The Safe House - Expositions

At this point, Williams is ready for a break. After a 21-week, sold-out stand-up tour -- one night of which was filmed for his acclaimed HBO special last month -- you'd expect the non-stop comic, 51, to be worn out. You'd be wrong. Never lacking in spastic energy, Williams tells us he's looking forward to a family getaway. He relishes trips to remote San Francisco Bay Area hideaways with his producer-wife, Marsha Garces Williams, and his three children. So while the good buzz still reverberates from his creepy bad-guy performance in May's Insomnia, and his newest movie -- "One Hour Photo", in which he's an obsessive and strange photo clerk -- opens, we dig deeper into Williams' darker side:

Does the man behind Mork from Ork really have a dark side?
Everyone has it. Most don't explore it.

How did you discover yours?
I was an only child, so it wasn't difficult to find that kind of a loneliness or a focus on other things. I focused on military history. In ["One Hour Photo"], it's photographs, but it was an extreme situation, where [the character] fixated on a whole other life.

Are you still a loner?
Yeah. Activities that I enjoy, even the sports I do, like long-distance cycling -- [or] before that it was long-distance running -- you're pretty much on your own.

How do you relax?
Marsha's always been great about finding wonderful places to go for great family time.

What's your best quality as a parent?
Playfulness. When I kick into it hard, they really love that.

What about video games?
We have a policy -- no video or computer for the first week of the month -- so during that time, they are really into reading, especially Zelda [13]. Cody [10] is into hard-core poetry. And Zak [19], he's got a summer job, and he's in college. Cody wants to be a pitcher, so I've been catching for him in the back yard.

So, where do you get your family pictures developed?
We have a friend who takes our family photos and develops them himself, so we know they don't go to another place where someone could dupe them. Because if something funny comes along, they're going to dupe it. A lot of people we talked to said there's a wall where they save those special photographs of the big guy wearing the thong.

Back To One Hour Photo Articles