FilmDrunk alter-ego Nick Nolte recently sat down for an interview with Movieline, and to my delight, it was awesomely Nick Nolte-ish.Whether it’s narrowly escaping a house fire, rummaging through trash cans looking for his satchel filled with beer and Xanex, or using “read a line” as a euphemism for snorting coke off his scripts, at 70 years old, Nick Nolte is still an unkillable machine of pure mischief, a human one-eared raccoon. He stars in this weekend’s Warrior, and from the sound of it, he spent the whole shoot raisin’ hell and not givin’ a f*ck like it was his job, because it basically is.
ML: Did you have a local bar where you did your drinking?
NOLTE: No, I had this assistant and she had a boyfriend who was a little… [Pauses] Mixed-up. The assistant was a little mixed-up too. We had been rehearsing a week and I said to her, “Should we do the right thing and go home? Or do we do the wrong thing and go to a club and meet up with your boyfriend? I’ll leave it up to you.”ML: Oh no!NOLTE: That was a terrible thing to do. Of course she said, “Let’s meet with Bobby.” We meet with Bobby even though I have to rehearse in the morning at 10 o’clock. Come 5 o’clock, we’re still at this apartment. There was booze and you know, other stuff. We rolled into rehearsal the next morning and I went straight to Gavin’s [O’Connor, the director] assistant and said, “Man, you wouldn’t believe the night I had. There was more cocaine there, more alcohol, this guy with tattoos all over him and rings, this girl who wanted to leave with me but she had been with him for 10 years and he was threatening to kill me. We barely got out of there alive.”
By “we” barely got out of there alive, I think he means everyone else, because everyone knows Nick Nolte cannot be killed by traditional methods. Nick Nolte stared death square in the face and spit tobacco juice on his robe.
In any case, I think “Booze and Other Stuff” would be a great title for Nick Nolte’s autobiography.