The Safe House - Expositions

NEW YORK - Robin Williams turns 50 in July, which may have more than a little to do with why the frenetic funnyman, the walking, talking improv machine, the give-this-guy-some-Valium star of The Birdcage and Aladdin, has decided to get all serious.

In the movies, that is.

"Once you hit 50, you're entering Walter Brennan territory," he says, referring to the Hollywood sidekick who hobbled along behind Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not and John Wayne in Rio Bravo, not to mention on TV's The Real McCoys.

"Oh, dammit, Duke!" says Williams, doing a dead-on Walter Brennan.

"Come on, Stuffy, let's get on the ponies. We're going in. Ashcroft said we could carry two pistols," says Williams, doing a dead-on John Wayne.

"I just want to do interesting characters," says Williams, doing Robin Williams again - sober, subdued, citing his role as a psycho killer in Insomnia, the Al Pacino thriller that opens Friday.

"I want to keep the possibilities open. As an actor, you don't want to get blocked off. People see that I can do something like this, and it's nice because all of a sudden it opens things up. They go, 'You're willing to play that part?!' "

And because he's not carrying the movie, he's not asking for the usual hefty paycheck. "They're not going to go bankrupt," Williams promises. "I'll be OK. Just feed me."

Following his role as a disgraced kids' show host in Death to Smoochy, which suffered its own swift death last month, Williams is looking at a summer bookended by Robin-does-the-Dark-Side performances. In Insomnia, which marks the studio debut of Memento director Christopher Nolan, Williams goes mug-to-mug with Pacino, who plays a veteran cop on the hunt for the murderer of a 17-year-old girl. But then something happens, and it's Williams' character who is stalking, and taunting, Pacino's. Williams' performance is a study of menacing cool.

And in One Hour Photo, set for release Aug. 21, he plays a milquetoast lab technician who latches onto a family whose pictures he's been developing.

"He basically lives vicariously through this family's photographs," says Williams, camped out in a Park Avenue hotel on a recent swing through New York. "He's another kind of very disturbed man, but he apears hyper-normal. He blends in... . And then you find out, Yeah, what's he doing? He's got bodies in the basement! "He develops and saves for himself pictures of this family, and it gets very bizarre. You wonder where he's going with it. There are a lot of strange turns. Once again, a strange portrait of a man with no life, finding another life."

Williams' own life seems pretty good right now. He speaks with a self-mocking grimace of his old drinking days (and goes into a Robin-Williams-is-drunk shtick, recalling the first time he met Pacino at a fund-raiser). He lives in San Francisco with his wife, Marsha, and their kids Cody, 10, and Zelda, 12. Zachary, 18, from his first marriage, has just finished his first year at college.

The actor is an avid cyclist who rides a $6,000 Serotta road bike, averaging 100 miles a week. He has a collection of about 50 bikes, and has befriended Lance Armstrong, the Texas cycling superstar. Come July, Williams plans to drop everything and go over to watch Armstrong compete in the Tour de France.

Williams also did something this year he hadn't done in about 15: travel the country on a solo stand-up tour, which included three sold-out shows at Upper Darby's Tower Theater in March. Before he crosses the Atlantic to follow Armstrong, Williams will hit the road again on dates expected to yield a comedy concert special for HBO.

"Just being out there in front of 3,000 people has been a kick," he says. "It's also been good to see what people are up for talking about, coming out of the numbness [of 9/11] and now kind of realizing, 'OK, who do we have in office?' Sure, he can't finish a sentence, but, hey, that's OK... .'

"You talk about problems with priests and people go, 'Whoa!' You start mentioning using possibly shock collars for problem priests. 'Come here, Jimmy'... BZZZZZT!', and people laugh.

"It's like that weird acknowledgment: 'Yes, it's true.'... What are they going to do now? Automated confession? 'Welcome to Father Auto. If this is a venial sin, press 1.'

"I think just being out has been so good for me, to kind of kick it back and do something that gave me such joy so long ago, 15 years ago, has been the best. The best for me. And to realize, OK, this is something I still do, and do well. It's like Masters golf. I can still swing."

For Williams, who trained at Juilliard (class of Kevin Kline and Meryl Streep), stand-up was cathartic after shooting Insomnia and One Hour Photo.

"I hadn't known Robin before," says Nolan, the Insomnia director, "but I'm told by him and the people around him that he was a little more subdued on the set... . He definitely had to go to a pretty dark place."

Yet Williams says it was a place he was mostly able to shake off.

"You have to. You don't bring that stuff anywhere else, like talking to a waitress." (He switches into a smoothly sinister "Hi, miss.") "You don't want to find yourself inhabiting that mind-set. It's very seductive."

Seductive?

"There's a book, When Good Men Do Bad Things," he explains. "We have limitations that we put upon ourselves - we have society, morals, ethics. Then there's that other, that bottom line where you're just on your own, you control yourself... . When you get to the range of extreme violence, of someone who crosses over the line and doesn't look back, that is seductive.

"And the only place you can explore this without doing time is acting. You think about what it's like [for a person] to do that, and then find some way to keep going. How do people function that way? How do they rationalize what they're doing?"

Williams says that he has some "small, interesting" projects ahead, after he takes the summer off. He'd like to get his mitts on another animated project, like Disney's Aladdin, where he can just let loose with a Tourettesian volley of free association in a sound booth.

"Definitely some animation. Oh, god, you can just go off," he says, wistfully.

And like any self-respecting comedian, Williams, of course, will continue to read the papers and watch the news, mining what he says is a particularly rich vein of comic possibilities in a world of Bushes and Ashcroft and Jean-Marie Le Pen, the French right-winger.

"It's just like a gift. Every day they say things, you just go, 'No. He didn't say that?!'

Look out, here comes his Le Pen accent: "We have our own Nazis. Screw the Germans! We can be Nazis if we want to! What was the Holocaust? It was a footnote! We were never there, with the Vichy France. Vichy water? One sip suddenly you're giving up a Jew? What is it?"

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