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Kevin Kline has carved out a career playing lovable weirdos and loony eccentrics, from the psychologically scarred (Nathan in "Sophie's Choice"), to the criminally insane (Otto West in "A Fish Called Wanda"), to the philandering and titanically self-absorbed (Joey Boca in "I Love You to Death") to the laconically offbeat (Howard Brackett in "In and Out"). Still, perhaps none of Kline's roles has been as wildly, aggressively idiosyncratic as Henry Harrison, the character that the Oscar-winning actor brings to sparkling life in his new film, "The Extra Man," which opens in New York City July 30 prior to a nationwide launch.

Based on the comic novel by Brooklyn writer Jonathan Ames, "The Extra Man" renders Henry as one of those quintessentially New York characters that Manhattanites seem so familiar with — charming and likable despite an air of faux sophistication and a propensity for grand pronouncements. While he has no obvious employment or easily discernible source of income (and tools around town in a dilapidated Buick), Henry manages to live the life of a man of far greater means — sneaking into the opera, wrangling invites to posh parties, and wintering in South Florida. A failed playwright, the stentorian-voiced Henry serves as "an extra man" (or "an essential man" as he prefers to call himself), escorting wealthy dowagers to society events and parties and keeping them company.

"In a way, Henry is living an illusory sort of life, playing a role of a man who's part of the haute noblesse of New York City. But he's living in destitute-like, squalid conditions. There's an element of performance to his life," Kline said during a recent press event in Manhattan while promoting "The Extra Man," which is directed by Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman ("American Splendor").

"Both of them have these artistic temperaments," said Kline. "And Louis' experimentations are probably driven by a need to understand himself deeply. He's searching for his identity more assiduously than a mere mortal might search. So he's out there. I think it's because he wants to be an artist or has an artistic temperament, like Henry."

While Louis becomes an accidental protégé to Henry, Kline said that he has never experienced a mentor-protégé relationship with a young actor before. However, he did encounter what he calls "mentor-ish" figures early on in his own career. "I have had strong men under whose wings I was taken," he admitted. While most of these men were stylistically worlds apart from Henry, what they did share was a larger-than-life stature and a dynamic ability to attract others to them and mold people to their way of thinking.

The first was John Houseman, his (and Patti LuPone's) former instructor at the Juilliard School's Drama Division in the early 1970s, who formed Kline and his first graduating class at Juilliard into a seminal touring repertory company. "He was a sort of mentor in that his philosophy governed the whole way of the Juilliard School," said Kline.

	Paul Dano and Kevin Kline in "The Extra Man"
	photo courtesy Magnolia Pictures

Another mentor was Joseph Papp, the dynamic, mercurial, and fiercely combative founder of the Public Theater, a company that he transformed into one of the country's most important centers for the development of new plays — and renowned for its free outdoor stagings of Shakespeare classics in Central Park. "I worked for years for Joseph Papp," said Kline. "While obviously they're very different men, they share this enormous life force. As quirky, as outrageous, as contradictory as Henry is, his spirit is what I find so attractive — this indomitable will to survive, to surmount whatever iniquities or depredations of time and the culture and his financial situation have wrought. And yet he rises above it in a quixotic sort of way and has great style and panache and joie de vivre."

One of the qualities that Kline loved most about the character was what the actor calls "his opacity" — the sense of mystery and unknowability that surrounds him. "He's so of another period, one that's antithetical to the confessional, transparency-riddled culture that we now live in," said Kline. "There was a piece in the New York Times recently about Greta Garbo and about the bygone days where [famous] people had a mystique. Those are the days that Henry misses, I think. And I do, too."

Still, Kline is unsure whether the character is grotesquely self-delusional, or if in fact he's truly self-aware. "I mean, you could say he's a big phony, but I don't think he is. There's something in his essential spirit that is very true to himself. There's certainly a degree or inventiveness and invention and self-delusion, but it's to survive...He doesn't see windmills; he sees giants that have to be conquered. He has this poetic imaginative streak...I don't know if he's redefined himself, or if he's just stayed true to who he is, in spite of the fact that his circumstances have changed. But is it a willful self-delusion? I think he's also very realistic. He knows he's living in these conditions, and he knows that there's something parasitic about his existence, in a way. But he has refined it into an art. He's made himself not supplementary, not extraneous or extra, but in fact crucial, essential to any social gathering of any intellectual weight. He's like great characters in literature who are improvising, who are making what they can out of what comes their way, but doing it with panache and style and extravagance — whether it's living utterly above your means or what have you."

For a 62-year-old guy who's played his fair share of narcissistic jerks and loud-mouthed lunatics, the St. Louis-born Kline is surprisingly soft-spoken and initially reticent in person — slow to come out of his shell. But before long, this born performer, who's dressed casually in a bright green polo shirt and dark pants with cropped salt-and-pepper hair, displays flashes of his robust intellect and sharp wit — offering up funny anecdotes, silly vocal imitations, and pithy one-liners.

During the casting process, the filmmakers immediately zeroed in on Kline to play Henry. Because of the character's outsized personality, they wanted someone with an equally commanding presence on screen. Still, they were concerned because they'd heard that Kline had earned a reputation for turning down so many roles, his nickname in Hollywood has become "Kevin De-Kline."

The actor, however, scoffs at such a characterization, while acknowledging that he remains discerning about what parts and films he chooses to work on. "Somehow I got that reputation. And my middle initial is D!" he said, with a good-natured laugh. "But you can't do every script that's offered. And I don't know if I'm more or less choosy. I just do what I like and what I think I'll find stimulating and/or fun or be challenged by it in a way that if I fail, I'll fail beautifully. I really don't know what my criteria are."

So have the quality of scripts that Kline has been offered taken a tumble in recent years?

"They go up and down, and you never know what's going to come across your desk. I mean, with some scripts, you'll read two pages, and it's just unspeakable," he said, tossing his hand over his shoulder in mock rejection. Despite the filmmakers fear that Kline would turn them down, he launched himself into the role with gusto. "I was just dying to do it," he said. "I was just so tickled by the script."

	Kline in "The Extra Man"
	photo courtesy Magnolia Pictures

He even showed up for a lunch with Berman and Pulcini in the kind of dated, fraying suit that Henry might wear. During the film shoot, he spoke off-camera with Henry's stentorian voice, seemed to be just as loose with facts as Henry himself, and made himself an "expert" in all the things that Henry was. Cast and crew members even started picking up the mannerisms and vocal intonations of the character on set. When one journalist points out that this fact is written in the press notes for the film, Kline cautioned, "Don't believe what you read in press notes — any more than what you read on IMDB," earning laughter from the assembled throng.

So was it also true that Kline even took on Henry's habit for clandestine public urination during the shoot, as sort of practice for playing the character? Kline flashed a look of mock disgust, then smiled, explaining, "When you're doing a low-budget film, you need to go back to base camp, as we call it, which is ten blocks the other way. Instead of waiting for my driver to take me back in a heated limousine to the toilet, it's like, 'No, we have to get the shot, and we have to get it in the next 20 minutes.' So, well, I have to pee, so I'm just going to walk down the street here, and I'm wearing my raincoat, and I'd like to see if [Henry's trick] actually works. And it does! … But I didn't constantly urinate in public!"

Both Berman and Dano insist that Kline was the consummate professional. While Dano had worked with Kline before on the 2002 film "The Emperor's Club," in which he played one of Kline's pupils, he said he didn't really get to know the actor until prepping for "The Extra Man." "We hung out a bunch before doing the film, and I think it was good that we got to know each other," Dano says. "He's such a spontaneous and alive actor. And he's not afraid to try things and put himself out there. I had so much fun working with him. He's hilarious."

Did the duo end up fostering the same kind of mentor-protege relationship that Henry and Louis develop in the film? "I'm still young, but I feel like more of an adult. So, you know, Kevin is now like a friend to me, when before [on "The Emperor's Club"] he would have felt more like a parent, or something like that. So it's totally different," he said. "You do feel a little safer. It's nice to have a connection with the other person. It's just a jumping off point. But this film was totally different, totally new. We didn't keep in touch before. But now we're buddies."

While the versatile Kline has shockingly only scored one Oscar over the course of his stellar career (for "A Fish Called Wanda" in 1989), he's been a magnetic presence on the big screen throughout the past three decades — from his breakthrough years as a screen actor in the 1980s ("Sophie's Choice," "The Big Chill"), through his '90s high points ("Dave," "The Ice Storm" and "In & Out"), and his recent tour-de-force performances in the aughts (as composer Cole Porter in "De-Lovely" and a dying, regretful father in "Life as a House"). He has two new films in the hopper that are due out in the next year, Robert Redford's "The Conspirator," in which he plays Lincoln's Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, and a new untitled Ivan Reitman film co-starring Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher.

Kline discusses his role in "The Extra Man" in this interview:

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