Turturro talked with NEWSWEEK’s John Ness about watching those first prime-time games as a fan and getting inside Cosell’s ahead as an actor.
NEWSWEEK: Why did you take this part?
John Turturro: I liked the script a lot. “Monday Night Football” was part of your life, but [the film] explored it from behind the scenes, which you maybe didn’t know anything about.
What did you like so much about “Monday Night Football” when it first debuted in 1970?
It had all those cameras. That first season, you’d never seen anything like it. It was just like an event. Howard would pontificate and Dandy Don [Meredith, played by Brad Beyer in the film] would come back and cut him. I remember that first season really well.
How did you get into Cosell’s mind as an actor?
I don’t have a blueprint for these things. But you sort of piece it all together. He obviously came out of a certain time and a certain background, which basically pushed him into a more liberal sort of thinking.
You were born in Brooklyn and you live there now. When you said the line, “Maybe they can’t put a Jew from Brooklyn in prime time,” did it have resonance for you personally?
Yeah, but I grew up in Queens. Cosell obviously grew up with feelings about being on the outside. But he was a guy who had a big mind, and a fantastic facility verbally, who was basically able to push his way through. It was a very sort of whitebread world. I mean forget about television, even on radio he was a very ethnic guy, in a sense. On television, to see someone who looked like that and sounded like that and was not afraid to–as he says–“tell it like it is,” it was unsettling.
Did you identify with Cosell as a New Yorker as you watched him in your youth?
As a New Yorker? No. I think New Yorkers tend to be myopic about the rest of the country. He was just Howard Cosell.
Talk about his insecurity.
He was a guy who was always being threatened. A lot of people didn’t like him, so I think he kind of came up with the idea that he could be fired at any time. Once that forms in you–like a kid who is not loved or something–you always have it. He had a tremendous amount of adulation, but also hate mail, too. He was someone who could criticize, and then if people criticized him, he sometimes had a thin skin. I saw one guy yelling at him in a documentary, and he almost got physical with [Cosell], and you saw [Cosell] get a little shaky, physically. There’s a gentleness there, too, combined with this superior arrogant intellect.
How would you explain to younger audiences why he was controversial?
He criticized athletes, and he wasn’t an athlete. He interrogated people whom he interviewed. He spoke up not for what Muhammad Ali did [refusing the draft], but because [Ali] was denied his constitutional rights and had his livelihood taken away. And he wasn’t afraid, if the game was boring, to actually say that.
But he also added a lot of drama to the game, right?
Yes, he had an ability to elevate the physical contest. Sometimes you felt like you were one of the early Greeks watching the Olympics. But I do think he would have liked to have been in a bigger arena than sports. The whole sort of toy-department aspect of sports got to him eventually.
What do you think Cosell really wanted from his life and career?
The truth of the matter is, when I do these interviews, I really don’t have anything to say. If I could answer those questions, sometimes I wouldn’t even do a role.
