But when Michael Douglas moves through the room, the old glamour is fleetingly restored. Faces break into wide, welcoming smiles, and not just because, as Kirk’s son, Douglas connects to the Lounge’s most storied past, or because he’s a bona fide celebrity in his own right. It’s because, as the quintessential version of a certain brand of late-20th century White masculinity, Michael Douglas has been That Guy for so many years.
At the height of his popularity, Douglas was the avatar of his generation’s deepest anxieties, transgressive desires, romantic aspirations and rapacious ambitions, embodying and reflecting the cardinal forces shaping American society — including fears of nuclear meltdown, 1980s avarice and postfeminist manhood. Even when he played down his legendary sex appeal to portray a pot-smoking, bathrobe-wearing college professor in the 2000 movie “Wonder Boys,” it felt like Douglas was still preternaturally attuned, this time to the panic of millions of baby boomers realizing that they had not only entered middle age, but were already on their way out of it.
Fit and relaxed at 79, Douglas doesn’t look like a cultural bellwether as he settles into a booth and orders a cup of peppermint tea. His now-white hair as impeccable as his blue sport coat, Douglas looks more like Hollywood royalty — a notion that has always made him laugh. He grew up in New York and Connecticut, went to college in Santa Barbara and has lived in Los Angeles only briefly. He and his wife, actress Catherine Zeta-Jones, now primarily make their home in Westchester County in New York. “It’s just hard to get away from it when you’re here,” Douglas says, referring to the constant shoptalk of a company town. “It’s breakfast, lunch and dinner. And I enjoy a mix of friends in different areas, not just in show business.”
If L.A. isn’t Douglas’s literal home, it’s still a place where he’s very much at home. A few hours earlier, he could be seen chatting amiably with members of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, Emmy voters who had attended a screening of Episode 1 of “Franklin,” in which Douglas plays founding father Benjamin Franklin. (Apple TV Plus will launch the eight-hour series on April 12.) The episode, in which Franklin arrives in France in 1776 to persuade King Louis XVI to support the American Revolution with money and arms, was met with a standing ovation — much to the actor’s relief.
“I dealt with doubt all the way through most of the production,” admits Douglas, who plays Franklin over the course of his nine-year sojourn in France, during which he invented his own brand of canny, cajoling diplomacy. Although Douglas and the series’ director, Tim Van Patten, considered using heavy prostheses and makeup to create Franklin’s distinctive look, including that famously high forehead, they decided to go a more naturalistic route. Douglas wears gray, wavy hairpieces and extensions throughout “Franklin,” but his character eschews the formal wigs and powdered makeup of the French court. He looks more like Michael Douglas than someone trying to imitate Benjamin Franklin.
Rather than experiencing “eight hours of the full Ben Franklin covering up Michael,” Douglas says, “I thought the audience would be more comfortable if they knew the guy. … It just freed me up so much more.” Still, he observes, that entailed a gamble: “Can I give the persona of Franklin?”
Those concerns seem to be evaporating as preview audiences see “Franklin” and accept the ineffable fusing of actor, character and real-life historical figure. Douglas “embodies Franklin’s spirit in many ways,” Van Patten said during a Q&A after the television academy screening. Franklin is “incredibly intelligent and charming and curious, and is full of wisdom and wit. And that is Michael.”
Surely there’s a joke in there somewhere about a famous leading man’s career ending with a gig playing Benjamin Franklin. “Franklin” turns that punchline on its head, with the title character emerging as yet one more of many seductive, compelling men of action Douglas has played throughout his career (this time, admittedly, with a touch of gout). In the series, the actor portrays Franklin less as the portly, avuncular aphorist and inventor of popular imagination than as an 18th-century rock star — the most famous American in the world, a wildly popular figure in France and an inveterate flirt, who beguiled the statesmen with whom he was negotiating as skillfully as he seduced the women who fell for him. (Ludivine Sagnier and Jeanne Balibar play Franklin’s real-life love interests Anne Louise Brillon and Anne-Catherine de Ligniville, Madame Helvétius.)
“In five years of living in close quarters with Ben Franklin, it never once occurred to me to confuse him with Michael Douglas,” says Stacy Schiff, who wrote “A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America,” on which “Franklin” is based. “That said, as soon as Michael’s name came up, he seemed insanely right. … He has the Franklinian twinkle in the eye, the raw charisma, the physical and intellectual versatility, the ability to move a discussion along with a tilt of an eyebrow. Michael has better hair, but that’s a detail.”
If the “Will they buy it?” question worried Douglas most throughout “Franklin’s” seven-month production in France, “Will I survive it?” came in a close second: Just three weeks into shooting in 2022, Douglas was rushed into emergency surgery to have his gallbladder removed. He had the operation on a Friday, recovered over the weekend, took two more days off, then returned to the set. “But I didn’t feel good,” he recalls, repeating and slowing down for emphasis. “I did not feel good.” With six more months to shoot, he says, he persevered, and gradually began to feel better. “But there was a moment when I thought, ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’ And then I started thinking about insurance and having to reshoot.”
It’s not uncommon for Douglas to think about things like insurance and reshoots; the bigger picture is never far from his mind. One reason he decided to forgo elaborate makeup on “Franklin” was because he knew that, combined with a 45-minute commute to the set every day, sitting for 2½ hours in a makeup chair would probably create delays for everyone else. “It’s unthinkable that Michael would ever do anything to make a director’s life more difficult. It’s just not in him,” says Steven Soderbergh, who directed Douglas in “Traffic” (2000) and the 2013 HBO movie “Behind the Candelabra.” “I’d be curious to know the origins of that. Was it something he witnessed? Was it something he got from his dad? Was it something he learned from being a producer?”
Douglas’s first stab at producing was when his father gave him the rights to Ken Kesey’s novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” in exchange for a percentage of Michael’s share of the profits. (The film wound up earning Michael a best picture Oscar in 1976; the fact that Jack Nicholson snagged the lead role instead of Kirk caused a rift in his relationship with his father that eventually healed.) But he traces his macro-sensibility further back, to when he performed as a young actor at the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut, where he learned about rewrites and submerging actorly ego to serve the material, then as a regular on the television series “The Streets of San Francisco,” where he learned about structure. “I always had a strong sense about making sure a piece was working,” he says simply.
Even when he’s not producing, he’s producing. “I can’t help myself,” he says. “I’m always acting with one eye looking at how the whole thing’s going together.” Part of that, he adds, is making sure his co-stars and crew members are comfortable. “I just don’t work well with tension. It disrupts me,” he says, referring to the “no d—heads” rule he has followed for several years. “I like to have as smooth an operation as possible. And I find that when you’re number one on the call sheet, punctuality and courtesy are two big qualities to have. If you’re there on time, ready to go, none of the other actors are going to be late. And if you set a tone of openness and courtesy, everybody else relaxes more.”
For Douglas, professionalism and politesse are expedient — but they’re also principles he learned from both his parents. Douglas was 6 when they divorced, after which his father stayed in L.A. and his mother, actress Diana Douglas, moved him and his brother Joel to New York, where they lived on the Upper West Side “in an apartment facing the alley, not the park.” When Diana married actor-producer-writer Bill Darrid (“a lovely man”), the family moved to a farmhouse in Westport, Conn.
“My mother was always very polite,” Douglas recalls, adding that his summer visits to Kirk put him in contact with such friends and neighbors as Tony Curtis, Janet Leigh, Frank Sinatra and Gregory Peck. “You could see their foibles and insecurities,” he says. “I think that was the biggest advantage about being in the second generation, just how you conducted your life.” His work ethic, he says, “is a reflection of not necessarily watching my father, but the pressures of having a father who is a movie star. … In some ways, it was respecting him. You wanted to show people you were not spoiled.”
Throughout his career, Douglas has produced and acted in movies that proved to be not just timely but uncannily predictive: For every escapist “rom-action” comedy like “Romancing the Stone” and its sequel, “The Jewel of the Nile,” there was a movie like “The China Syndrome,” about a fictional nuclear accident, which premiered in theaters in 1979 less than two weeks before a real nuclear accident at Three Mile Island. The dispossessed former defense worker Douglas portrayed in 1993’s “Falling Down” evoked the rising racial tensions of Rodney King-era Los Angeles, and it arguably presaged present-day MAGA rage.
His characters in “Fatal Attraction,” “Basic Instinct” and “Disclosure” hyperbolized men’s rising panic and confusion amid shifting gender roles. (Douglas and his “Fatal Attraction” co-star Glenn Close went viral with a 2011 photo of them with a bunny — if you know, you know — captioned “Happy Easter Everyone,” sent to Douglas by a friend. “It cracked me up,” Douglas explained recently, adding, “I thought Glennie would get a kick out of it, so I sent it to her and a few other friends.”)
Douglas’s most iconic character might be Gordon Gekko, the corporate raider in 1987’s “Wall Street”; writer-director Oliver Stone intended him to be the villain of the piece, but he emerged as a folk hero, not least because of the electrifying command with which Douglas played him. (Douglas won his only acting Oscar for the performance.)
“Gekko was conceived as a slick guy,” Stone recalls. “And Michael could be seen as too slick. But that’s one of the reasons I cast him. … He had the same quality his father had. Kirk had a reputation for playing heels in movies like ‘Out of the Past’ and ‘Ace in the Hole.’ And I liked that quality in [Michael], which I had not seen in ‘Romancing the Stone’ or any of that. And he knew [Gekko’s] world, being from New York and having rich friends.”
Douglas’s career encountered a near-fatal turning point in 2010, when he was diagnosed with tongue cancer; he was treated with chemotherapy and radiation, a physical ordeal during which he wasn’t sure if he would work again. Eleven years earlier, while playing a conservative administration official in “Traffic,” Soderbergh had asked him “on a whim” if he would ever consider playing Liberace. “And he answered in a way that was immediately very Lee-like,” Soderbergh recalls, referring to Liberace’s nickname. Douglas remembers the moment. “I looked at him like, ‘Are you saying that the drug czar is fey?’” he recalls with a smile. “‘Am I mincing too much?’”
The project languished for another decade, and by the time Soderbergh was ready with an adaptation of a memoir by Scott Thorson, Liberace’s lover, Douglas had undergone his cancer treatments and was ready to work again. “Behind the Candelabra” would be Douglas’s first project since his illness, and it would earn him an Emmy for a portrayal that many viewers and critics considered fearless, sensitive and revelatory. “The fact that it was the first thing he did after coming back from his cancer scare just gave the whole thing a very welcome emotional component that I thought really added to the experience and the performance,” Soderbergh says.
Since then, Douglas has been on a journey of exploration. He learned about green-screen acting in the Ant-Man movies, and explored the mysteries of comedy in the Netflix series “The Kominsky Method.” Playing Benjamin Franklin is Douglas’s first attempt at a full-on period-costume drama — in this case a production involving 78 principal actors and 5,000 extras, location shoots at Versailles and more than a half dozen chateaus — and a whole lot of French. “I’m the only American actor in the show!” Douglas says delightedly.
And now, for the foreseeable future, Michael Douglas is ready to stop.
Douglas, who will turn 80 in September, took the last year off “just doing a little inventory and this and that,” and was able finally to devote time to nonprofessional priorities: He listened to more music (if you think you glimpsed him at the U2 show in the Sphere in Las Vegas in early March, you might be right). The gallbladder episode prompted him to adjust his diet, which has dramatically improved his energy level; he misses his eggs, but still sneaks a piece of bacon now and then. He and Zeta-Jones took the whole family to southern India for five weeks over the winter holidays (the couple has two children in their early 20s, and Douglas has a 45-year-old son from a previous marriage). He’s planning a trip to the Norwegian fjords and has his eye on South America. But most of this year will be spent hopping between the couple’s house in Mallorca, Spain, and Ireland, where Zeta-Jones will be filming the new season of “Wednesday” for Netflix.
Rather than make movies, he says, he wants to devote time to his longtime political causes: nuclear nonproliferation, which he became concerned with when he did “The China Syndrome,” and gun control, which became personal in 1980 when he and his friend Jann Wenner were walking home from a Christmas party on Central Park West and happened upon a commotion that turned out to be John Lennon’s murder outside the Dakota apartment building. Douglas and Wenner went on to found the gun-control organization CeaseFire, which has since dissolved; today, Douglas is involved in Everytown for Gun Safety, as well as the political reform organization RepresentUs.
Meanwhile, Douglas says that “Franklin” has stayed with him “in important ways.” For one thing, it sent him to the works of Marcus Aurelius. “It’s my new faith now,” Douglas says of Stoicism, praising the philosophy for its emphasis on probity, character and emotional self-control — qualities that are notably lacking in the contemporary public square. “I think back to these guys and how brave they were, my God,” Douglas says of Franklin and his peers. “And he was 70 [when he went to France]! After all the stuff he’d done — and by the way, in 1776, it wasn’t an easy boat ride. He had no real [diplomatic] experience at all, it was him just sort of winging it.
“It was just a joy to do something that triggers your mind, and essentially reminds you of how fragile our democracy is,” he says. As for the current political season, he adds wearily, “I’m really looking forward to this year being over.”
Until then, he’ll be waking up every morning not knowing exactly where the day will take him, which, maybe for the first time, is totally okay. “I’d been working pretty much my whole adult life, and I enjoyed not working,” Douglas says of the past year. “It’s the joy of getting bored. It’s that moment of, ‘What am I going to do?’ rather than, ‘What do I have to catch up on, what do I have to do?’” Douglas smiles, his face settling into wisdom and contentment that might be described as Franklin-esque. “It’s just sitting there as a tabula rasa.”
