The Shield's hard-as-nails, Michael
Chiklis has a soft spot for his Boston home.
Michael Chiklis can't remember a time when he wasn't a Boston Red
Sox fan. Just talking about
Fenway Park makes his trademark raspy
voice go soft. "There's no better place to see a
baseball game," he
says. "To know it is to love it." As Vic Mackey, the magnetic,
Machiavellian L.A. cop at the center of
The Shield, Chiklis
has earned a reputation as a bruiser with a
Bruce Willis smirk. In
real life, Chiklis ("Chikie" to his friends) is a family man with a
big laugh and a serious soft spot for Boston, the city he still
calls home, even though he hasn't lived there in two decades. And
nothing gets him nostalgic like talking about
America's pastime.
"Fenway Park is a home-run hitter's venue, a defender's nightmare,"
he says. "It's got all kinds of holes in it, places where you can
hit a ball, and it's a real problem for the outfielders." He
rattles this off with the ease of a man who has had this
conversation before, over a pint or four at the Cask 'n Flagon, the
sports bar where everyone is welcome (except Yankees fans). "The
Sox have always been a heavy-hitting team, but we're better
defensively now," he says. Then he stops for a moment. "Listen to
me. I sound like I'm doing an interview for ESPN."
Chiklis was born in Lowell,
Massachusetts, but when he was five,
his family moved to Andover, the very pink of
New England's prep
school culture' something of a shift for Chiklis's middle-class
family. "It's a Waspy town, and we were a Greek family who moved on
up," he says. "But it was cool. I was sort of a street urchin who
got educated." Chiklis was five or six years old when he announced
his life's ambition: to become an actor. "And my parents were like,
'Sure, next week you'll want to be a fireman,'?" he says.
But Chiklis never faltered. With his parents' encouragement, he did
summer stock in
New Hampshire and scored a raft of regional shows
closer to home. He was captain of the
football team at Andover
High, but it was acting that fired his imagination. When it was
time for college, he applied to one place - Boston University's
School of Arts. "It's a good thing I got in," he says. "I don't
think I realized how competitive it was. Like, out of 3,000 people,
85 people got in. What was I thinking?" Luckily, he was one of
those 85, and he spent the next four years in Boston immersed in
stage work - learning Shakespeare, studying Chekhov.
At night he lined his pocket as a court jester at Medieval Manor, a
Renaissance-themed restaurant where he offered customers wine and
one-liners. He played drums in a female-fronted rock band, Double
Talk, a group with a philosophy of noise and Aqua Net above all
else. "We would play the club circuit, these really nasty places
like the Rathskeller, also known as the Rat, and we'd play the
Channel, the Spit, the Roxy. We'd play the Paradise and the Middle
East in
Cambridge, and by the way, those two are places I still go
to nowadays. The
Middle East is a small, intimate venue, and it's a
great place to see everybody from King Crimson to the Dixie
Dregs."
Of course, playing rock music in the '80s came with one imperative
- big hair. "Believe it or not, the bald guy had some big hair, and
it was long," says Chiklis, whose shiny skull has earned him a
place among the recognizable-bald-guy ranks of Telly Savalas and
Mr. Clean. Chiklis even did a Bertolt Brecht play,
The Caucasian
Chalk Circle, with a
Mohawk - "and it actually worked for the
character," he adds. Not everyone was pleased with the fashion
statement, however. "At the time, my dad owned a beauty salon
called Talk of the Town, which is now called Shear Image. And you
can imagine - me walking in with a jet-black Mohawk? He had some
suggestions."
Soon after graduating from BU, Chiklis moved to New York and
prepared for greatness. Greatness, however, took its sweet time.
Chiklis scrapped and starved like any barely working actor and
eventually landed the lead in the critically maligned 1989 John
Belushi biopic
Wired. Next came the likable small-town title
character in the 1991-95 television series
The Commish. But
afterward, he fell into a rut, stereotyped as the doughboy
do-gooder. So he shed the nice-guy image - lost 50 pounds, shaved
his head, and ended up scoring the role of a lifetime, Vic Mackey,
in Shawn Ryan's renegade FX series about crooked cops,
The
Shield.
Loosely based on scandals in L.A.'s Rampart division,
The
Shield brings viewers inside the tense, morally compromised
world of cops in the fictional town of Farmington. Mackey is the
swaggering tough who runs the department's strike team with all the
subtlety of a pickax. He is a classic antihero, a protagonist so
compelling that even after he killed one of his own men in the
pilot episode, it's
still hard to dislike the guy. Over the
course of the show's first four seasons, he cheated on his (now
ex-) wife, planted evidence on several suspects, stole from the
Armenian mob, and strong-armed justice a number of times in the
name of, well, not law as much as order. Chiklis compares Vic
Mackey to Shakespeare's Richard III, a character he calls "one of
the greatest ever written" (he also hopes to make a film version of
that play). The witches' brew of ego, pride, and power suits him
well: Chiklis has won an
Emmy and a
Golden Globe for his
performance on
The Shield.
Until now, no one has rivaled the physical presence of Mackey, but
that may change with the addition of Forest Whitaker (
Platoon,
The Crying Game) to the cast as Detective Jon Kavanaugh.
Whitaker is an actor who manages to loom large while maintaining a
quiet gravity. Then again, quiet may not be on the table for a show
like
The Shield. "We do a lot of nasty head-butting, the two
of us," Chiklis says of his and Whitaker's characters. He won't
reveal much about the season, but he does offer this: "Some things
come full circle, and it deals with conscience. We have a tagline
for every season. This year the tagline is 'conscience is a
killer,' and it has to do with my character's odyssey. The original
sin of the show, so to speak, is coming back to haunt me."
In the past year, writer/executive producer Shawn Ryan has hinted
that the show may be coming to a close, but Chiklis isn't so sure.
"One of our collective fears is that we'll let this show fade or
become long in the tooth," he says. "We were talking about [ending
the show] a lot before this season, but we came into this season,
and it feels as fresh as season one. Maybe even better, because
we're a well-oiled machine now. We know how to do it."
In the meantime, Chiklis is making forays into film. Last year, in
order to play the Thing in
Fantastic Four, he donned a
costume so cumbersome it actually sent him into therapy - it was
that traumatic. "Seeing my daughters' faces made it worth it,
though," he says. Chiklis has two daughters, Autumn and Odessa, and
he was glad they could finally see him in something made for their
demographic. (Autumn plays Chiklis's daughter on
The Shield,
but he has been adamant about not letting her watch certain violent
scenes.) This summer, he braves the massive costume again to shoot
the sequel, due to open in the summer of 2007.
He's also starring in a supernatural thriller with
Lucy Liu called
Rise, slated for this summer. "I can't really describe it
without giving too much away," he says. "I'll just say that Lucy is
divine in it. And it's got a real old-school genuine American noir
feel to it." In the film, Chiklis plays an L.A. cop, somewhat
familiar territory. "On the surface, people are saying 'Why are you
doing this movie?' Like, big stretch, you know? When you see it,
you'll see why. It's very different than anything I've done."
Were there any downtime (there isn't), he'd love to take his family
back to their beloved Boston. He would book a room for his family
at their favorite hotel, the Ritz-Carlton, overlooking the Public
Garden, and take his wife to a hushed, romantic dinner at Petit
Robert Bistro in Kenmore Square, or at L'Espalier on Gloucester.
One afternoon the family could go shopping along
Charles Street or
inside Copley Place, and later they could stop at the Boston
Children's Museum or the
New England Aquarium. And at night, they
could visit the North End to fill up at any number of that area's
classic Italian restaurants - Lucia, Joe Tecce's, Mamma Maria. "You
just can't find Italian food like that on the West Coast," he says.
"It just doesn't exist."
Of course, Chiklis would have to catch some sports while he was in
town. He loves his Patriots, but it's the Sox who have his heart.
In 2002, Chiklis threw out the first pitch at a Sox game, and you
get the feeling that, along with his Emmy and his Golden Globe, it
was the kind of honor that can make a guy's life. Afterward, he
joined a group of friends for dinner at Abe & Louie's steak
house, and they feasted on rib eyes and red wine. "Now, that was a
good day," he says with a sigh.
Sometimes, he even misses the bitter Boston winter. "People always
complain about the weather and changing of the seasons," he says.
"But what happens is, as a result, there is this exchange of ideas
that happens while you spend those winters in Boston. There are
almost 50 colleges and universities in the city, so when I went to
college there, it was such a wonderful place to be, surrounded by
students and ideas. People are real in Boston. They don't mess
around. They tell it like it is." He makes a little groan. "Talking
about this stuff is making me homesick."
Sometimes, when he's in sunny L.A., he overhears someone with a
Boston accent, and he can't help but stop to chat. "It gives me
that feeling you only get from the things that are home," he says.
"It's all those things that make you smile, that remind you of when
you were a kid growing up and the joy you had, that remind you of
the certain things that only your city got right."
He Said...
The places in Boston that knock
Michael Chiklis's Sox off
LODGING
The Ritz-Carlton Boston, very expensive, (617) 536-5700,
www.ritzcarlton
.com/hotels/boston
DINING
Abe & Louie's, steak house, expensive to very expensive,
(617) 536-6300,
www.bbrginc.com/al
Joe Tecce's Ristorante and Café, Neapolitan, moderate to
expensive, (617) 742-6210,
www.joetecces.com
L'Espalier, French, very expensive, (617) 262-3023,
www.lespalier.com
Lucia Ristorante & Bar, Italian, moderate to expensive,
(617) 367-2353, luciaristorante.com
Mamma Maria, Italian and New American, expensive, (617)
523-0077,
www.mammamaria.com
Petit Robert Bistro & Pastry Bar, French, expensive,
(617) 375-0699,
www.petitrobertbistro.com
NIGHTLIFE
Cask 'n Flagon, (617) 536-4840,
www.casknflagon.com
The Middle East, (617) 864-3278,
www.mideastclub.com
The Paradise, (617) 562-8800,
www.thedise.com
The Roxy, (617) 338-7699,
www.roxyplex.com
ATTRACTIONS
Boston Children's Museum, (617) 426-8855,
www.bostonkids.org
Fenway Park, (617) 226-6666 (tours) or
www.redsox.com (tickets)
New England Aquarium, (617) 973-5200,
www.neaq.org
SHOPPING
Copley Place, (617) 369-5000
We Said … The places in Boston that knock our Sox off
LODGING
Boston Doubletree Guest Suites, expensive, (617) 783-0090,
www.doubletree.com. We
don't usually recommend chain hotels, but we like this Doubletree
outpost for its swell view of the
Charles River. Plus, shuttles are
standing by to take you to Copley Square, Boston Common, and other
top spots, saving you precious cab fare. Oh, and did we mention the
delicious chocolate chip cookies waiting for you at check-in?
Charlesmark Hotel, moderate to expensive, (617) 247-1212,
www.thecharlesmark.com.
With only 38 rooms, this nineteenth-century residence turned
boutique hotel proves good things come in small packages. Maybe
it's the
Boylston Street locale. Or the little touches like soft
music playing in your room when you arrive. Or the martinis at the
swank new hotel bar. We'll let you decide.
DINING
Charlie’s Kitchen, inexpensive, (617) 492-9646. The best plan of attack at this
Harvard Square institution? Drop some change in the jukebox, slip into a downstairs booth, and order up a brewski and a classic double cheeseburger. You’ll feel like one of the locals in no time, whether you’re a aspiring college student or a seasoned working stiff.
Finale Dessert Company, inexpensive, (617) 423-3184,
www.finaledesserts.com. During the day, the bakery whips out gourmet soups, salads, and sandwiches, but we usually eat light before visiting so we can come in the evening and splurge on its prize-winning desserts, like manjari mousse (served with blackberry-Cabernet sorbet) and Finale’s own version of Boston cream pie. Sin-sational!
ATTRACTIONS
The Computer Museum, (617) 723-2500,
www.mos.org. Nerd alert! Once private but now part of the
Museum of Science, this temple of high tech covers all things computing, from an early Enigma machine to a virtual fish tank created by the brainiacs at MIT.
DeCordova Sculpture Park, (781) 259-8355,
www.decordova.org. A giant wooden pig, a pair of 12-foot-high hearts, and a Kong-size baby are just a few of the unique pieces scattered throughout this 35-acre outdoor art museum. Better yet, it’s just minutes from Thoreau’s beloved Walden Pond.
Author