Anthony LaPaglia on working with 'gruff' but 'nice' playwright Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman star Anthony LaPaglia on working with Arthur Miller Arthur Miller was "tall", "gruff", and didn't say much unless required, according to a star Adelaide-born actor who is about to play one of the playwright's most celebrated characters on a hometown stage. Anthony LaPaglia is portraying Willy Logan in the American's Pulitzer Award-winning play, Death of a Salesman, for an Australian production that has been revived twice since it premiered in 2023. LaPaglia recounts how he met the famed American playwright while performing a later work of his, A View From The Bridge, on Broadway during 1997. "He was a very big, tall, very nice guy. Gruff, but only spoke when he had to,"he said. "Basically, he just laid it out one day. "He said: 'Listen, I write my stuff very lean. There's no fat on it. The faster you get through it, and don't think about what you're saying, the more it will come to life.'" LaPaglia had secured the part of Eddie Carbone in A View From The Bridge despite Miller initially believing he was too young for the role because he wanted an actor who was about 50 years old. LaPaglia had pushed his agent to convince Miller to let him do a reading anyway, believing the character could be played younger and be more of a "sexual threat than an older guy". "After the reading, he [Miller] was like, 'Absolutely, go do it', and he came to many rehearsals," LaPaglia said. "It was a really amazing experience to have the guy who wrote the play, and won a Pulitzer Prize [for Death of a Salesman] standing there, so that you could ask, 'Well, Arthur, when you wrote this, what did you mean?' "It was the best experience." LaPaglia listened to Miller's advice about performing his lines and found that, when he started "trusting the process", it was true. "The more you kind of divorce what you're thinking about them and just invest in them, and do them as committed and as quickly as possible, it brings a whole new life to it." Miller died aged 89 in 2005. Directed by Neil Armfield, the Australian production of Death of a Salesman premiered at Her Majesty's Theatre in Melbourne during 2023. It was revived at Theatre Royal Sydney in 2024 and, after returning to Melbourne this year before a season in Brisbane, is finishing with an Adelaide season. Opening in Adelaide's Festival Theatre on Saturday, it will be LaPaglia's stage debut in Adelaide after leaving town aged 19. Since then he has achieved a successful acting career that first took off in the United States, winning the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for his portrayal of Eddie Carbone in 1997. Among a list of other accolades, he has also won three AACTA awards for his work in the films Lantana (2001), Balibo (2009), and Nitram (2021), and a Golden Globe for Without a Trace. Learning more each season Co-star Alison Whyte has been playing Linda Logan since 2023 and said her portrayal of Willy Logan's wife had become "deeper" as a result. "It's such a joy to play … I just love the relationship between Willy and Linda,"she said. "It's beautiful, very caring." She said that while the characters had no semblance to her own upbringing, she often thought about her parents' relationship in the context of the play. "Not that it's anything like Willy and Linda's, but it's just the love and the devotion and the care," Whyte said. Originally from Tasmania (where she recalls seeing a production of Death of a Salesman as a teenager), Whyte is a regular presence on Australian screens in such crime dramas as Scrublands, Jack Irish and earlier favourites like Frontline, Blue Heelers and the 2015 film, The Dressmaker. Whyte, who has performed a number of classics for Melbourne Theatre Company — including The Glass Menagerie earlier this year — has also played a Miller character before, starring as Abigail Williams in the company's 1991 production of The Crucible. She said the skill sets required for the screen and stage were very different. "Essentially you've got to find some truth in what you're saying, but they are very, very different skills," Whyte said. "There's a muscle that's required up there, on stage, that looks ridiculous when you're using it on a small screen." LaPaglia also said his understanding of Willy Logan had increased with each season. A tired, broke and increasingly deluded salesman who spent a lifetime pursuing a mythology in the Great American Dream, Willy is intent on seeing it achieved by his two sons, Biff and Happy, played by Josh Helman and Ben O'Toole. "Every time we come back, there's another layer to it that I hadn't seen before," LaPaglia said. "It does get a tad more clear." Adding more depth to LaPaglia's portrayal of Willy is the fact his own father, who was a mechanic by trade, also sold cars. "He was also wildly erratic and wildly ambitious, and for his kids as well," he said. "It's not a big stretch to find my dad in there at all, and if he's there, why not use him?" Death of a Salesman opens on Saturday and runs until October 4.