had with Zack [Snyder] everyday, I was kind of trying to find this. I felt sorry in a way for this guy. He's virtually alone. He doesn't have any friends. The similarities here with Rorschach I think are striking.

In approaching it, how I left, every time I closed that book it was just kind of this huge question mark of why don't I hate this guy. I just didn't understand how I could shoot the woman that I get pregnant, kill her and the one person that The Comedian is in love with. I do think that he was in love with Sally Jupiter. That's the love of his life. But what he does to her, how do you forgive that? How do you make excuses for that as the audience or as the guy playing him? I couldn't. There was just no excuse. It was a rough way to go. I think the only thing that kind of grounds The Comedian, in particular, is his daughter. That and kind of finding out what the crux of the film is and what Ozymandias is doing and maybe life is not a joke. There's no joke to be had, there's no smiling your way out of this one. It was finding the humanity, in a nutshell. I got nothing else. I'm talked out.

Haley: To me there's just nothing gray about Rorschach. It's incredibly black and white which is also what's fascinating about the guy. It's totally possible. I think that he was an absolute victim as a child of selfishness and self-centered behavior. That was always masked and justified and excused by complexity, by gray. I think that being a victim of that he reached a point in his life where he was fighting against that. I think that every punch, every finger snap, every kick, every being is protecting that inner child and slashing out at the mom and or at humanity’s incredibly selfish and self-centered ways.

Q: Do you think he's being selfish in that expression?

Haley: No. He may very well be, but I think in a weird kind of way it's his only hope of survival. Like, if he didn't turn his energies this way, I think that he'd even be worse for wear, even much more of a nut bag, much more dangerous to society. He's turned on the guilty or on the guilty by association. If you're in Harry's bar, you're guilty.

Q: Did you reference vigilante types from other films?

Haley: Not really, no.

Morgan: We had this great source material. It doesn't get any better than the graphic novel. If there's ever a question, if you're having some internal question about what's going on, it was so nice to turn to page two hundred and go, 'Oh, well that helps.' Visually it's like having the world's greatest storyboard and there's dialogue in the book, too. It's a matter of getting in these heads which sometimes maybe wasn't the most comfortable place to be for either of us. I think that we both at certain times may have taken issue with some of our character's choices as people but as far as having a place to go to, the graphic novel just get any better than that. It's the greatest thing in the world. I don't remember ever seeing a script. I mean, I know there's a script. We shot it. But whenever we were on set and any of us had questions, the point of reference was always that book. There was a ragged, dog-eared copy of 'Watchmen' sitting on top of the monitor and Zack's chair for the length of this film. That was used by all of us eight hundred times a day if not more. It was an amazing thing, being able to shoot from something like that.

Q: Where did you find the voice for Rorschach?

Haley: It was in the third drawer in my cabinet. No. When I read the graphic novel for the first time, that's just the voice that I heard and that's what we did on the audition tape and that's what we ended up doing in the movie.

Q: Is it surreal to go online and discover that you're the subject of an intense casting debate?

Haley: Yeah. I poked around in there a little bit.

Morgan: It's dangerous. It's a big, big mistake.

Haley: Yeah. It's like, 'Someone turn off the internet.'

Morgan: 'Why did I look at that? They hate me. I've already made the wrong choices.'

Haley: It was kind of cool though to really get a strong sense of the fan base and what this source material means to them.

Morgan: There's no fucking around with these people. Fans of 'Watchmen' are so passionate. They're so smart. They know it so well. They care so much about it that it's kind of a big weight to carry around while you're shooting a movie. It kind of takes away from some of the giddiness because you know this is a serious thing you're involved in and we didn't want to screw it up. No one wanted to screw this up. Going on to the internet while we were shooting, I made that mistake. Oh, God, you figured out how passionate people are and how skeptical they are of what you're doing.

Haley: It's scary.

Morgan: It's intimidating. It really is.

Haley: But it's motivating, too.

Morgan: That's exactly right. You certainly are real serious about it. We were very serious about making a movie that represented this graphic novel. Zack was our captain and I think that he did a hell of a job.

Q: Aside from 'Watchmen,' is there a superhero movie that you love from your youth or something that's come out recently?

Morgan: 'Watchmen'.

Haley: I thought 'The Dark Knight' rocked. I really enjoyed 'Iron Man'. I thought that was incredible.

Morgan: Yeah. I think those two are great and entertaining movies. I have a hard time though of putting 'Watchmen' in the category of a superhero movie. I just don't know if it fits that genre. It's kind of unlike anything I've ever seen.

Haley: I think it fits the genre and takes it to the next level.

Morgan: I think it starts it's own genre. It's certainly not your average superhero movie. I think that 'The Dark Knight' especially kind of opened up a door that hadn't been opened before. It took superhero movies to a much smarter place than they'd ever gone before, a much more adult place. I think that 'Watchmen', again, is going to take it to another level whether or not the general audience figures it out or not. That's anyone's guess, but we'll see.

Q: 'Watchmen' society seems to be as much a villain in the story as everyone else.

Morgan: What I find amazing is how relevant this film is today. It was written some twenty odd years ago and it's still so relevant now. What I love is that Zack fought for this. The studios had wanted this to be an updated story to make it the war on terror. That's ridiculous. As it stands, as it was written by Alan it's so relevant now. The doomsday clock is ticking still. Alternate reality, but scarily similar to what's happening to the world right now.

Haley: And at GM.

Q: Jeffrey, you've had an interesting year on TV with 'Grey's Anatomy'. What do you think about the huge response to Denny?

Morgan: I don't pay attention to it. I'm busy enough working right now. My feeling of that, and I'll do this really quick because I want to just talk about the movie, is that if it weren't for Denny, I wouldn't be sitting here. I wouldn't have gotten the chance to play The Comedian. I trust Shonda Rhimes implicitly and she's a dear friend. I believe whatever she's got cooked up for this storyline, which as far as I know is not over yet, it's going to be great. I wish the audience members would just kind of go with it. They fell in love with these characters for a reason, because of her writing. So, instead of walking away and turning their backs on her, they ought to stick with it.

Q: Is this story going to be accessible to people who know nothing of the graphic novel and the world of Watchmen?

Haley: I kind of feel that when you pick up the book and you read it for the first time and that's your first experience with it or if you go to see the movie and you haven't read the book, it's there. Is it the totality of the book? No. No film ever is. But I really think that Zack's captured more than just the essence of the book.

Morgan: The movie stands on its own. You don't need to be a fan of 'Watchmen' to see this movie. It's rated R and that means, or well it doesn't mean it, but little kids shouldn't be seeing this. It's a little bit smart. It's a little bit deeper. It's a very dense film and it's two and a half hours worth of that. But this movie, I think, if you're not a fan of the book, just like Jackie said, it stands on its own still. You weren't a fan of it. What did you think of the movie?

Q: I thought that it was very intense.

Morgan: I think that's a very good way of putting it. It's a very intense movie. It's hardcore. Zack didn't pull any punches at all. He stayed very loyal to the novel and I think this is a movie that a fan of the graphic novel can see and enjoy. That's always what you want to do, but we’re just very keen on the fact that it had a very intense fan base and we wanted to please them for very obvious reasons. We were petrified to fail on that.

Haley: That's what I always felt, that if we really made it for the fans, that it would then be right for the people who hadn't heard of it ever.

“Watchmen” opens in theaters on March 6th.