The trauma of witnessing his father kill a man when he was just two-and-a-half years of age changed actor Terrence Howard's life in ways he's still trying to figure out, writes Donald Clarke
I SUPPOSE YOU wouldn't be too surprised to read that Terrence Howard is a bit odd. Over the last decade or so, he has gradually emerged as one of the most reliable and captivating actors of the new century. A tall African-American with a rich, flexible voice, Howard combines the idiosyncrasies of a great character actor with the galloping charisma of a matinee idol. When, after paying his dues in bad television and mediocre films, he received an Oscar nomination for 2004's Hustle and Flow, few doubted we had a new star for the ages. But, yes, he does have a somewhat unusual screen presence. He was intense in Neil Jordan's The Brave One. He was otherworldly in Paul Haggis's Crash. Now, he is enigmatic as Robert Downey Jr's sidekick in Iron Man, the summer's first blockbuster.
That's just acting, of course. How odd can he be in real life? You have no idea, my friend.
As I enter his room at Claridge's Hotel in central London, Howard, dressed in a crisp white suit and coloured cap, is smoking a fag out the window. Well, this certainly counts as unusual behaviour in Hollywood. Indeed, I had the impression that convicted smokers were habitually stoned to death on Sunset Boulevard (with organic stones, naturally).
"They can kiss my ass. How about that?" he says, when I mention how unpopular his habit has become. "You do what they say and then you become a victim of conformity and that's when you cease to be an artist. I am on this earth and I have to compete with a billion of my brothers. I am not going to conform with anybody else's ideas." Take that, health Nazis.
Howard scratches out his cigarette and we make our way to the comfy sofa in the centre of the vast room. He pulls out a pen and begins sketching the flowers in the centre of the table. As his conversation moves from the unusual through to the weird and on to the properly barmy, he continues to work on his reasonably competent still life. He's an artist, you see.
Terrence lives in Philadelphia. Why is that? He was born in Chicago and largely raised in Cleveland. Philly is an unusual place for a movie star to wind up. "Hey, I'm from everywhere, man. I don't believe in boundaries. There is only one true land mass and that is the Earth. There are no separate lands, just the earth's crust and a few puddles of water on it."
Howard even manages to work his weird amalgam of popular science and New Age hokum into his discussion of Iron Man. Jon Favreau's entertaining film, an adaptation of a vintage Marvel comic, finds Downey Jr's Tony Stark, a reformed weapons manufacturer, donning hi-tech armour to fight an alliance between middle-eastern fundamentalists and deranged businessmen. Howard plays Stark's liaison in the military.
"Tony Stark is reminiscent of Einstein after he sent the letter to Roosevelt urging the development of the atomic bomb," he says. "He explained that the Germans had already stockpiled uranium, but later realised that was all propaganda. He had been misled. Every time he saw a photograph of Hiroshima, he was reminded of how they had misused his beautiful equation. If Einstein could have made himself a suit like Iron Man, he might have destroyed all the weapons."
There's a lot more where this came from. The most striking section of the monologue concerns a great revelation that struck Howard when he was still a child. While pondering the reasons that soap bubbles take on spherical form, he suddenly happened upon the secrets of the universe. It's all to do with surface tension.
"I didn't even need to continue thinking about it," he says. "It may take people 100 years to recognise it, but they will realise all this and they will realise that things like String Theory [a mathematical approach to theoretical physics] don't work."
The chronology of Howard's early life is a little hard to disentangle. But he seems to be suggesting that his all-encompassing epiphany happened shortly before he secured his first role as a juvenile actor.
Initially raised in a suburban quarter of Cleveland, Ohio, Howard planned to become an engineer, before being plucked up by a casting agent.
"Yeah, I was walking around with my brother who got an audition for the Cosby Show and they had me come in and read as well. Ultimately, I got a part and was paid $1,900 (€1,211). That blew my mind. I went to school to do chemical engineering - I was still trying to answer that one question - but once I knew the answer, there was no need to continue with school. Because if you know one thing about one thing, then you know one thing about all things."
Oh my word. This is the sort of quasi-mystical claptrap you encounter in the novels of Paulo Coelho. "Paulo Coelho talks about this - about our personal legend - in a book he wrote called The Alchemist. Our personal legend places us in the universe." Uh, huh.
It is easy to make fun of Howard's eccentric worldview, but we should remember that, as a child, he endured a very significant and very public trauma. In 1971, when he was just two-and-a-half, Terrence saw his father, Tyrone Howard, kill a man in a Cleveland department store. The details of the case are still in question, but it seems that the victim, a white man, accused Tyrone and his family of cutting ahead of him in the queue to meet the store's Santa Claus. A scuffle ensued and Terrence's dad somehow ended up fatally stabbing the man in the thigh and neck. Tyrone turned himself in and, after expressing remorse, was sentenced to manslaughter, for which he served 11 months. Terrence believes a racial slur triggered the altercation. Tyrone remembers things differently. Whatever the true facts, the incident, reported in the papers as "The Santa Line Slaying", must have had a devastating effect on the youngster.
Did his improvised philosophies help him survive? "That strengthened me. Yes," he says. "Mind you, I don't remember who I was before that incident. It was as if the TV channel changed from a cartoon to a bad 1970s movie. That's how my mind remembers it: it was like going from Bugs Bunny to Superfly. How do you survive Superfly?" I have read that, after the incident, his family were forced to move to a working-class estate. Racist elements in Cleveland's public life raged against his father in the media. He must still bear some psychological scars.
"I don't know. People keep saying since I got an Oscar nomination, since I recorded my first album, things must have changed. That's the same question. No. Nothing changes but the date. But I do remember it pretty well. I remember thinking: something very bad is about to happen. What will all this ultimately mean? And I am still figuring it out today. Without that, I would not have become the actor I am today."
Oh, really. I had, indeed, suspected that the incident might have fuelled an enthusiasm for taking on imaginary personae. Did acting offer places to hide? "No, I don't think so. But I did act out in school just for the hell of it. I was suspended at least 15 times. I was expelled four times, just because I was incorrigible. The teacher would make me write lines out a thousand times just to punish me. So I'd change the way I wrote for the hell of it."
He moves his pen from the still life to an empty space below and begins writing from right to left across the page. What does the mirror writing say? "I write for the sake of me. You are not going to dominate me with dogma. I will out-reason you because I understand so much more than people think I understand." And so on.
For all his eccentricities, Terrence Howard is unquestionably one of the most alluring movie stars of his generation. Nonetheless, despite decent roles in such pictures as Mr Holland's Opus and Hart's War, it was not until 2004, when Howard was already in his mid-30s, that he achieved proper fame. Hustle and Flow, a controversial picture, found Howard playing a pimp and budding rapper. Yet he somehow turned that dubious character into a sympathetic figure. Made for small change, the independent picture created a storm at Sundance.
"Yeah. I was sitting there and the movie ends," he says. "There's all this wild applause and all of a sudden they announce my name. Everybody stands up. They say that was the very first time that Sundance had given an actor a standing ovation. I thought: 'Okay, this means something.' Here is a film we shot in 24 days. I was paid just 12 grand. I was handed a seed and I could have thrown it away, but I planted it and this whole orchard of opportunity grew up."
It is reasonable to note that Howard has not appeared in an avalanche of box office smashes since then. But the work he has done has been impressive enough to install him as the actor every sane film-maker longs to hire. In a space of a few years, he somehow managed to work in films by three Irish directors: Jim Sheridan's Get Rich or Die Tryin', Neil Jordan's The Brave One and Kirsten Sheridan's August Rush.
"That is strange. Isn't it?" he says. "They're quite different. Jim is completely open to whatever comes towards him. He is like gravity and he has a massive atomic presence.
"Kirsten is more watchful. She has very particular ideas. She is more like the jets shooting out from the centre of a black hole.
"Neil is a cloud. He is like a nebula in which stars are always peaking. There are huge celestial ideas there that give birth to new universes."
When not making assessments of the astrophysical properties of Irish directors, Terrence has found time to appear as the troubled lead in an admired African-American production of Tennessee Williams's Cat On a Hot Tin Roof on Broadway. "That seems a little more enjoyable than film because, on a daily basis, I have to prove myself to be a real actor and interpret Tennessee's pain," he says.
Despite his many successes and his apparent self-belief, Terrence Howard does not come across as being relaxed in his own frame. The constant sketching seems like a way of avoiding embarrassing eye contact. He is very good at expressing traumas - one in particular - through grand philosophical ponderings that fail to address his inner pain. And he has had more troubles than most. His marriage to Lori McCommas, with whom he has three children, broke up after 14 years. He married her again in 2005, but they separated not long after.
Does he find comfort in religion? "Well, it depends who is doing the preaching. I take the scientific approach to the bible. You can take an approach to it that . . ." I must confess my mind begins to wander a bit here. Nice curtains. Oh look, a mini-bar. What time is my flight again? Hang on, a minute! What's he just said?
"The problem people have with the Bible is the earth being created in seven days. But each day is just a day of extraordinary events: Noah's day, Moses's day, my father's day. The problem with people that hold with evolution is that they are more faith based than religious people."
Terrence Howard doesn't believe in evolution? He's having a laugh. Isn't he? "Oh, no way. One of the things Darwin said was that the evolutionary records should show links between the various species and they don't. Species adapt, but they don't change. If evolution works, why are monkeys still around?"
Because apes and man evolved from a common descendent. And the fossil records do exist. This is crazy talk. I rant as I have never ranted before, but, after five minutes of argument, he is still wagging his head calmly. By this stage, the PR person, more used to interrupting conversations concerning exploding speedboats, has reappeared to tap her watch politely.
Returning to his sketch, Terrence finds time for one last rumination on the meaning of his intermittently troubled life and the role of predetermination in the universe. "I've learned how to survive," he says. "I think I was meant to survive.
I know I am not supposed to be dead yet. When I am supposed to be dead, I will be dead - and I'll accept it the same way I accept life."