When you meet John Turturro in person for the first time, it’s hard to keep your mind from cycling through a dozen characters he’s played over the years. When I show up at the Midtown salon where he gets his hair cut, Turturro’s holding a white porcelain coffee cup in one hand and the matching saucer in the other. I think of Detective Larry Mazilli from Clockers, Joey Knish from Rounders, and the Shamata Kid from Miller’s Crossing. But no—I land on Philip Roth’s hornball anti-hero, Mickey Sabbath, the character Turturro will turn into a few hours from now on stage in Sabbath’s Theater, the lauded adaptation of Roth’s 1995 novel that Turturro co-created with writer Ariel Levy.
It isn’t for any reason besides the sneakers. Blue New Balance 990s. Turturro wears them when he plays Roth’s pervert. It’s a good choice of footwear for the part, since most over-60 guys you see puttering around the Upper West Side also tend to favor the brand, for reasons I’ve never quite been able to figure out. Turturro is also wearing them when we meet. Does he just like to walk in Mickey Sabbath’s shoes everywhere he goes? Is it some sort of acting thing I can’t understand?
“I usually wear work boots, but it’s a pain to take them off and these are comfortable, so I wear them to the theater,” he says.
It’s apt that he prefers work boots because I can’t think of many actors who have worked as much and at the level Turturro has for over the last four decades. His first film role was a small part in Raging Bull that doesn’t get a name in the credits, but from there, the Brooklyn-born, Queens-raised actor has done everything from similarly small parts in other classics (“Writer” in Hannah and Her Sisters, the M.C. at a seedy uptown magic club in Desperately Seeking Susan), to lead roles in Best Picture nominees (Quiz Show), to his various roles in some of the best work the Coen brothers and Spike Lee have made throughout their own decorated careers. His long list of television roles includes one that netted him an Emmy (for playing Tony Shalhoub’s brother very convincingly on Monk) and another Roth character (a sycophant rabbi in The Plot Against America.) More recently, he won even more praise as Irving Bailiff on Severance.
When or if we’ll see what happens next with Irving and the rest of the mind-wiped Lumon Industries employees is an open question; even before the strike shut down all production, there were rumors of behind-the-scenes issues between showrunners Dan Erickson and Mark Friedman, as well as worries about production costs, and the general anxiety that comes with following up a successful first season. But Turturro isn’t concerned. “I've done my second season,” he says as we walk out of the salon. “They have to go back and finish it. I can do whatever I want to, go back or not or whatever.”
His long list of beloved films and television appearances can obscure that Turturro started out as a stage actor, and tries to return to it every few years. He calls it “the biggest test” for an actor, and right now, the New Group Off-Broadway production of Roth’s novel is his central preoccupation. For a hundred minutes on Tuesday through Friday, and then two performances on both Saturday and Sunday, he’s Mickey Sabbath. It’s something he’s been trying to do for years. Adapting Roth’s work has been in his head since the two met in the ‘90s. As we get into a Lyft and head through Midtown to the theater, he recalls their first encounter: “I guess he saw me in Quiz Show and was like, This guy can do my stuff.” The two tried to get Turturro in a one-man show as Roth’s most famous character, Alexander Portnoy, but between not being able to find the right director and both men being busy, it never happened. “I worked with him [Roth] alone a lot. He was very intimidating,” Turturro says.
The other thing the 66-year-old actor thinks about is time. “I look at my clock and I go, How much do I have? I don’t want to work horizontally.” And that’s where the pressure to do something like playing possibly the horniest of all of Philip Roth’s many horny and sleazy characters comes from. I mention that there are two sorts of Roth fans: Those who consider Sabbath’s Theater one of his best books and the ones who consider it maybe a little too raunchy for their tastes. That’s part of why Turturro likes it. “A lot of people said we couldn’t do it,” he says. “There are things we didn’t put in there, things that I think are brilliant, but a lot of people are afraid of sex. [America] is a very stunted country. But violence? That’s no problem.”
Even in death, Roth remains one of America’s greatest and most misunderstood fiction writers. For every person with a few hundred followers on social media who fires off a “Philip Roth sucks” tweet without any explanation why they feel that way or any number of articles that look for the author’s autobiography in his famously shitty male characters, there are plenty that will tell you no matter what, he’s one of a handful of truly great American fiction writers from the last century. And no matter what you think of Roth and his various metafictional stand-ins– Nathan Zuckerman, David Kepesh, occasionally "Philip Roth"—the guy was a master of writing seriously flawed characters.
“I’m attracted to growth exploration,” Turturro says when I bring that up. Mickey Sabbath, like most of Roth’s characters, doesn't become a better person in the traditional happy-family-movie way, but he does find some bit of clarity and understanding into how and when he went wrong. There’s no epiphany, like George Bailey running down the streets of his hometown shouting “Merry Christmas” at the end of It's a Wonderful Life; Mickey is still an old, gross man. But he gets why he’s gross as the story winds down. When Turturro talks about “growth exploration,” he’s not talking about the scene in the play when we watch Mickey masturbate over the grave of his dead mistress; it’s that little glimmer of humanity that’s hidden underneath all the darkness he’s mining.
I bring up Jesus in the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski, another iconic Turturro sleazebag. It’s one of his most popular roles, but the character only gets a few minutes of screen time. The little bit we do get to know about “the Jesus,” besides his love of purple and that he’s a great bowler, is that he’s a “pederast" who did time for exposing himself to a kid. That’s it. Like just about any Roth creation and their various transgressions, Jesus is a great, funny character, but it’s tough to see people in this day and age publicly proclaiming their love for a fictional sex offender. But Turturro really wanted to do something more with Jesus.
“There are certain characters you play and think that you could play them in a different way,” he says as our Lyft sits at a red light. So in 2019, Turturro wrote, directed, and starred in The Jesus Rolls, a crime-caper continuation of the Jesus story that’s also a remake of Bertrand Blier’s 1974 sex comedy, Going Places. The film didn’t get the sort of rave reviews Noah Hawley’s television series continuation of the Coens’ Fargo universe receives, but I personally think it’s one of those movies that will get a second look 10 or 20 years from now– that like more than a few works of art that take time to find their place in the canon, The Jesus Rolls may have just been wrong for the specific moment in time it came out.
Turturro admits that most art that challenges people even the slightest bit is difficult to make these days. “I think the culture is like, Do you want to be part of the culture?” He thinks for a second as we get closer to the theater and his mind goes to where it will be for the next few hours, literally inside of a Philip Roth story. “I think when Roth wrote Sabbath’s Theater he didn’t care about being part of the culture, and that’s part of the fascination I have with it.”
Turturro has a few more directorial credits to his name. One is an anthology of three plays that was on Broadway in 2011, Relatively Speaking. The only reason I even bring it up is because we pass the theater it was staged at while crawling through traffic on 47th Street. I see on the Lyft driver’s phone we have four minutes left to our destination, hardly enough time to dive into a deep topic, so I mention I love the Elaine May play that was included in the trio he directed. We start talking about May, the famously reclusive comedian and director.
As we pull up to the theater he’s performing in just a little bit, he brings up her 1976 movie starring John Cassavetes and Peter Falk, Mikey and Nicky. I mention it’s one of my favorite movies ever, and that it ranks up there with Roth’s books as the art I’m glad I was exposed to when I was younger (but not too young) because I believe nothing saved me from becoming what today we call a “toxic man” more than watching movies or reading novels about extremely flawed guys like Mikey, Nicky, and even Mickey Sabbath.
Turturro lights up as we get out of the Lyft. “You’re right on the money,” he says. “It makes you think after you’ve seen it. You don’t come out with fake answers. You go, What would I do in this situation? What would I be like? And that's the whole idea, is that you're having an encounter with a book.” And when it’s performed live in all its perverted Rothian glory, Turturro says, “We're presenting an offering, and we're going to have an encounter with you.”