‘Stanley Kubrick, “Full Metal Jacket”, and an Actor’s Heartbreak’

Aaron Couch, writing for The Hollywood Reporter:

Tim Colceri had just been given a beeper, an envelope full of cash and a driver to take him wherever he wanted. He wanted to go to a pub, so that’s where he went. Before he could settle in amid the cigarette smoke and dark beer of the establishment, his beeper went off. It was a message from the man who’d summoned him to London.

“Tim, learn pages 1-28. Driver will pick you up tomorrow at 7. Stanley.”

Colceri rushed to his hotel and began cramming. A Vietnam veteran, he was used to hopping to attention when a superior barked an order. But those 28 pages were full of dialogue for Gunnery Sgt. Hartman, the character he had been hired to play based on a self-taped audition for Full Metal Jacket. Colceri gritted his teeth and went to work, shouting lines all evening in his hotel room.

Hard, if not impossible, to imagine Full Metal Jacket without R. Lee Ermey in that role.

★ Monday, 30 September 2019