Vincent D'Onofrio says the shoot for Claire Dolan was a disaster. The actor said he did not get along with anyone on the set except Katrin Cartlidge, and called making the film “a horrible experience.”
That blunt assessment lands years after the 1990s drama arrived as part of an uneven stretch in his film career, a period that also included The Newton Boys, which flopped, and other projects that did not meet expectations. D'Onofrio has since found a different kind of visibility through roles such as Wilson Fisk, also known as Kingpin, in Daredevil, and earlier turns that ranged from 80 pounds gained to play Private Gomer Pyle in Full Metal Jacket to heavy makeup as a farmer infected by an alien parasite in Men in Black.
Still, he did not dismiss Lodge Kerrigan, the director behind Claire Dolan. D'Onofrio said Kerrigan was good to work for because he had “a definite style and a definite talent,” adding that he had “a lot of originality and a real sense of cinema.” He said Kerrigan sent him a copy of his earlier film Clean, Shaven, and that he and Cartlidge made Claire Dolan because she had agreed to do it.
The actor was even more direct about the movie itself. “Claire Dolan is a certain kind of film; not everyone can sit through a film like that,” he said, which fits the way he described the production as a project he respected but did not enjoy. In his telling, the film was less a pleasant set than a difficult job done for the promise of working with Cartlidge and a director he believed had a clear voice.
That makes Claire Dolan the rare project in D'Onofrio’s career that he has openly singled out as miserable, even as his later resurgence on Daredevil reminded casting agents of the range that first made him stand out. The film remains the answer to his own complaint: he stayed because Cartlidge was attached, and he went through with it because Kerrigan, however tough the experience, looked like a filmmaker worth working with.
