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Jon Voight plays the hero
30/12/2007 13:32 - (SA)
Los Angeles - After carving out a niche as one of Hollywood's most reliable villains in recent years, Jon Voight says he was only too happy to play a hero in his new film National Treasure: Book of Secrets.
But while the 68-year-old veteran gladly seized the opportunity to portray the screen father of Nicolas Cage in the hit movie, Voight credits his willingness to embrace bad guy roles as helping to prolong his acting career.
"Yes, after a long absence from playing a good guy on the screen I'm getting to be someone the audience roots for," Voight said in an interview when asked about his latest role. "It's a big fun adventure for the audience and an international puzzle for them to solve."
"You'll never hear me complaining about the characters I'm playing because I'm happy to be a working actor who's a survivor in Hollywood."
Academy Award winner
A winner of the best actor Academy Award in 1979 for his performance as a disabled war veteran in Coming Home, Voight has earned Oscar nods on three other occasions, including for his breakout as the young Texas hustler in 1969's Midnight Cowboy alongside Dustin Hoffman.
Yet to modern audiences he is best known for his roles in films such as Heat, Mission: Impossible, and Enemy of the State, where he has been seen as an outright villain or authority figure of dubious morality, and as the father of actress Angelina Jolie.
Voight says there is a simple explanation for his recent surge in popularity. "I've grown into the parts that Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum would play if they were alive and my age today," he says.
"Over a decade ago a good friend of mine said I would be working more once I started playing villains.
"My vanity was such that I was still looking at myself as a leading man, certainly not a bad guy or an ageing amoral supporting character like I was in (director) Michael Mann's Heat.
With National Treasure on release, Voight has two more films in the pipeline: Pride and Glory, a crime film co-starring Colin Farrell and Edward Norton, and psychological drama The Uninvited.
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South Africa
