Eric Roberts proves resilient in 'The Dark Knight'
The Joker isn't the only villain turning Gotham City upside down in "The Dark Knight." Audiences should also beware of a sharp-dressed crime boss named Salvatore Maroni, played with tough, smirking cool by actor Eric Roberts, who, in a career that has spanned three decades, has certainly seen some dark moments of his own.
His part as Maroni is small but crucial, with Roberts as an unctuous urban menace who tangles with Batman, the Joker and D.A. Harvey Dent. "The Dark Knight" is an unexpected coup for Roberts, returning him to mainstream glory after years in the relative obscurity of B-movies and TV guest roles.
"It's a great dramatic film, with a bunch of great actors," said Roberts, who spent five months on the shoot in Chicago and London. "I would get through working in the morning, and I would sit on the set all day, because it was that exciting to me."
On a recent Saturday, Roberts was in good spirits as he relaxed with his wife, Eliza, over lunch at a favorite neighborhood spot in Sherman Oaks. His hair was streaked with gray, but he otherwise seemed the same wiry, charismatic figure he's often been onscreen. With age has come an ease with a career that has charted terrific highs as well as profound lows.
But Roberts is undoubtedly on an upswing with "Dark Knight." He recalled that during a long day on the set outside London in 2007, Heath Ledger was smoldering through three pages of near-monologue as the Joker addressed a room crowded with bad guys, coming across as simultaneously threatening, charming and insane. Then came a moment when Ledger had a break to chat briefly with Roberts. "How am I doing?" he remembered Ledger asking him, before adding with a wicked grin, "You know, it's hard."
Roberts should know. In the 1980s, he spent his first decade as a movie actor enjoying the same kind of accolades for disturbing, difficult performances that Ledger is now receiving posthumously as the Joker. In 1983, Roberts played a different kind of psychopath in Bob Fosse's "Star 80," as the murdering husband to Playmate Dorothy Stratten, delivering an intense, layered performance as a young man who was frighteningly fervent, yet almost sympathetic. There was an Oscar nomination for 1985's "Runaway Train" and acclaimed roles in "The Pope of Greenwich Village" and other films.
