It's 9:00 A.M. on a Thursday and Sam Robards is about as Hollywood as the Midtown Manhattan deli where the walls are sponge-painted purple and yellow and a turquoise ceramic bird is staring at him through a recessed-glass cabinet. The icy-eyed actor is relaxed in a black T-shirt and khaki cargo pants, leaning back just enough to seem comfortable, but not careless. A native New Yorker, he has just finished perusing the day's Post, which he will later tuck haphazardly into his back pocket.
The 45-year-old Tony nominee's latest theater project, The Overwhelming, makes for some heavy shoptalk, given that it's set in Rwanda as chaos is looming. In the geopolitical nail-biter written by J.T. Rogers, Robards's character, a naive American academic, moves to Kigali, on the eve of the 1994 genocide. With his wife—played by the refined Linda Powell, daughter of Colin and Alma—and their teenage son, he then confronts what Robards describes as the Hutu-Tutsi "machete-chopping killing parties."
Beyond the work, Robards is devil-may-care right down to his faded striped sneakers. The son of Lauren Bacall and the late Jason Robards, he was born into the fame machine, but has successfully avoided the grind of its gears. "I'm just doing what everyone else does. Paying the bills and calling the DMV. The usual." To hear him tell it, he sort of fell into acting after being kicked out of Sarah Lawrence at age 18. A probe as to why he got the boot cues perfect bad-boy back talk: "That's something you would have to ask them." So Robards has spent the past 26 years bouncing between film, television, and theater gigs, and at this point, he'd rather perform than promote. "The process of it is great," he confides. "The schmoozing and that stuff is annoying."
Once an enfant terrible and now a consummate professional, Robards has nothing if not range. On his one day off from The Overwhelming, he's "kickin' it old school," as he puts it, among entitled teens on the set of the CW series Gossip Girl—a cheeky high school drama from Josh Schwartz, the creator of The O.C., that sends up the pleated-skirt and striped-tie culture that produced Robards. And his forthcoming film projects have him playing everything from a troubled Russian astrophysicist in Perestroika to a French-Canadian corporate cheerleader in the Campbell Scott mockumentary Company Retreat. He's also taken a turn at producing a short film written and directed by Jason Antoon called Jesus Cooks Me Breakfast. Possible sequels include God Gives Me an Apple and Satan Buys Me a Drink. Seriously.
Before heading off to rehearsal, Robards stops to buy himself a cup of coffee and a banana. He pulls the last three dollars out of his wallet, displays them one by one, and says with dramatic self-deprecation: "There. That's the life of an actor. And there's no reserve!" But he's flashing that leading-man smile now, and it's clear: Robards has more than the Post in that back pocket, and he knows it.
