{"id":355568,"date":"2025-12-18T06:16:09","date_gmt":"2025-12-18T06:16:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/355568\/"},"modified":"2025-12-18T06:16:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T06:16:09","slug":"michael-patrick-thornton-on-waiting-for-godot-apples-the-savant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/355568\/","title":{"rendered":"Michael Patrick Thornton on ‘Waiting for Godot,’ Apple’s ‘The Savant’"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the most iconic moments of 20th century theater isn\u2019t two men sitting under a tree, waiting for a God that won\u2019t come, in Samuel Beckett\u2019s \u201cWaiting for Godot<\/a>\u201c: It\u2019s a long, unpunctuated speech delivered by the character Lucky that makes James Joyce\u2019s \u201cFinnegans Wake\u201d look like Ernest Hemingway.<\/p>\n

In \u201cSunset Blvd.,\u201d director Jamie Lloyd\u2019s ongoing Broadway mounting of \u201cWaiting for Godot,\u201d also starring Keanu Reeves <\/a>and Alex Winter aka Bill and Ted, that speech is delivered by actor Michael Patrick Thornton<\/a>, who plays Lucky as the mostly silent, muzzled end of a slave-master relationship with Pozzo (Brandon J. Dirden). But the twist here is that, with Thornton being a wheelchair user himself, so is Lucky, which casts the character into a new 21st century perspective.<\/p>\n

\"LOS<\/a> \"YouTube<\/a> <\/p>\n

\u201cThat speech is typically looked at as a speed and volume parlor game, like, \u2018Holy shit, look at how many words are coming out of this guy\u2019s mouth? Isn\u2019t that amazing?,’\u201d Thornton told IndieWire in a recent interview. \u201cI always find that with text that looks absurdist, the more you treat them as not absurdist and take them at their own terms, they become even more creepy and menacing and truthful and absurdist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Told in a lingua franca of philosophy and academic jargon, Lucky\u2019s speech has something to do with the collapse of reason and logic, and the futility of human progress, which is ultimately what tramps Estragon (Reeves) and Vladimir (Winter) are up against, too. Thornton spent three weeks memorizing it.<\/p>\n

Thornton, who starred onstage next to Jessica Chastain<\/a> in Jamie Lloyd\u2019s 2023 Broadway showing of \u201cA Doll\u2019s House,\u201d has been seen on television in series like \u201cBlack Rabbit,\u201d \u201cMadam Secretary,\u201d and \u201cLet the Right One in.\u201d \u201cWaiting for Godot\u201d only has a few more weeks before it must close January 4, and Thornton\u2019s portrayal of the speech could make him a Tony contender next year.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I was more interested in is can the images that I\u2019m working with, and the emotion that I have around different sections, can that translate in a way that passages of Shakespeare that have ancient fucking agrarian jokes that make no sense to our modern society, can enough be transferred in the hyper-specificity of the images and the emotion, to get the emotional narrative of it, as opposed to the philosophical narrative?,\u201d the actor said.<\/p>\n

As Thornton is otherwise largely silent onstage, what\u2019s going on inside the actor\u2019s head while Reeves and Winter share droll, existentialist banter? The play takes place inside a giant drain pipe constructed on the stage, and underneath it all thrums a destabilizing Lynchian sound design of moody ambience.<\/p>\n

\"\"Michael Patrick Thornton\u00a9 2024 Kevin Scanlon<\/p>\n

Thornton said he took inspiration from one Charlie Chaplin in channeling a mostly wordless performance outside of that speech.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s this incredible moment in \u2018The Gold Rush\u2019 \u2026 Chaplin is obviously silent. He\u2019s at the bar, and the girl that he likes is in front of him, and she\u2019s in the foreground, and he\u2019s just maybe a few feet behind her, and all he does is he watches her,\u201d Thornton said. \u201cShe is the focus. He doesn\u2019t pull focus; he doesn\u2019t move his body. It\u2019s really just his eyes. It\u2019s a five-second shot, 10-second shot. I saw that years ago, and when I got cast as Lucky, I went back to it. There\u2019s something humane he does in giving her all the power, all the status; you know everything by how he looks at her. He loves her so much but is terrified to talk to her. I was like, if I can get that quality into everything I\u2019m doing in act one before that speech, I will be very happy. If love can shine through my eyes, and yearning, and protectiveness, and yet not pull focus and help the audience out in terms of where\u2019s the ball, who\u2019s got the story, it feels very \u2018Gold Rush\u2019 to me. It feels like act one Chaplin, actor two David Lynch.\u201d<\/p>\n

That feeling of shining love out from the stage is also, he said, reflected in the unusual beating heart that Reeves and Winter\u2019s friendship helps bring to Beckett\u2019s otherwise emotionally dry text.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember seeing them when I was younger and thinking they were amazing. I remember the scene of Napoleon talking about a waterslide. I think the guys just do one shout-out to their band. By the voluminousness of the laugh each night, you can almost nail down the median age of the audience, of who gets that,\u201d Thornton said. \u201cWhether you are a fan of Bill and Ted or not, what does propel the production, I would bet a lot of chips on, is Alex and Keanu\u2019s friendship. They generally are like brothers. They care for each other and have gone through a lot of shit together, at the ascent of their careers being crazy famous. There are moments where I can hear that friendship come through the lines in a searing way. If you are a fan, you are going to geek out about the wild stallion reference, and if you\u2019re not, there\u2019s a huge beating heart at the center of the production that, not to play favorites, I just don\u2019t think most people associate with Beckett at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another reason I wanted to talk to Thornton was over his starring role in Apple TV<\/a>\u2018s limited series \u201cThe Savant,\u201d which was pulled from the calendar in September, seemingly in response to the murder of Charlie Kirk. Led by \u201cA Doll\u2019s House\u201d co-star Chastain (who\u2019s since pulled the series\u2019 title from her social media bios), it\u2019s about online infiltrators of dark-web hate groups whose mission is to prevent possible attacks from happening. (Apple did not reply to IndieWire\u2019s recent request for comment on a series update, but it\u2019s currently undated.)<\/p>\n

\"JessicaJessica Chastain in \u2018The Savant\u2019Courtesy of Elizabeth Fisher \/ Apple TV+<\/p>\n

\u201cI hope [it comes out] soon because we need to have a conversation about why our young men are being radicalized online, and why the story of the American Dream has failed the middle class, and why these online communities are providing the comfort and support and sense of identity that obviously the real world and the job market and family and friends are not,\u201d Thornton said. \u201cThe show talks about that, and the show talks about the personal cost that these anonymous, white hat, thankless online warriors undergo by sifting through the internet and trying to predict when something bad will happen based on anonymous accounts. There are a lot of good people who get up every morning in this country and log on and protect us from attacks we never knew were imminent.\u201d <\/p>\n

He also added bluntly: \u201cIt\u2019s a conversation we need to have way sooner than later, and the fact that the first U.S. trillion-dollar company would backpocket a work of art in order to maybe sell more phones is worrisome for any pluralist democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of his role in the series, Thornton said, \u201cI play this great character named Gary, who\u2019s former law enforcement, who now runs an organization called the Anti-Hate Alliance. Imagine if you had the ACLU and a bunch of hackers, a love child between them as an organization, and I am Jessica [Chastain]\u2019s boss, and I oversee a team that monitors the dark web very closely and tries to give actionable pieces of information to the FBI in order to keep the country more safe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Next up, though, Thornton stars on the big screen in \u201cCODA\u201d Oscar winner Sian Heder\u2019s \u201cBeing Heumann,\u201d a portrait of disability rights activist Judith Heumann (Ruth Madeley). The film shot in Toronto in mid-2025 with Mark Ruffalo, Dylan O\u2019Brien, and Rob Delaney also in the cast.<\/p>\n

Thornton plays Ed Roberts, a pioneering disability rights activist who was also the first wheelchair user to attend the University of California, Berkeley.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor 25 years, I\u2019ve always been the only wheelchair user on set. And everything has been a conversation like, \u2018Oh, what if we can\u2019t get him into the makeup chair? What if we can\u2019t get an ADA trailer? What can we get for his dressing room?\u2019 There\u2019s been so many fucking annoying things that come with every single job that quite frankly non-disabled people don\u2019t even have to think about,\u201d Thornton said.<\/p>\n

\u201cBeing Heumann,\u201d though, was \u201clike going to disabled Valhalla. Every trailer was ramped. There was an access coordinator there. The people who were non-disabled were in the minority as opposed to the people who were disabled. You had people who were deaf, blind, power wheelchair users, manual wheelchair uses; it was astounding what they pulled off, and the script is badass about a badass woman and unfortunately still very timely about access needs in Section 504 [which prevents disability discrimination and helps ensure access needs are met] and the largest sit-in protest in the history of the United States, which brought together the butterfly brigade, and the Black Panthers, and brought all these groups that previously were siloed to collaborate and say enough is enough. I can\u2019t wait to see it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWaiting for Godot\u201d is onstage at the Hudson Theatre through January 4.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One of the most iconic moments of 20th century theater isn\u2019t two men sitting under a tree, waiting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":355569,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[236,88,5450,174650,92,110471],"class_list":{"0":"post-355568","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-interviews","11":"tag-michael-patrick-thornton","12":"tag-tv","13":"tag-waiting-for-godot"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=355568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355568\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/355569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=355568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=355568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=355568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}