Miami Herald

Date: 08/16/1987

AFTER THICK AND THIN, D'ONOFRIO FINDS FAME

Vincent D'Onofrio, whom we may consider a man very much on a roll, is relaxing without pretense, but without much reticence either, in a banquette in a reasonably fashionable residential "club" in North Dade. He's at one table, nursing a beer, while a newspaper reporter is interviewing him. His family -- mom, stepfather, a pride of sisters -- is at an adjacent table, talking to another reporter and by all appearances thoroughly enjoying the whole thing.

And well they should. Vince -- little Vince, Hialeah-Miami Lakes class of '77, the D'Onofrio kid who split for Colorado after high school, then turned up in New York and starved for, gee, must be a decade now -- is a star.

"I play that down," Vincent says, and it's possible to believe him at least a little, because he really does radiate nice-guy/shy-guy. "But anything the family can enjoy from it -- things like this, today -- is great. They supported me, emotionally, when I was struggling in New York. Because I don't live here anymore, they don't get to do this kind of stuff, and I want them to."

So Vince D'Onofrio takes a week off, flies home for a vacation and says, 'While I'm at it, set up some interviews and have the folks by for a look.' This he can do. D'Onofrio is the second lead of the first half of Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket -- he'd be the runaway star were it not for Lee Ermey, former Marine drill instructor, in the role of . . . a Marine drill instructor -- and D'Onofrio has an intriguing cameo in Chris Columbus' cut-above-the-norm teen flick, Adventures in Babysitting.

In Full Metal Jacket, his first movie, he plays that saddest of sacks, the fat recruit. And no joke, as it turns out, for the film calls for D'Onofrio's Pvt. Leonard "Gomer" Pyle to buckle, then collapse into a full psychotic episode. Leonard is a loaded blimp sent into a power dive. In Babysitting, made not long after Full Metal Jacket wrapped, D'Onofrio plays a long-haired, fully muscled garage attendant whose resemblance to the comic book hero Thor is enough to frazzle the nerve ends of a sharp-eyed preteen.

And the D'Onofrio who sits for the interviews doesn't look like either of them.

Neat trick. D'Onofrio, who is 6-foot-3 and usually runs about 210, expanded to an impressively padded 280 for Full Metal Jacket. He was on his way back down, around 230 maybe, for Adventures in Babysitting. For Kubrick, he sported a Paris Island skinhead; for Columbus, he wore the long-blond Thor wig. This is a guy who can still walk the streets unnoticed when he's out of costume.

This is also an actor who is grateful for the chance to have "converted" himself so thoroughly for a part. D'Onofrio's resume includes time with Actors' Studio (method) during those lean years in New York, where he had heard that "actors like DeNiro had emotions ready at their fingertips that they could recall at any time." D'Onofrio, who had gone west expecting good times at Colorado University and wound up auditioning for community theater, then headed east for busboy-and-bouncer duty between casting calls, was ready for some method. He wanted characters at his fingertips.

"The thing I did with Leonard, gaining the 70 pounds and delving into the role like that, is one of the most important things to my career. If I could keep doing that throughout my career, if I have to wait a year to play another role as intricate as Leonard, I will. That's the only thing I like to do. I like to change myself. I like to think about things, I like to move people, I mean really move them, make them think about things they don't think of every day. And that's easy to do when you get a role like Leonard. It's not that hard if you have 100 percent dedication."

Any less, there may be some problems. "When I was in London shooting the film, I can't tell you how hard it was. Being 70 pounds overweight, you suddenly have to say, 'What do I look like? Do I look like a horse? Am I dressing right? Am I making people uncomfortable?. Why do I feel so uncomfortable?'

"I confronted it every time I went out and hailed a cab. Cabs would pass me by, because I was bald and 280 pounds. In London, I was living in a very expensive part of town, in Chelsea, and it's amazing the way people would treat us, (costar Matthew (Modine) and me. We'd go into restaurants and the maitre d' would repeat everything to me, as if I was dumb or something. "Everything was hard -- tying my shoes, walking up steps, breaking a sweat just getting dressed. I was hanging around for eight months with the extras, guys who were in great shape, and here I am 280 pounds. . . . It helped me with the part a lot."

D'Onofrio had put on the weight via a Warner Bros. expense account that tempted him up to some 10,000 calories a day -- "for breakfast I would have a 12-ounce steak, three eggs, half a loaf of bread and a quart of milk." He took it back off under the supervision of a professional trainer and a physical therapist.

Not for just anyone would he endure this again, D'Onofrio says. "Let's just say, I won't do Short Circuit II."

Working under Kubrick for one's feature debut? A different story. "I sent him three audition tapes. For the last tape, he sent me sides -- sides are just lines from a script out of context -- and said, 'Do what you want with them.' I got a video camera from a friend, did what I thought was the best reading and sent it back. That's when he brought me out there to London.

"When we got out there, when I shook his hand he asked, 'Are you ready?'

"I said, 'Yeah.'

"He said, 'You know what you're going to do?'

"I said, 'I know exactly what I'm going to do.'

" 'Fantastic.'

"And that was it. He gave me complete artistic control of my character.

"Stanley used to come up to Matthew and me and say, 'All right, guys, what are you going to do?' And we'd have worked something out and he'd say, 'Good, good, do you mind if I put a camera here? Can I put one here?' So I made a lot of choices in that film. He does that with all his actors. He surrounds himself with actors who know what they're doing, who can handle the parts.

"He had a hard time with Leonard because he had a lot of fat actors who were right but couldn't go through the emotional extremes. So then he started looking for actors who could gain the weight. He still didn't find one who could go through that emotional extreme, going from a country bumpkin to that animal backed against the wall in the bathroom (the climactic scene of the first half of the film, in which D'Onofrio's character turns, not altogether unexpectedly, homicidal).

"I knew he wanted that scene at the end to be big, so I watched documentaries on animals, and I waited until I found a certain animal. I won't tell you which one, 'cause I might use it again, and it's like giving a secret away. But I watched a lot of documentaries on this animal, and I waited until I found the animal making the decision to go for the jugular. I waited till I found that moment, and when I found that moment I had the murder scene."

Since then, Vince D'Onofrio has folded back into semi-anonymity, pretty well ignored on the streets of New York (he tells of being refused a reserved seat at a showing of Full Metal Jacket) and rarely recognized even in Hialeah. It's a good deal, and he hopes his next role, which he will not otherwise discuss, is along the same lines -- "an intricate, physical change."

"If I could keep my career like this, where people wouldn't even know who I was, I'd love it."

Now that word is out, however, chances are it won't be that easy.