December 9–16, 1999

movies

Green Giant

From Armageddon to a three-hour-plus prestige pic, Michael Clarke Duncan is one happy fella.

by Cindy Fuchs

Michael Clarke Duncan is happy. He’s happy to be starring in The Green Mile with Tom Hanks, to be sitting in a nice hotel room wearing white socks and designer jeans and no shoes. And he’s clearly happy with the role of John Coffey, the burly death-row inmate who manifests (among other things) the ability to heal others’ injuries. "I like to equate John Coffey with an angel," he says. "We don’t know how long he’s been around. He could have been a slave for all we know, because with his special powers, he doesn’t age. He’s a mystery. He feels pain every day: You’ve had a headache before, but imagine having it 24-7, each and every day. That’s gotta be demoralizing."

Duncan, whose highest-profile role before The Green Mile was Armageddon’s taciturn Bear, was understandably giddy at the chance to take on a more serious role. "I thought, ‘OK, I’m in the big time now,’" he recalls. "And I’m just working, trying to do a good job. I’m trying not to get too intimidated. I walk in and there’s Tom Hanks, and I think, ‘God, there’s the guy from Bosom Buddies.’" Duncan describes director Frank Darabont, as being "like a Zen master. He uses, I call it ‘mental capabilities’ on you. No matter how many scenes you’re going through, Frank can get you to do more, even when you’re tired. I wanted to do good for him, because he makes you feel like you have it in you."

On the set, Duncan recalls, "We really didn’t get in each other’s way, or talk about our parts, but when the camera was on, it meshed into this finely tuned instrument. It’s like when you have a magnet and crush up metal and spread the particles around and then can pick them all up with the magnet? That’s what it was like, the magic of the movie."

Coming up in Chicago, Duncan says he wanted to play football, but his mother set him straight. "She said, ‘You’re pretty silly, so you’re gonna make it big in Hollywood’," he remembers. Duncan was aware early on that his striking appearance would affect his opportunities, but, he says, "I didn’t want to fall into a category where I was limited to certain roles, OK? I’m 6’5", 320 pounds, so the roles I had previously were almost all the same: bouncer, security, bodyguard, gangster, hit man. All sort of the same thing, kind of physical. And when you have something like The Green Mile come along, it changes the mold a little bit, breaks you out."

Duncan doesn’t appear to have been fazed by the film’s dark subject matter, or its setting in a time (1935) when black criminals were as likely to be executed outside of a prison as in. "My mother told me, there are bad white people, there are bad black people. Anybody can be bad at any given moment. I never looked at the race issue in this role. I was so happy to be working with Frank Darabont, I was working with the top! I just thought, man, my bills are gonna be paid, I am out of debt. I got nice credit cards, and people want to give me more credit."

At the end of the film, John Coffey’s last request is to see Top Hat, where Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance to Irving Berlin’s "Cheek to Cheek." Duncan thinks this moment is "perfect. I thought people would really be touched." He remembers that while shooting, "I had a line, ‘They’re angels just like up in heaven,’ and the first time that camera came by, I forgot the line, I was just looking at the movie. I was thinking, man if I could dance like that it would be so cool, to be my size and dance like that. And that was all John wanted. Really, it’s about this: You can’t judge a book by its cover, and that’s the main thing that people do with John Coffey. And me too."