PARTING SHOT
FOUR YEARS AGO, WHILE FILMING FANTASTIC FOUR, NELSON BEGAN WRITING a play. “Especially when doing a superhero movie, I ind myself in need of intellectual succor,” says the actor, who most recently, and delightfully, appeared as the titular character in the Coen brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. The result, Socrates (at New York’s Public Theater, starring Michael Stuhlbarg), is, in fact, a do-over: Nelson had made an attempt in 1987, after studying philosophy in college. “It was such a demeaning failure, I’m surprised I kept writing,” he says now. Socrates, credited with founding Western moral philosophy, was a brilliant oddball; he wrote nothing and claimed he had nothing to teach. Accounts of his ideas come primarily from his acolyte Plato, who published their dialogues after Socrates was sentenced to death in ifth-century B.C. Athens. His crime? Exposing the lies of politicians and the potential for tyranny within democracy, which makes Nelson’s play acutely timed. “I’d like to think it’s an effort to participate in repairing democracy,” he tells Newsweek. “That’s what Socrates was all about.”
Illustration by BRITT SPENCER