JOHN BENJAMIN HICKEY

John Benjamin Hickey recently starred as Frank Winter in the critically acclaimed WGN America series Manhattan. John's film credits include Truth, Big Stone Gap, Get on Up, Pitch Perfect, Flags of Our Fathers, The Anniversary Party, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and The Taking of Pelham 123. John can currently be seen in the Netflix-released film Tallulah, which premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. Most recently, he wrapped on Black Bear Pictures' Barry, a Barack Obama biopic that premiered at TIFF; Scott Cooper's Hostiles, starring Christian Bale, Rosamund Pike, Jesse Plemons, and Ben Foster; and George Wolfe's HBO feature The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. On television, he received an Emmy Award nomination for his work on the Showtime series "The Big C," playing Laura Linney's brother, Sean. He also recurred on the hit CBS television series "The Good Wife" playing Internet billionaire Neil Gross. Other television credits include "Pitch Perfect," "Manh(a)ttan," "Modern Family," "Hannibal," "The New Normal," "Sex and the City," and "Law & Order." On Broadway, John won the 2011 Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play and a Drama Desk Award for his performance in The Normal Heart. His other credits include Mary Stuart, The Crucible, Cabaret, and Love! Valour! Compassion! for which he won an Obie Award. Earlier this year, John was back on stage in Peter Parnell's Dada Woof Papa Hot at Lincoln Center for director Scott Ellis.

I can say one with the utmost confidence about what I've done in my career is that I've certainly had the great fortune of working with amazing directors with Stephen Daldry, Sam Mendes, Joe Mantello, Richard Eyre, Philida Lloyd, Scott Ellis. My list is long. I can brag about anything, boy, I really got lucky with directors and I've been most of those people at really extraordinary moments in their careers. Sam Mendes in his production of Cabaret along with Rob Marshall in New York in '98 with Natasha Richardson and Alan Cumming and Joe Mantello in Love, Valor, Compassion which was the beginning of Joe's extraordinary career as a director. I never sat and watched those people thinking, Oh, I'm going to do what they do someday. Never. It never, ever occurred to me, but I do, hopefully, as an artist your greatest asset is being a sponge. I think the thing that keeps you going is to be as sponge-like as possible and to just try to absorb what's amazing about a fellow artist, even when they do that's different than what you do. So, I have been, if not literally taking notes, I've certainly unconsciously been taking notes for many, many, many years. So, I guess it's just a fancy way of saying I've been stealing from the best for a long time and have thought about those people as I made this directorial nascent journey. I feel like they're on my shoulder.

On Directing Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick in Plaza Suite

I had known them both for over 20 years and have known them through the course of their long and wonderful marriage and always admired them professionally so much. And I was on Sex and the City, but I had nothing to do with Sarah on the show. I never saw her on set. It's not like the three of us were looking for something to do. I kind of put this reading together and it went so well that we all three looked at each other afterward and said, "We should do this. We should do this together." It was a bigger leap for me to do it with them than for them to do it because this is my first Broadway directorial effort. My Broadway directorial debut, and it's only the second play I've directed, so I had a very steep learning curve, but I've enjoyed every minute of it. Yes, the longer you stick around in this business, the smaller and smaller the world gets.

On Acting

If you are thinking about too much, you're probably not doing it right. Some nights you do it and you're just like, that just felt like it was ten minutes long and I just was on cloud nine. What was I doing? A great, great American actor George C. Scott, who was in the original cast of Plaza Suite had a great quote once, he said, "Every actor worth their salt has one good show a week and spends those other seven shows wondering what they did that made them so good that night." And nobody knows. If you could figure that out and if you could bottle that then, of course, everybody could do it.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

And then also speaking of some of the great actors and actresses you've worked with as well. And some that you've worked with many times, what you love about the collaborative process.

HICKEY

Again I've been so fortunate to work with such great actors over the years. Joe Mantello and the entire company of The Normal Heart, Nathan Lane, who I consider one of my great educators. He was a real mentor to me. I mean there's not a big age difference between us, but he was such a professional and he was so devoted to the character and worked tirelessly to make the character in the show as good as it could possibly be. Nathan was always the first one there in the morning. Nathan was always the last one to leave. Nathan never ever did it sitting down. He's always full steam ahead and there was a great lesson in that for me to watch somebody's work ethic. It taught me my work ethic. Laura Linney is a great friend and artistic collaborator who I went to Juilliard with many, many years ago. We were classmates. I've done The Crucible on Broadway with her and then, of course, I did four or five years of that television show The Big C with her. Watching her work is an extraordinary thing. Very educational because she doesn't waste her energy. She really knows how to marshall her energy on a television show and then in a theater in rehearsal for a play. Again, the thing where you steal from great directors, you steal from great actors. You watch that. Oh, I see how she does that. Or I see how he does that. I want to figure out my way of doing it, you know? You learn from the best.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Josie Meloy. Digital Media Coordinator is Hannah Story Brown.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process.

It's about, can you handle the complexity of these things and, with American Indians, it's overwhelming, for the American public, this terrible tragedy and seeing Indians as part of the 21st century. Seeing Indians who are engineers or contemporary artists at Biennales is hard for people becaue they're always thinking about (not always, but) many of the kind of people who go to our museum. They're coming from a place of guilt and also not knowing how to process things. And so to always see Indians as of the past, which is sort of what happens. We're only Indian as much as we're like our ancestors, is something the museum has always been trying to challenge. And, you know, it's difficult. This is not a good time for complexity and nuance. We're trying to flip the script from the idea of just tragedy, this terrible past, to say, American Indians are part of the 21st century doing all kinds of interesting things. And the connections between American Indians and the United States are profound and deep, and it's not simply an issue of us being victims and the U.S. being the opressor. It's much more complicated than that.

–PAUL CHAAT SMITH · ASSOCIATE CURATOR
SMITHSONIAN NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN
Excerpt of an interview for The Creative Process

I actually assumed in graduate school that I would become a teacher and I've taught in a number of different universities, but it was working with art objects and seeing them in museums like the Metropolitan Museum or The Frick that made me want to go into museum work and ultimately become a curator. So when I was finishing my dissertation and had to think about a career, I applied to a lot of teaching jobs and there was one job that year in America in my specialized field, which was European sculpture, and I was very lucky. But a professional career is a bit of luck as well as predisposition, so I knew I wanted to work in museums, and I was lucky enough when
I was able to find my way here.

–IAN WARDROPPER · DIRECTOR
THE FRICK COLLECTION
Excerpt of an interview for The Creative Process

I think there are certainly social aspects to this because, you know, whether painting a landscape or doing a conceptual piece or large sculpture, I think artists, who are all involved in this creative process, I always say they are almost like bellwethers. They pick up on trends, pick up on anxieties, pick up on things in the world almost before the rest of us do. And artists get up, eat their cornflakes, go to work. They really do. And it's this creative process, which as Chuck Close once debunked and said, "Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us get up and work." It's not always inspiration, but another great quote of his is that he always, anytime he sees a lot of painting like going to a museum, he's always astonished by the transcendent moment when you realize that this is just colored dirt and pigment laid on the surface with what's arguably just a stick. There's such a metaphysical moment when these images are created on a surface. In three dimension, if you're talking about something that has reference in the natural world. In three dimension on a flat surface, it's kind of a head-scratcher to start. So great art has a transcendent moment.

–ALICIA LONGWELL · CHIEF CURATOR
PARRISH ART MUSEUM
Excerpt of an interview for The Creative Process

I think that contact with ancient civilizations is very important because we get to have in our life a third dimension. If we live only in the present, we don't understand what happened many thousand years ago. We don't realize what the development of humanity really is. I think it's very helpful to know history. I don't believe that history can teach for the future, but history can give us another dimension, can make us wiser with more abilities to judge our present. Sometimes we think that we invented everything, but this is not true. The history of human thinking is very important, is very useful for us to know different thinking of other people. At the end of the day, multicultural civilization is also very helpful today. I know, for myself, for example, I concentrate on antiquity, but sometimes I work on other civilizations. Some months ago I organized an exhibition on a very famous Chinese emperor – Qianlong (1711-99). And through this opportunity, I studied a little about Chinese culture, and I found very exciting things. And I can compare these things with our Western civilization. All this is very fruitful because we open our eyes, and we are not going on only one track. There are different approaches in life and different interpretations of the world and of societies.

–DIMITRIOS PANDERMALIS · DIRECTOR
ACROPOLIS MUSEUM
Excerpt of an interview for The Creative Process

The whole thing is to get them to feel like no matter where their background is from, the difficulty they have in their personal lives, the isolation that they feel in relationship to that, that within the art community they are embraced, they are welcomed. All they have to do is just keep getting better at it, but the community is there. I think that something we're all looking for is where we belong.

–ERIC FISCHL
ARTIST
Excerpt of an interview for The Creative Process

When I first started acting, I came to Los Angeles for a one week job. I was with my dad and we went to a production of a play called Fences. And James Earl Jones was the star. And I remember I was just the whitest kid ever from small town New Mexico. I'm sitting there watching this play about a lower middle-class African American man in Pittsburg and his family. And I just remember being so moved, moved to tears at thirteen, fourteen years old about a world that I really knew nothing about. Not even from school, even, but certainly not this feeling empathy for this specific man and wife, and she was peeling potatoes on a rocking chair and monologing ire at his character. And it was so moving. I did think, even back then I recognized the impact that the theater can have on someone that isn't even anything like what they're like.

–NEIL PATRICK HARRIS
ACTOR, WRITER, PRODUCER, MAGICIAN & SINGER
Excerpt of an interview for The Creative Process

Creativity is perhaps the ultimate mystery. I veer wildly between opposing views on it and have different feelings depending on whether the creator is isolated or a collaborator. Gropius said the artist is an exalted craftsman. “In rare moments of inspiration, moments beyond the control of his will, the grace of Heaven may cause his work to blossom into art, but proficiency in his craft is essential to every artist. Therein lies the source of creative imagination." And Steve Sondheim said, "Art is craft, not inspiration." And Rilke mistrusted any artist's knowing participation in his own creative process.

–TONY WALTON
ART & THEATER DIRECTOR · COSTUME DESIGNER
Excerpt of an interview for The Creative Process