There’s a line in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps that most succinctly captures the seismic shift that has occurred since we all drank the Kool-Aid of Oliver Stone’s “greed is good” mantra back in 1987: “I’m small-time compared to these crooks,” Gordon Gekko remarks, with more than a little bitterness, to his estranged daughter’s fiancé, played by Shia LaBeouf.
Michael Douglas knows such a line was integral to the evolution in his best-known film role. “Sure, the whole world has changed since then, hasn’t it?” he says. Indeed, two decades have passed when we pick up Gekko’s story at the start of the much-anticipated sequel, which opened in late September, and both the film’s characters and its real-life audience are surveying a decidedly altered landscape: The barons of Wall Street aren’t the cocksure kings of even five years ago.
Now, when it comes to our mortgages and Tmoney-market accounts, America as a whole most definitely has trust issues. Douglas’ life has undergone a wealth of change as well—though at the time of our conversation in early August, it was yet to be revealed just how much. On the day we sat down in the Upper West Side apartment Douglas shares with his wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and their two children, the 66-year-old actor was affable, breezy even, eager to talk about Wall Street, as well as a smaller independent film he starred in that was released earlier in the year, the Steven Soderbergh-produced Solitary Man.
“In our business sometimes you have to get out there and be a salesman,” he says of his enthusiasm for the latter, which enjoyed solid reviews amid a limited release. Yet Douglas was also in New York that week to see physicians and undergo tests that would ultimately determine that the sore throat plaguing him throughout the summer was actually cancer. He began treatment in late summer, and he was optimistic, telling David Letterman his chances of recovery were roughly 80 percent.
Douglas’ Aspen Ties
But those were headlines for another day; on this Tuesday afternoon, Douglas is open to all other questions, including talk of Aspen. “A very important place for us,” he calls it. “You know, I proposed to Catherine there, on New Year’s Eve 1999, right on the millennium. We were both sick as dogs; she could barely pronounce yes through the sniffles.” (November 18 marks the couple’s 10th anniversary.)
Ask Douglas about Aspen, and his thoughts turn to “decades of memories and dear friends, and a lot of great Christmases.” A self-avowed “intermediate, fair-weather” Snowmass [http://www.aspensnowmass.com/] skier (troubled by knee problems in recent years, he underwent knee-replacement surgery in 2009), Douglas has been an Aspen regular since 1974.
Looking Back on Michael Douglas
