‘One Battle After Another’ star Tony Goldwyn is fine with being the king of suave movie villains

By Dan Heching, CNN

(CNN) — For someone who’s played a menacing collection of pretty bad dudes on screen for over three decades, Tony Goldwyn is a really nice guy.

When we spoke by video around the holidays, the actor and director was smiling and laid back, excited to talk about a number of things, including his latest big-screen role, which sees him leading a band of white supremacists in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another.” The buzzy film is heading into Oscar season with a slew of Golden Globes to its name, including best film.

Tall, composed, with classic good looks, Goldwyn has made a career of playing what he calls “morally frightening human beings.” He got his big break in the 1990 hit film “Ghost” playing Carl Bruner, an incidentally homicidal precursor to the finance bro archetype that we know (and mostly abhor) today.

“Carl definitely set a kind of trajectory for me,” he said. “Weirdly, at that time… I was more worried about getting pigeonholed as the all-American boy, milquetoast-y kind of hero. So the idea of playing a villain like that was super attractive to me.”

In the ensuing decades, Goldwyn has appeared as a slew of similarly reprehensible but smooth-talking bad guys, in films like “The Pelican Brief,” “Kiss the Girls” and “The Last Samurai,” as well as in the arguably villain-adjacent role of Fitz on the small screen in Shondaland’s hit 2010’s show “Scandal.”

“If you can play a villain and make him find his humanity and make the audience think he’s a great guy, and then he turns out to have no moral compass, then that’s– that’d be really fun,” he said.

His turn as the wildly named Virgil Throckmorton in “One Battle After Another” has taken his particular brand of well-mannered villainy to new heights. (“One Battle After Another” is a production of Warner Bros. Pictures, which is owned by CNN’s parent company Warner Bros. Discovery.)

“Virgil, I see as a little bit different,” Goldwyn said. “I think Virgil Throckmorton and people of his ilk – which is what makes him really scary – is they have great moral certitude, certainty. Virgil Throckmorton has no self-doubt about his morality. He’s very clear about what’s right and what’s wrong, and the way the world needs to be.”

In “One Battle,” Goldwyn’s epically charming Throckmorton heads a nefarious, covert racist organization whose members call themselves the “Christmas Adventurers,” a group of white supremacists whose exclusivity and elitism is matched only by their terrifying ideals.

“I loved Virgil Throckmorton because he is a villain, but he’s so charming, and who wouldn’t want to be a member of that club?!” Goldwyn said about how he approached the character, a kind of caricature-like nightmare. “That was absurd and terrifying at the same time.”

Of course, Goldwyn doesn’t only play suave bad guys. He has become a mainstay in the “Law & Order” universe as a DA managing all sorts of criminal and legal mayhem, and the character he plays on “Hacks” is the (just so) slightly less morally compromised network exec Bob Lipka. Beyond that, he is a seasoned director, having helmed several episodes of “Scandal” along with other well-known series and films, including “Dexter,” 1999’s “A Walk on the Moon” and the more recent “Ezra,” which featured his “Ghost” costar Whoopi Goldberg.

With all that range, Goldwyn is unbothered by the notion that his career has been influenced by any sort of typecasting.

“It helped me support my family and I just stopped worrying about it, you know?” he said. “I kind of broadened my career so that I wouldn’t be at the mercy of other people deciding who I was or what I was about.”

That might be something Goldwyn has thought about for a while. The grandson of legendary studio creator Samuel Goldwyn, he is, technically, a nepo baby himself.

It’s a term he takes issue with.

“This whole nepo baby thing kind of is irritating because it’s so pejorative, and haven’t people gone into the family business in every field throughout history?” Goldwyn – who in fact comes from a show business dynasty on both sides – asked. “Isn’t that kind of a natural thing to move into what your forbearers did and to take that on and build on what they did?”

That’s a subject broached on “Far From the Tree,” a podcast he recently launched with his daughter Anna Musky-Goldwyn, who also works in the entertainment industry as a television writer and is identified by her dad as “the fourth generation now of people in our family who are in showbiz.”

On the podcast, which has welcomed luminaries in the arts like Jane Fonda as well as sports figures like University of Texas head women’s basketball coach Vic Schaefer and his daughter, assistant coach Blair Schaefer, Goldwyn and his daughter talk to parents and children who work in the same business about the “challenges, the joys, the ways that it brings an intimacy to the parent-child relationship.”

Granted, Goldwyn is also quick to express his sincere and deep gratitude for his last name and all that comes with it, saying he feels “privileged to be part of a legacy.”

It also proved to be formative for him.

“I thought, should I change my name, like before my first professional job?” he recalled wondering back in his early 20s, when he was just starting out as an actor. “And my instincts said, I said to myself, ‘Tony, this is your problem.’ For me, I was like, this is my hangup to get over.”

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