"Who cares about Raul Julia?" asks Raul Julia. "I'm an actor. I want people to see my work, not me as a person."
Millions of people are seeing Raul Julia's work as an actor in "The Addams Family." But seeing Raul Julia as a person in a New York hotel room is not too bad, either.A walking cliche - tall, dark, handsome and Latin - but impatient with celebrity and the effect of his appearance, Julia is a mixed blessing to interview.
"Some interviews are genuine," he says ominously, fixing a direct gaze with large, hooded eyes. "But at the same time it can go overboard and be in really bad taste."
The moustache he wears in "The Addams Family" is gone, his face decorated instead with wire rim glasses.
His 6-foot-plus frame slouches in the corner of a couch, resigned, even resentful at the prospect of more discourse about Freudian aspects of Gomez's character or why he, Raul Julia, wears two wedding rings. He has already explained to prying journalists that he is married to two wives - no, he's just kidding, the second ring was an anniversary present from his second wife, Merel, whom he married in 1976. They have two sons and live near New York.
"People are interested in knowing about actors and their personal lives," he says with a shrug of disgust. "They like to snoop so they can forget about their own lives for awhile."
The 47-year-old Puerto Rican-born actor hasn't experienced the really intrusive celebrityhood that sells out at airport newsstands, despite his dynamite mix of machismo and intellect. For one thing, he's a moving target.
Since first appearing with the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1966, he's moved easily and gracefully between stage and cinema, musicals and dramas, slapstick and tragedy.
He's a four-time Tony nominee for shows as different as the musical "Nine," the Harold Pinter drama "Betrayal" and Shakespeare's "Two Gentleman of Verona." He also won high praise in 1977 as "a princely and seductive vampire," according to "Current Biography," for his Broadway role as Dracula, distant relative of Gomez.
"The Addams Family" is his 24th movie. Not a star who can open a movie on the strength of his name alone, Julia nevertheless has brought class and credibility to pictures as different as "Compromising Positions," about romance and murder in the suburbs; "Romero," about a slain archbishop; and "Tango Bar," a history of the seductive dance. (Why does that word keep coming up?)
His most acclaimed performance came in "The Kiss of the Spiderwoman," playing a left-wing journalist opposite Oscar-winning William Hurt.
The role of Gomez was physically demanding, with a month of rehearsal to perfect the swordplay and the split-second timing crucial for playing opposite a disembodied hand. "But the whole atmosphere was very relaxed," he says, "like making home movies."
Performing live on stage "requires more emotional fitness - if you've been doing theater, you're ready for a movie anytime. But still you have to bring up the truth, the emotion, the reality."
He claims that his best performance ever was his first, when he was 5 years old and played the devil in a class play at a school run by nuns near San Juan.
"Seldom have I been able to rise to that level again," he says dramatically, "the innocence and the openness and spontaneousness, the lack of self-consciousness and concern about whether you're good or bad or what people are thinking of you. You're just completely pure."
"The Addams Family" is all tongue-in-cheek, according to Julia. He is also tongue-in-cheek. His latest movie, he says dryly, "is not Terminator 2."
Nor is it "Kiss of the Spiderwoman." "That's when I learned that you should never underestimate the intelligence of the general public. Something in that movie made them feel like human beings again and not just pawns for some big company to make a lot of money shooting some nice little messages about feelings - wipe a tear and go home happy.
"A lot of the recent movies haven't had any human value to them. It's all been superficial stuff, and human beings require more than what the big moviemakers think they require."
One of the rare Hispanic actors who has escaped stereotyping, Julia is also passionate about promoting more opportunities for minorities in the movies. "It's great that it's starting to happen with African-American directors," he says, "but that's not enough."
Hollywood "has the power to open itself to everybody, to include both communities, even interchange and share our talents and cultures, but they have a stingy way of looking at things." Not long ago he had a power breakfast with some of the most important Hispanic actors in Hollywood - Edward James Olmos, Ruben Blades, Andy Garcia - to talk over tactics. Power breakfast, the sequel, is in the works.
Right now, keeping one eye cocked on the response to "The Addams Family" and the potential for a sequel, Julia is deeply immersed in the 25th anniversary revival of "Man of La Mancha."
The show has already debuted in Chicago, later than was scheduled after co-star Sheena Easton became ill. It continues on a national tour before a Broadway opening scheduled for April. Though the double role of Don Quixote and his creator Cervantes seems tailored for Julia, the reviews have been cautious to negative.
Julia "sets off some genuine sparks," observed the Chicago Tribune, with "the possibility of a passionate and moving performance." Variety magazine, however, blasted the star: "Raul Julia proves deadly dull . . . theatrically moribund from start to finish."
Deadly? Moribund? Maybe he took this "Addams Family" thing a little too seriously . . .