from the New York Times:
July 12, 2008
Holy Cameo, Batman! It’s a Senator!By PAM BELLUCK
The senior senator from Vermont is in a large room packed with people when an unruly citizen bursts in making loud, unreasonable demands.
Anyone can see that a gavel to order is not going to work with this joker. He’s harassing people, and he’s got a gun.
The senator steps forward. “We’re not intimidated by you thugs,” he says. The man, saying, “You remind me of my father — I hated my father,” grabs the senator’s head, and thrusts a knife to his face. The senator freezes, eyes wide.
Not your typical Capitol Hill brouhaha. No, this scene is pure Hollywood, straight out of the new Batman movie, “The Dark Knight.” But that really is the senior senator from Vermont: Patrick J. Leahy — Democrat, Judiciary Committee chairman and lifelong Batman fan — has a cameo in the film and gets to be held at knifepoint by Heath Ledger’s Joker.
Bam! Kapow! Biff!
“No matter what they say, I don’t wear tights or a cape or a mask,” Mr. Leahy said in a phone interview. “Not that kind of movie. Not that kind of guy. My wife would have killed me.”
The 68-year-old six-term senator says he has been big on Batman since he was 4, when, one Sunday after Mass, his parents stopped at a little drugstore in Montpelier, Vt., his hometown, and bought him a comic book for 10 cents.
“I can vaguely picture it,” Mr. Leahy reminisced. “One of the scenes had Bruce Wayne down in the Bat Cave to work on the Batmobile.”
Batman became his favorite superhero because “he has no superpowers,” Mr. Leahy said. “He had to use his own brains and his own knowledge. He could have had an entirely different life. As a billionaire, he could have done anything.”
Mr. Leahy had a nonspeaking cameo in the 1997 film “Batman and Robin,” did a voice-over for the part of a governor in a Batman cartoon, and wrote the prefaces for a “Batman” anthology and a Batman comic book about the danger of land mines. Once he was spotted doing wheelies on his grandson’s toy Batmobile down the long marble hall outside his Senate office.
He donates all Batman earnings to the children’s wing of the Kellogg-Hubbard Library in Montpelier. Mr. Leahy, who is legally blind in one eye, said that his daily trips to the library, then in a basement, made him a precocious reader as a child. On Saturday, the movie will have its premiere at the library, which will receive the proceeds from a reception and 350 tickets being sold to the screening, at $50 apiece.
The filming of Mr. Leahy’s scene in a Chicago restaurant last summer took “all night long,” he said. Mr. Ledger would “punch or throw me halfway across the room,” and Mr. Leahy was propped up by another actor “with an arm like an oak tree” who was “brandishing a gun in my face.”
It took the senator a couple dozen tries before he got his line right.
“We tried it two different ways — one was authoritative, the other one was with a lot of fear in my voice,” Mr. Leahy said. Ultimately, he was directed to act like the prosecutor he once was, with a take-charge attitude.
So how did Mr. Leahy manage to find his character’s motivation? Was he thinking of Vice President Dick Cheney, who in 2004 used profanity to curse Mr. Leahy on the Senate floor?
“No, I wasn’t visualizing Dick Cheney,” Mr. Leahy said. “They can’t use that dialogue in a PG-13 movie.”
Wham!
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/12/washington/12leahy.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=us&pagewanted=print
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