Video: THE COLLABORATION's Jeremy Pope & Paul Bettany Talk Warhol, Basquiat and More!

You're about to make your Broadway debut. How excited are you

Really excited. I'm really excited. I'm so excited to bring. It was great doing this in London

I loved it, and it was well received, and the audiences were great, but it feels like a homecoming for this play

It feels like its natural habitat. It's a New York story about two New York icons

and it feels I'm excited to bring it for a bunch of New Yorkers to see it

It's going to be interesting. You're going to have the best of a theater world, the best of the art world coming to see it

see this too. That's terrifying, yes. But fabulous at the same time, right? But fabulous and terrifying

So when you were first offered this, Andy Warhol, such an icon, were there trepidations

Like, what made you say, yes, I have to do this? Oh, I said no, I don't want to do it

When it was first offered, my friend, Dennis O'Sullivan, who's one of the producers who I've worked for and with on a number of movies

said, what about Warhol? And I said, no, I don't know that that's possible

I think maybe there's a reason that he's always contained as a sort of a cameo

And I think it might be really hard, is what I thought

And I was right. But I thought it was hard to get under the glasses and the wig

and the monosyllabic curation. performance that he put on publicly. And then he sent me the diaries

I read the diaries and I hadn realized that they were just dictated to Pat every morning really and he speaks in these long secure sentences and sort of sounds more like Truman Capote actually as I read him

So I thought, God, that's fascinating. So I started speaking to some people that knew him, Anna Winter

and Candace Bergen, who I was working with at the time. She said, no, they..

It's actually quite verbose and voluminous. and I went, wow, that's fascinating

And I had seen their work together, remounted at the Whitney a couple of years before they came to me with the script

And I had been fascinated by it and I'd bought every book. So I actually knew quite a bit about them and their work together

So I was really interested and I began to just see a way in

and then read the script. Still thinking about it, we had a workshop for a week

and Jeremy walked in the room, and I went, oh, I'm in

And that's really when I knew I was in, was Jeremy was so focused and intentional

about everything he was doing. And I was terrified. It hadn't been on stage for 25 years

and I didn't know I could do it, so I basically learned the script. And he had basically learned the script

So right from the first workshop, we were just able to play more than you usually are when you're stumbling through dialogue

What made you say, yes, I have to do this? There was a lot of things, but I think first it was just Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kwame, Paul Bettney

it was a perfect, it was just going to be a perfect connection for us to come and collaborate

Sounds cheesy, but that's what it was. I fell in love with Paul from day one. We had never met before, but I just, there was something about him that was so special and so giving

And has just been so freeing to be on the stage with him and to find and to continue to explore I think the thing that we want to make sure that we doing as artists

being that we've done it at the Young Vic and we've done the movie, but our emphasis is not about what we did, it's about what we do

And what that means for us is to continue to find the heart and souls of these people

and to continue to dig and to explore and to play. And I think to have a collaborator, collaborators, Kwame, Paul, Anthony, our writer

to be open to that. Every version, every iteration, we've learned more about ourselves

the art that we want to make, and we've learned more about these artists. And that has just been so unique

and so, so fun. You mentioned you hadn't been on the stage

in, what, 25 years? What have you enjoyed the most about being back in the rehearsal room

and live audiences and just doing live theater? Wow. There are so many things

Of course, the immediacy of the reality of the response is extraordinary

Acting on film, well, film is a director's medium, absolutely. You give them a lot of choice

and then they modulate and create a performance later with an editor

And it's kind of the opposite. And there's a freedom to that, which is amazing

because you can make mistakes and that's fantastic. So it's sort of like the editorial

happens during rehearsal on stage and it is absolutely an actor's medium

in that you, the director might have told you one thing, you're like, I don't know, Quarme

it kind of went a different way tonight, and that's thrilling. So there's all of that

but it also really I thought how great would it be and how much time would we save on movies

if we went back to the days where you really Sydney Lamat had four weeks of rehearsal

before shooting and I mean I don know whether you could get anybody to pay for that fund that experiment but I just think it really enrich

filming experiences to do that. I think the thing that I found most interesting

specifically about Basquiat was just his ease, there was such an ease to his art with intention

I think he had a very direct connection from heart, mind, soul to keep. canvas. So I think that's why that's been a lot of my resource and my research in finding or

trying to get as close as I can to his soul is, you know, he, whether it was, whatever was going on

in his mind or politically, you see that reflected on the canvas, which feels very different

than a war hall where it does feel like there's a Maryland and there's maybe pink lips and

purple lips. But I also think there was an intention behind his art. And I believe Andy kind of

predicted the world of like Instagram and branding. And that's kind of what we see now

You know, I definitely feel that from people like, what's your brand, what's your thing. And, you know, two artists who kind of predicted the future

And as far as how art was going to live, and I think that's what we're seeing now

as we're seeing people kind of unveiling and unpacking these artists and going, wow, they contributed so much

John in, you know, 27 years and kind of Andy, this vast variety of him being a pop artist and being in celebrity

and fashion and, you know, just who he was as a socialite and a personality, if you will

But I continue to find just new things about these individuals, new photographs, the times

they spent together. You know, it wasn't just about the art. There's pictures of them getting pedicures and just hanging out

I think they really just fell in love and found harmony together and soulmates within each other

So that's just been very beautiful. and, you know, again, feels very aligned with how I feel about Paul

and just our experience in collaborating and going all the way across the seas

to do it in London and make the movie and allowing that to be different. And now here we are on Broadway

I'm going back to, you know, to NTC. Paul's having his Broadway debut where I had mine

And it just feels right. I feel very blessed and grateful, you know