It's fairly simple. If you see the name William H. Macy in the title credits, odds are you're going to walk away with, at minimum, the feeling that you've seen a great performance. Macy has wowed the crowds on stage, on television and in more movies than Cranky can remember, the best two off the top of my head being Fargo and Pleasantville. For the second time Macy sat for the Cranky Critic star Talk microphone, to talk about his latest gig, as a superhero called The Shoveler, in Kinka Usher's Mystery Men.

CrankyCritic: The last time we talked was for Pleasantville, and we asked what your favorite 50s TV shows were. Now we'll ask what your favorite comics were...
William H. Macy: Oh, I'm going to disappoint again. I didn't read comic books.

CrankyCritic: Like everybody else in this movie! I'm so disappointed!
William H. Macy: I know. I know. I think that's one of the reasons we're so good. We didn't pollute our minds with comic books [laughs]

CrankyCritic: Was there an image that you brought into this, thinking "I don't want to do that?"
William H. Macy: No. All the actors were very clever. A lot of the hooks they came up with. Hank Azaria came up with the idea that, to his mom, he didn't have the British accent. Ben Stiller came up with the idea that Mr. Furious was basically full of shit and that he never did anything. He just warned people that he was about to go. Paul came up with half of that stuff – the sibilant "s" and the "pull my finger". I chose Gary Cooper. I thought the way I want to do it was, I'm sort of the moral center of the Mystery Men and the simple man. The construction worker with a wife and family. I chose Gary Cooper. I went to Kinka and I said let's cut all the lines and we did. We cut my lines by two thirds. Made me terse and monosyllabic and simple. I thought he's the kind of guy who has very very simple rules which are basically Baptist morality, right and wrong a simple view of the world. He makes his decisions simply and never looks back.

CrankyCritic: How good did you get with that shovel?
William H. Macy: Better than it looks in the film. I did some great gags, and of course Kinka shot everything this tight but the couple of times that it does show it works out. I worked at it all the time. There was nothing to do on the set so I was constantly slinging that shovel around. I did the first two weeks of the shoot with this huge gash on my head because I was practicing and I whacked myself in the face. I saw stars. And also, the set, every once in a while when that shovel would drop, over and over and over again, it made the most horrible sound. Because I was one of the stars of the thing, everyone had to endure it. Everyone wanted to say "Put the damned shovel down!"

CrankyCritic: Tell us how you went about making The Shoveler into a real person.
William H. Macy: First, I loved the story. You could say it's about loser superheroes, hat's funny to begin with. And I love the morality of the thing. I think the greatest stories are when you take the hero, your superhero who's an ordinary man who absolutely does not have the skills required to vanquish the bad guy; The least likely person. I think deep down inside we all feel like we are that person. Everyone else belongs here and is having a grand old time and we're the only outsiders. Everybody feels that way. These guys, who don't have the goods to go up against the bad guys, realize there's nobody else. It's our job. The City's looking to us and we go into battle scared to death. I just think that's a compelling story. I love the attitude towards the violence. I mean, I do whack people with the shovel very hard. But Hank won't throw a knife because someone would get hurt. The fact that Dr. Heller invents non-lethal weapons. I really love that. I think it's more powerful.

CrankyCritic: Non-violent violence?
William H. Macy:  I think that Hollywood shot itself in the foot by throwing violence and violent acts around willy nilly. I think we should be able to use as much violence as we jolly well please but let's make it effective. You kill one person it means something. You kill forty persons it doesn't mean anything. So I'm done with the violence. They spend all this money and blow up a building in the most spectacular way and the audience yawns. We've seen it all. The audience is way ahead of Hollywood when it comes to violence.

CrankyCritic: There are tons of special effects. Are you green screened out?
William H. Macy: We got lucky. The sets were stupendous. I mean I've heard the guys from Star Wars talking about never wanting to act again. These poor schmucks spent 5 months in front of a blue wall, just pretending. That's hard stuff. That could drive you from the business. We had astounding sets. The props were just phenomenal. The scenic design of this film boggled my mind and I've got to say Kinka Usher takes all the credit. Vivian's costumes were just genius, everything was genius but it all comes back to one vision, and that was Kinka's. I saw him dealing with the designers. He didn't bully them. He let themselves express themselves fully. He described the world in such a way that they could go insane and come up with this great design. So unified. I'm so impressed with everything.

CrankyCritic: And his demo reel was, basically, a Got Milk! commercial.
William H. Macy: Well, a very wise guy once said "All you gotta do is that first scene on the ramparts with the soldiers. Just do the first moment of that scene. And if you can do that, all you have to do is the next moment. And when you finish that scene all you got to do is the next scene. And if you do enough of them, you've done Hamlet." So the unit of measure for us is not Hamlet, but the moment. Put your attention on the moment and have faith that the script will put them together.

CrankyCritic: What was your breaking moment. When you felt like someone had given you your shot?
William H. Macy: To a large extent, Dave Mamet was my teacher. He advised us to not sit around waiting for the phone to ring. So we created our own fun. I started a theater company in Chicago called the St. Nicholas Theater Company, fresh out of college. I was 20 years old and it was wildly successful and I was there all through the 70s. We owned the joint. I was producing and writing and acting and I owned a house and bought a car. All this off the stage. Then, when I moved to New York, it was kind of the same thing. I recreated my company as the Atlantic Theater Company, where I'm going to work this coming January doing American Buffalo. I'm going to play Teach. I was the original Bobby when Dave wrote the play. I was 22 years old and now I'm going to play Teach, with James Gandolfini. I'm a lucky palooka.

CrankyCritic: You get to reinvent your perspective of the play.
William H. Macy: Yeah. Yeah, I'm raring to go. I did a film called Homicide that Mamet directed. I was living in New York doing a lot of plays and Dave said "Mace, we're going to kick you upstairs. You're going to be The Guy." And that was it. I went from playing one of the cops to playing Joey's partner. The film did me some good but mostly it's what you were talking about. He's not only been my mentor but my greatest champion.

CrankyCritic: Was there a good sense of bringing what you want to the table, of improv in this movie?
William H. Macy: Yes. Which was, in all candor, difficult for me. I'm not an improviser and I don't particularly believe in improvising. I like to have the script perfect. If the script's not perfect then I say don't start shooting. Many, many films go into production, though, with a half-finished script and these pages were coming in daily. And it was a challenge. And the good news is that these guys, Hank and Ben and Janeane, that's their bread and butter. They're used to working on their feet that way. It was odd for me. I do four takes and I'd be finished. You'd seen everything I was going to do and they'd take four hours [laughs].

CrankyCritic: Can you compare Mamet and Mystery Men? It can't be as hard an acting job, can it?
William H. Macy: Uh, yeah. The truth is when you do something, whether it's a hundred million dollar studio film or an indie, you get as nervous as you can. There's a threshold beyond which you can't get any more nervous and you work as hard as you can. Perhaps some actors do some projects where they consider themselves slumming but I've never worked with one and you work as hard as you can. It really doesn't matter. With the indies, you can't tell! You can do a hundred million dollar movie and nobody sees it. You can do a one million dollar indie and it's huge. It's everywhere. It's Fargo. You've got to be careful. There's only one thing I've got to sell and that's my acting. I've got to be good every time.

CrankyCritic: If you could have a superpower, what would it be?
William H. Macy:  Umm, if I could foretell the Stock Market... [laughter]

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