Robert Sean Leonard

Philadelphia Theatre Company’s premiere of White People, by J.T. Rogers, brings actor/heartthrob Robert Sean Leonard to town. Tall, lanky and khakied, with bespectacled brown eyes that hardly ever meet mine, he talks with thoughtful eloquence, charming modesty and youthful earnestness.

His film career was kickstarted with Dead Poets Society in 1989, and he won renown for his Claudio in Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing. His stage career has been illustrious: Nominated for a Tony in 1993 for his performance in Shaw’s Candida, he went on to play Valentine in Stoppard’s Arcadia on Broadway and most recently appeared in the celebrated Broadway revival of O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, which starred Kevin Spacey.

You studied history for five years at Fordham, and in White People you play a history professor. How connected do you feel to this part?

As far as his passion for history and his belief that education and connections between the past and the present have the power to heal and explain life, I understand. I think you can only go forward by going back. For me, the study of history is the essence of the future — when you study history and you see the connections — you make the connections to the present. So in that way, I connect to this guy quite a bit.

I gather from what the playwright has said that he’s trying to universalize the discovery of latent racist feelings. Is there resonance in that for you?

I know I have felt anger and rage in a city [New York] that is multicultural and therefore difficult at times. Race is a part of my life, the history of racism, the history of blacks, the history of Native Americans and others — growing up in New York it’s a part of your life every day. There are a lot of things in this play I identify with — and a lot of things I don’t.

You seem to prefer plays where language is central.

There are a lot of plays that have been huge successes that I never even saw; they seemed just too loud to me. I’ve read plays I thought were just too vulgar for me, I didn’t want to say those words every night. I’m much more used to doing Eugene O’Neill and George Bernard Shaw and Shakespeare and Stoppard and Tennessee Williams — this has been my career up until now. I’ve done some new plays but not many.

To me what’s remarkable about writing — it’s so simple it almost seems silly to talk about it — Garrison Keillor once wrote a piece about a boy slamming his door open on the first day it had snowed, seeing his breath puff out in front of him and running down the steps, making a snowball, and throwing it and hitting the stop sign right in the middle of the O and jumping as high as he could and running down the street. That’s what I wish for all of us, Keillor said, being excited that it’s morning, and that it snowed. Every great book I read is someone who’s older than me telling me what’s important, what not to miss, what to remember.

How did you get interested in acting?

I was 9 and my mother painted signs for a theater company, and I hung around with her, in Ridgeway, NJ, and I fell in love with the people and the paint and the lights. They started throwing me on stage whenever they needed a kid. The first role I had was The Artful Dodger in Oliver when I was 13. I thought the actors were idiots, doing vocal warm-ups, having affairs, but the crew was cool — they smoked and climbed ladders.

When I was onstage I was embarrassed so I tended to say my lines as quickly as I could so I could get offstage. A friend of my father’s saw me and I guess because everyone around me was trying so hard and I was trying so hard just to leave, that I guess he thought I was natural or I must have appeared to be gifted because I wasn’t "acting." So he put me in this acting class. I don’t know why I went — I was excited by the attention, sure, but I certainly didn’t have a love for it. But it was exciting going to New York once a week and then this small agent started sending me out for auditions, and at 14 I was working for Joe Papp at the Public Theater.

I heard you’re making a new movie directed by Ethan Hawke called The Last Word on Paradise. Can you tell me about that?

I just stopped shooting it. Ethan and I met on Dead Poets Society, we had a theater company in New York and one of the things we did was — it would be lovely to say discover, but what we did was stole this beautiful writer named Nicole Burdette and she wrote a screenplay about the Chelsea Hotel. It’s all our friends — me and Uma [Thurman], Frank Whaley, Steve Zahn, Marisa Tomei as well as Natasha Richardson, Lou Reed, Isaac Hayes and Kris Kristofferson. When your friend says, ‘I want to direct a movie,’ you just say, ‘When do you want me to be there?’ The movie goes from sunrise to sunset, although time is unclear in it — even what decade it is. Steve and I are the most modern characters; we play musicians, inspired by Bob Dylan and we come to the Chelsea where he had been.

When will it be released?

I don’t know — Bravo made it, and I guess if it’s any good, they’ll release it. If it’s not good, they’ll just show it on TV.

What’s your life like when you’re not working?

I have two dogs and a girlfriend named Gabby [a classicist specializing in Sanskrit and Greek] and yesterday I had the greatest day off — we went to Barnes & Noble and the Zen Palate and took a nap and watched Ally McBeal — jeez, as the Sondheim song says, "What more do I need?"

It sounds like you can still throw that snowball at the O.

White People opens Jan. 26 and runs through Feb. 20 at Plays and Players Theatre, 1714 Delancey St., 215-569-9700. Tickets are $24-$38.