William H Macy was in a bar recently, when something happened that he isn't accustomed to: the 61-year-old actor, writer and "normal-looking Joe", found himself in the beam of unsolicited female attention. He puts it down to his latest role, as "a character who's surprisingly appealing to the ladies" – surprising because that character is Frank Gallagher, the drunken shambles at the heart of Paul Abbott's TV show Shameless, now remade for the US starring Macy. "I had to go home and tell my wife," he says. "Guess what? I got hit on in a bar! And she was really pretty!"
Macy has long been a pin-up to a different demographic: men of a certain age who identified with his role as Jerry Lundegaard in Fargo. The Coen brothers' film won him an Oscar nomination and a fan base among those mainly midwestern men who felt similarly put-upon; at the mercy of forces outside their control. There is something in his blue indignant eyes, at once credulous and vaguely accusing, that both expresses Macy's outlook – deadpan, sardonic, winningly self-critical – and explains his appeal as an actor. Today, in a cafe in New York, his hair is long and straw-coloured, for the role of Frank. He looks dolefully about and says, "to see your own visage up there, it's terrifying. I have to see a film twice, the first time just to get over the shock: the fact that my face seems to be dripping off my skull into my chest."
Macy is married to Desperate Housewives actor Felicity Huffman and they have two children, Sofia, 10, and Georgia, nine. As Frank, he is a ramshackle father of six, the Manchester of the original replaced with working-class Chicago. It's hard to imagine the translation working – Abbott's script is so specific – but it does, just, with Joan Cusack as the germo-phobe Sheila, and Emmy Rossum as Fiona. Nothing in America quite equals the seediness of the Chatsworth estate and, to British eyes at least, the US version looks too fancy, the house too big. Paul Abbott thought so, too. "He saw the flat in Chicago and said, 'It's palatial!'" says Macy, whose Frank, while still fabulously addled, is softer than David Threlfall's original. "I guess by British standards it's huge." Of the Channel 4 version, he says, "It's so brilliant – although I can't understand a word anyone is saying – I thought I better stop watching. I want to put my own stamp on it."
It has taken Macy a long time to find a role he can enthuse about like this. When he gets stuck as an actor, he has traditionally found something else to do: for years he worked as a writer, turning out Movie Of The Week scripts, most of which won him Emmy nominations. Then he directed in the theatre.
After Shameless, he's out of immediate ideas, other than to do what he calls "important work". He is heartily sick, he says, of making noble little movies everyone praises and nobody goes to see. What does he mean by important?
"To be candid?" he says. "A hit." And bursts out laughing.
In America, the jury is still out on Shameless, although it has provoked less controversy than might have been expected, given its underage gay sex, cheerful law-breaking and comedic take on something you are supposed, in the US, to be thoroughly ashamed of – being poor. The only time the network raised objections during filming was to a scene in which Frank, in a drunken rage, headbutts his son Ian and shows no remorse. Macy didn't want to tone it down – "I wanted Frank to have a little danger about him" – but agreed to a shoot a new scene in which he issues a baffled apology. Frank was never supposed to be a monster.
Nor Lundegaard, the hopelessly drowning protagonist of Fargo, who arranges to have his wife kidnapped so he can pick up the ransom from his wealthy father-in-law. This was Macy at his finest and he campaigned hard for the role, flying from his audition in LA to turn up, unannounced, at the New York auditions. The Coens wrote the part for "a portly balding man", but Macy says he knew it was his; that combination of cynicism and innocence, the man overwhelmed by schemes he has put into motion and promptly lost purchase on. Did the Coens laugh when he walked into the New York audition room?
"They're geeks, is the best way to describe them. They're movie geeks. They're personable enough, they're just really odd guys. Socially, rather inept. So, they crack up and one always wonders, what are you laughing at? I said, 'I'll shoot your dog if you don't give me this role.' I think Ethan laughed."
Macy's own background is uptight and Lutheran; he is utterly repressed, he says, in contrast to his wife, who comes from a large, loud family and makes him talk about his feelings. He based some of Frank's mannerisms on his late mother's comportment when she had been drinking. Her subconscious, he says, would slip out and she'd have no idea, later, that she'd shown her true feelings. For example: he once took a girlfriend back to her house. When he went to the bathroom, leaving the two women alone, his mother was drunk – "in her cups, smiling at this girl and she just went suddenly…" he makes the motion of a cat scratching, claws out, fangs exposed.
"And when I got back, the girl was frightened – she said, your mom just mimed clawing my face. And my mom had no memory of this. As shocking as it was, it was really funny." He smiles. "Rest in peace, Mother."
She wasn't chaotic. She was "a quiet, sad drunk," and she was very good to her son. In his 20s, he was a struggling actor in Chicago, working in a small theatre company alongside the then unknown David Mamet. They were on the brink of dissolution: broke, at each other's throats and ready to give up. When his mother unexpectedly inherited $20,000 from her own mother, she gave the entire amount to the theatre company. "And as angry as we were with each other, 20 grand paid for a play, and that play turned out to be American Buffalo." It was Mamet's first big hit, nominated for two Tonys and won the 1977 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play. "It was the jumping-off place for my career," Macy says.
He calls Mamet, with whom he has had a career-long association, "a good pal, fiercely loyal, I owe him just about everything". After Buffalo, he moved to New York and carried on working, mainly in the theatre. It ruined him a little, he says; he has lost jobs because he is too precise in his speech. "People have said, in one form or another, your diction is too good. At first you think, are you insane? And then I realised, I spent so much time in the theatre, and Mamet was such a stickler about that and I am, too – that I had been spoilt. It's a cute acting trick, this whispering, mumbling thing. I realised a long time ago, when people are mumbling or whispering they're either talking about sex, or money, or lying. So if you're not doing that, you'd better speak up."
Those first theatrical roles of his were mainly "the callow youth who ended up weeping on the stage". Then he did a lot of smarmy, white-collar businessmen types. His expectations started to change, then, from wanting to make a living, to wanting "to be a player; I wanted to have some power. Until finally now, it's about the work. I'd like to do something significant."
Macy had a basic confidence that came from knowing he was better than most at what he did. But he was also subject to powerful downs. "I've hit the skids about three times in my career, where the work stops and I couldn't get arrested. I got very depressed." Since Fargo, he hasn't had to audition any more – a life change "right up there with Felicity marrying me and having children" – although, when he is considered for a role, he assumes he still comes up against the same group of actors: Paul Giamatti; Philip Seymour Hoffman. "A lot of us were in Boogie Nights. I feel like we're all interchangeable, although I'm older than most of them. I'm starting to look my age, which I think is going to help me."
The fuss surrounding Fargo was good practice for what happened in Macy's household when Huffman hit the big time with Desperate Housewives. When Macy talks about his wife, it's with a baseline sense of wonder that he pulled off attracting her in the first place. "I don't understand it completely," he says, "but she adores me. She thinks I'm funny." She also corrects the worst of his habits, he says, primarily the habit of not talking about how he feels.
"My attitude towards communication has always been: it's a slippery slope, because you start communicating, the next thing you know you're going to be talking to each other, the next thing you know you're going to be feeling things, and then you'll be living your life and I want no part of that." He issues a bone dry look. "So I tried to avoid that stuff, but she forces it upon me."
Most of all, he says, his wife wants the best for him. Macy was married before, "to someone who didn't want what's best for me, as a matter of fact, she hated my guts". He gives the example of Huffman baking him a pie – "she baked me a pie!" – when he finished filming the first season of Shameless. "She's my best friend; she's hysterically funny. I adore talking to her; she's a great confidante. She's really good at sorting things out. She's invaluable that way, when I don't know what to do."
What did she say to him when he told her about the woman hitting on him in a bar?
"She said: I'm glad you're telling me; I'm confused you're telling me. I hate that you're telling me. I'm proud of you." He smiles. "She had a lot of emotions. I just had to tell her."
The interesting thing for Macy, given how competitive he is, was his response to his wife's year of extraordinary success – at the same time her TV series took off, she was Oscar nominated for her lead in the film Transamerica. Macy searched himself for signs of resentment. "And I was nothing but thrilled for her. It didn't bother me at all. That was the test."
Macy's major vice in life used to be smoking. "I've loved smoking pot, my whole life. It doesn't work for me any more, which is sad." Since having kids, he has also cut back on drinking. "I'm just acutely aware that I'm in my third act, as my wife so disarmingly put it. And I don't know how many brain cells I have left."
He has two big indulgences left: woodwork and motorbikes. Although he's a "terrible carpenter", he has two large woodworking shops and loves being in them. Last year, he took a long solo bike trip and is planning another. "I could become a hermit if I'm not careful; I like that. When people on Facebook say stay in touch – I don't want to stay in touch. I don't want anyone to know where I am."
He sometimes wonders at the strangeness of his professional life; isn't it odd, he says, that as an actor, he has spent a large proportion of his time "under imaginary circumstances. Probably months and months, that I've been in this alternate universe." He and his wife don't let their children watch TV – a luxury, he says ruefully, of the wealthy who can afford more expensive forms of babysitting. They read. They make up games. They have powerful imaginations, he says. Every night the family eats dinner together.
Increasingly Macy chafes against the limitations of his profession. "I think it's possible to be too quick-witted, too smart to be an actor. You have to turn off a lot of your brain, in a way. When you see a fellow actor just missing it, it's hard to keep your mouth shut, but you have to. Or see a director so stupid he couldn't direct vomit into a paper bag. And he's in charge, and it's really hard to keep your mouth shut."
He would like to write more, and to direct, although he recently performed under circumstances that reminded him how great being out front can sometimes be. His wife is a spokeswoman for NARAL, the reproductive rights organisation, and they had a big lunch in Washington DC to celebrate the anniversary of Roe vs Wade. "Hoity-toity affair," Macy says. Huffman was master of ceremonies and she asked her husband to write a song for it. (He started writing songs years ago when he was asked to give a series of toasts at friends' weddings: "I started writing these little songs on a ukulele; you can say anything. Talk about who they slept with, and diseases they had had. Everything. Howling with laughter.")
This was a trickier gig. Macy's first attempt, he says, "was a talking vagina, and my wife said, no. But then I wrote this little song... I'm really proud of it. I rhymed 'utopian rooms with fallopian tubes'. Doesn't get better than that." When the lunch for 800 came around, he and Huffman had rehearsed for a grand total of an hour. In the hotel room before the performance, he asked his wife if she was nervous. "And she said, 'Er, little bit, little bit. Why?' And I said, 'Because I'm not, either.'" He permits himself a sentimental look. "And I said, 'We've become those warhorses. We've been doing this cumulatively for about 60 years. We are those old warhorses who can just show up and do it and take all the nerves and turn it into something good.' And I just loved her, at that moment. It was like, OK, this is where we belong, this is what we do. Sit back and relax. We got it."
Shameless US starts on More4 on Thursday 23 June at 10pm.
Styling by Micah Johnson. Grooming by Joanna Pensinger at Exclusive Artists. Suit by Hugo. Shirt by +J Uniqlo
