Almost Famous

Bill Paxton keeps seeking a better vantage point. As he raced through the Museum of the City of New York—“C’mon!”—the actor grabbed his companion’s arm to point out curiosities, mimicked Alan Arkin’s put-upon growl and Richard Burton’s mellifluous boom, and discussed his ambivalence about psychotherapy. He’s prone to nightmares “where I’m clutching the spire of the Empire State Building and I don’t have the strength to hold on, and then I’m falling.” But: “If you cure the patient, do you kill the passion?” At the end of one therapy session in Beverly Hills, he said, he’d wept and said, “I just want to be Bob Cratchit!”

By birth Texan and by choice Californian, Paxton is by nature Dickensian. He came to New York in 1976 to study acting at N.Y.U. and “bombed around on a motorcycle meeting gals”; sneaked up to shoot photos from the roof of the Flatiron Building—“one of my city forts, where I could go and calm down”; and “lived with two gals in a Tribeca loft, where I had to keep an acetylene torch and go up and down the pipes with it to keep the toilet from freezing. It was like living in an Edward Hopper painting.”

At a graffiti exhibit, “City as Canvas,” Paxton grasped an aerosol can that was part of a wall display and gave it a gentle tug. “I’d love to have a wall like that in my house,” he said. He swept his camera phone around at the work of Sharp and DAZE, who’d tagged the subway cars of his youth, saying, “I’ll just hose the place down with my iPhone and then in a calmer moment I can enjoy the whole exhibit.” He collects everything from Henry Taylor paintings to wooden foundry molds to satyr busts from the old Vanderbilt Hotel. He asks for ten per cent off and buys on layaway.

“O.K., you. Break’s over. Time to resume summer vacation.”

At fifty-nine, he said, “I love actors more than being an actor, because you have to get it up every time.” Still, he works as much as anyone. In “Edge of Tomorrow,” which opened a few weeks ago, he plays Tom Cruise’s zealous Master Sergeant. “Remember, there is no courage without fear,” he said, dipping into character, his blue eyes fierce. Then he cracked up. Paxton is often cast in military roles or as part of a doughty crew—“Aliens,” “Apollo 13”—because of his air of decency and self-restraint. Yet he said, “The imp is inside me at all times. I’d like to scream obscenities in this room, just to see the people react.” He didn’t, but he was soon loudly quoting an artist friend’s description of a debauched Hollywood party in the thirties: “ ‘I’m talking about extreme hair-letting-down, not a few diluted drops of jism.’ ” He added, “I had something else I wanted to tell you: we should all mock death as much as we can, because in the end death makes a mockery of all of us.”

At the “Gilded New York” exhibit, Paxton tapped a vitrine of elegant ladies’ fans made from pheasant and eagle feathers: “Sure, I’d buy one of these and put it in a Lucite box. Nature is the greatest artist of all!” He added, “Two weeks ago, in Huntsville, Texas, I was holding a box with a lock of Sam Houston’s hair. I was touching the source!” He’s going to play the legendary Texan in a miniseries on the History Channel. “And I had the crutch Sam used after the Battle of San Jacinto under my arm”—he demonstrated a crutchy hobble. “I could tell he was six-two because it was a little tall for me, so I’m going to wear lifts to get up there. To command presence, one must have scale!”

Over coffee, Paxton reflected on a career that has left him just short of security-guard famous. “I’m an R.B.I. guy,” he said, a reliable hitter who drives in runs. “I guess I never had the one movie that put it all together for me, but I always swing for the fences.” In “Million Dollar Arm,” a baseball film that débuted in May, Paxton played the U.S.C. coach Tom House as a relaxed sage who helps remind Jon Hamm’s character what the game is all about. “I spent a day with Tom at S.C., watching him with his young pitchers, and I drew from his integrity,” he said. “He’s also a life coach, and a real Jedi Master. I said, ‘I wish I had more time to spend with you,’ and he said, ‘Bill, you just be you, and you’ll be a perfect me.’ I found that so comforting.” He grinned, momentarily at peace. “And then I walked away and thought, What does that mean?” ♦