Fisher Stevens

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1:09Fisher Stevens and I were recently brought close together by one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, Philip Guston, and one of the greatest footballers, David Beckham. A few weeks ago, he was in the River Cafe with the producers of Beckham, the series he directed for Netflix. We agreed to have breakfast at my house, A half hour turned into more than an hour as we talked about Gustum, architecture we lived in, and food we cooked. We agreed we would continue the conversation on Ruthie's Table 4 when I came to New York. So here we are, this time in Fisher's house, connected through a love of Beckham, food, film, and Gustum, and each other.

1:51Life is good. So here we are. Do you know that we asked you to choose a recipe? Yes. Which is for pumpkin soup. I have to say that this soup is amazing because it's so thick. You can eat it with a fork. It's just, and it really is. You'll see it's just pumpkin. And you can have it with chicken stock or vegetable stock. So the pumpkin soup, this one serves six. And we start with three tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil, River Cafe olive oil I prefer, plus extra for the crostini and for serving 50 grams of unsalted butter. Make it organic butter if you can. Then we use two cloves of garlic, peeled and finely chopped.

2:36Wash your hands afterwards. A small bunch of fresh marjoram leaves. And then, because it's a British restaurant, we'll say kilograms and grams, but 1.5 kilograms. This book is a kilogram. Yeah, no, it's good. But what is 1.5 kilograms roughly? It's about two and a half pounds. Well, two and a half pounds is a kilo, so it would be about three pounds. Three pounds. So 1.5 kilograms, roughly three pounds of pumpkin, peeled, seeded, and diced. 200 grams of new potatoes, peeled and cubed. We should keep them white potatoes, right? New potatoes are white. 200 grams of new potatoes, peeled and cubed.

3:16Two dried red chilies, crumbled. I love making a little spice. Love chilies. One liter of chicken stock. Or vegetable stock. Or vegetable stock. Six slices of ciabatta bread. One garlic clove peeled in half. So not the finely chopped, but have it. No, because we're going to wrap it over the bread. The bread with freshly grated Parmesan. Oh, I'm so hungry. Are you hungry? Should we go get some? Yeah, this sounds so good. So you're going to heat the extra virgin olive oil and butter in a saucepan and gently fry the chopped garlic with the marjoram leaves until soft. Add the pumpkin and potatoes and continue to cook for a minute.

3:56Add the chilies in the season well with sea salt and black pepper, not too much salt. Pour in enough stock just to cover the pumpkin. Bring to the boil and then turn down the heat and simmer for 20 to 25 minutes or until the pumpkin is tender, adding more stock if necessary to keep the pumpkin covered. So you'll have to keep checking on it. Because you don't want it watery, so you want just enough to cook the pumpkin. Yeah, okay, that's important. Strain about a third of the stock from the pumpkin and set it aside. Pour the contents of the pan into a food processor and pulse. Yeah, you know what that is, like a maggi mix.

4:38Right, and pulse it though. Yeah, because you want it thick, really thick. You don't want a thin puree. No. It's like a great meal. Return to the saucepan and add the strained-off stock plus any remaining stock. Check for seasoning. So if you need a little more salt, a little more pepper, you check it out there. The soup will be very thick. Then reheat gently for serving. By the way, for the crostini, toast the slices of ciabatta. then rub with the garlic halves and drizzle over extra virgin River Cafe olive oil. Serve the soup with Parmesan, extra virgin olive oil, and the crostini. And the addition of 200 grams of cannellini beans is a variation of the soup, which I personally recommend if you make this omit the ciabatta crostini.

5:29I prefer the cannellini beans to the crostini, but that's up to you. I love cannellini beans. I love them too. And when you read that recipe, it is just pure. It's potatoes, pumpkins, and some, you know. Healthy. Healthy. It's good. And you'll be full. And you'll be full. You don't need much more. And it's not expensive. Right. If you're thinking that way. Especially after Halloween. Except for the olive oil. Oh, yeah. The River Cafe olive oil. This year, it's insane. Why? Because of olives. Because it was so hot this summer. I mean, there's hardly going to be any production of olive oil rocher.

6:00Where do you get your olive oil? So we have five estates in Tuscany that we buy our wine from, and we buy it from Moore. But a lot of the wine producers make olive oil as well. And so every year we go, we take 20 people. If you've worked in the River Cafe for like a year, we take you to Tuscany. Actually, then we take another 20 to Piemonte. And then we go and teach them how they make the olive oil. Are your wine producers, you like the Italian, the Tuscan wines? Yeah, we do. Well, now we used to, you know, our whole roots in the River Cafe were Tuscany when we started because Richard's family, my husband's family, came from Florence.

6:37And Rose, my partner, lived in Lucca. But then, you know, it was wine that really took us to other regions. So we went to Piemonte. We went to the Veneto. We went to Puglia. All of who make wine. And so it's not just, I love a Tuscan. You know, I love the, do you drink wine? Yes, quite a bit. Maybe too much. Sicily's become a big, big, I've noticed in your wine. Yeah. I'm very into Etna. I'm very into Sicilian wines. I've been there. I've toured a few vineyards in Sicily. And I love the natural wines of Sicily particularly. Once I started making money, I would just go big with food, wine. I've blown a great portion of my money on.

7:16I respect that. You know, I think it's really interesting that people sort of measure their success in what they were able to eat. So Beckham, you know, I remember we did a podcast with him, And he was saying that he remembers being able to go to a restaurant and not look at the right side of the page. Or that McCartney said that he thought wine was terrible because he'd only had cheap wine. He'd never had a good bottle of wine until Brian Epstein took him out to eat. Was that the case? Yeah. Well, yeah, and I remember one of the first proper meals I ever had was my girlfriend took me to 21 for my 21st birthday.

8:01And that was fancy. That was the beginning of like, wow, people eat, you know. And then my first bottle of proper wine, because I hated wine too. And I was doing a play at Williamstown. Arthur Miller's play. I was playing young Arthur Miller. It was called American Clock. Oh, it was about Arthur Miller. Yeah. By Arthur Miller. By Arthur Miller, about Arthur Miller. Arthur Miller was there. He was rewriting the play while we were, I mean, it was incredible. And he said to me, like, you'll get it when the clothes is, kid. You know, it just didn't give me much confidence. But the guy who played my father was a guy named, is a guy named Ron Rifkin, who's one of my great friends.

8:41And he took me out and he said, have you ever had red wine? I said, yeah, I don't like it. He goes, oh, no. Oh, no, no, no, no. Have you ever tasted it? Do you know what Bordeaux is? Do you know what Burgundy is? Do you know? I'm like, no. Baroque? No. He goes, okay. Nice man. Nice. And to this day, he's 84. He comes over. We drink incredible wine together still. So that was when I was like 22. And then he got me hooked. And then I'm obsessed now with bread. Mostly bread, French, Italian. And the good stuff or, yeah, but anyway. Do you, going back, so you started acting. Did you go to college or acting school or were you ever on your own in a place where you had to not eat out but cook for yourself?

9:32Sorry, the first question is what was your college? Did you go to after high school? Yeah, I dropped out of high school. I started auditioning at like 15 for shows and plays. I got off Broadway, my first stuff, when I could still use my name before I had to join a union. And then I started working as a busboy in two restaurants in New York and as a bike messenger and making money, like good money, like more money than my mom. And then I got my first job at 16, had to change my name. It was a movie over the summer. Didn't pay that much, but I thought, I'm going to make it. But no, of course, I didn't work again for like a year and a half, two years.

10:16But I was eating out. Yeah. And while in high school, I worked two nights a week. Do you remember a restaurant? Mario Batali ended up opening a place called Esca in the same spot, but it was called Curtain Up, 43rd and 9th. I was a busboy there, and I was a busboy at a very groovy kind of hipster Upper East Side singles place called Yellow Fingers on 60th and 3rd Avenue. Did that teach you, do you think, about food and why? Well, no, no, no, no, because I just was, no, those places were not, those were hamburger, those weren't, you know, like great places, no. Did it teach you how to be in a restaurant?

11:02Yeah. I always think that one of the reasons I love Americans coming to the River Cafe is that most Americans have at one time in their life worked in a restaurant. And I think that teaches you a little bit. It gave me such respect for waiters and busboys. Some of the things that I saw in those kitchens, you would never, ever have that at River Cafe. You mean anger and bullying? and anger bullying but also not even that just the way they handled the food oh yeah okay yeah but um so i i think and also that culture of eating out you know and then i go to school and and then you know what i said my my senior year in high school i did like two months and i was like forget it i'm just gonna work my mom's like okay you might as well you're making more money than me and uh and i was auditioning and studying acting very seriously yeah and then i couldn't really get a job and then there was a kid that I knew and and uh through auditioning and in high school he went to another high school two kids actually one of them is named Matthew Broderick oh yeah and Matthew Broderick uh I bumped into him and he's like hey man I'm in this play it's maybe moving to Broadway and I just got a bigger play and I'm leaving I'll get you an audition to replace me and he got me the audition to replace him and what's the play the play was It was called Torch Song Trilogy.

12:23Oh, yeah, Torch Song Trilogy. And I got the job. Was that in the 80s? 1982. Yeah. It was in a little theater in Sheridan Square. It was kind of a revolutionary gay play by Harvey Fierstein. And Matthew got me the audition, and I got the job, and that was it. I started working, and basically almost since then I've been working. And then Matthew was in a play called Brighton Beach Memoirs, and he was going to leave that. And then he got me an audition to replace him in that, and then I replaced him in that. So he believed in you. He did. Yeah, he was in the restaurant the other day. Well, you know, they're coming to London.

13:03To do Plaza Suite. They're going to do Plaza Suite. And they were there. I wasn't there that night. But they like to eat. Oh, yeah. Oh, I've had some great meals with Matthew. Have you? Oh, yeah. As a matter of fact, okay, so this is a food story. So when I was replacing Matthew in Brighton Beach Memoirs, Matthew was making money. He was going to do Ferris Bueller, right? He was going to go do the movie or something, I believe. And he would take me out to dinner at this amazing place. I don't think it's still there. Maybe it is. 52nd Street called Gallagher's Steakhouse. I've heard of Gallagher's.

13:38Gallagher's Steakhouse was the place. The sports guys, everybody went in. And he bought me dinner a few times there. Big dinner. serious because he was making bank man you know and we yeah we used to go and we would drink martinis i think i was 18 it was illegal then but who cares now food food was so key and then when you're on broadway right you're acting at night yeah you're done with the show you go to restaurants so that's what i asked you know your friend rafe as you know or other actors you eat before the play do you eat after the play well we had a couple who ate before during the play yeah Really?

14:17There's a few, but I always meet them, you know, if you have a friend in the theater, you meet afterwards and then you go out. Well, you don't want to be too, but you don't want to go on stage with a full stomach. Have you ever had to eat on stage? Have you had to eat something? Yeah, yeah. Is that all fake? No, no, no, yeah, a little bit. You know, like Brighton Beach, every night you had to pretend to have dinner and, you know, applesauce, but you just take a couple of, no. And the worst is in movies because you have to recreate. The thing about succession... Yeah, we can talk about it. The thing about succession is that there was a lot of scenes where you're supposed to be eating, but nobody's ever eating because you can't recreate the position and how much is there because of the way we shoot the show.

15:04I see. You'd have to have the same thing and the same take and the same thing. And because of the way we shot in big, giant chunks, it was impossible. And people noticed there's like a whole website about why does nobody eat on succession? Like literally people noticed that. Because a lot of the drama takes place in tables or, you know, in cocktail parties or the food. I like that element because there's always a sense of the tension about being sitting down to eat, but not eating because there's so much drama happening. I think that's also quite, you know, lots of people talk about actually sitting down to a table is a very kind of positive experience, but can also be a very challenging experience.

15:44And that's what succession captures so well. It's really challenging. I mean, I never, because my character never sits still. And I'm never invited to the table to eat. I'm always just told what to do. But sadly, but that was good for my, I didn't have to worry about the food on the plate. Did they feed you all, the actors? Because that's another thing, isn't it? What you feed. Yeah. I talked to Wes. You know, Wes's dream would be not to stop for lunch. You know, he told me. What do you mean? You don't stop for lunch. Wes and Succession and now, you know, I'm working on Guy Ritchie movie. All these productions, we do French hours.

16:22So there's no real break for lunch. You work through lunch. French hours, you only work 10-hour days, right? Like in the old, you know, in many days, my early days of making movies, you'd shoot 14-hour days. but that would include like an hour where you all sit and eat. Succession post-COVID found it much more manageable and you get much more done if you don't break. But they'll hand you like a box and in the box is just crap. Wes is different because like on Asteroid City, if we were working, you know, the good news about being on a Wes movie is that you're usually a smaller part, so you only work like four-hour days.

17:07So then you can go and have a big lunch. But if you're working a 10-hour day with Wes or an eight-hour day with Wes, they have like on Asteroid City, we were in Spain. And yeah, it would be a carton, but the food was much, not to knock Succession's catering, but much better on Wes's movies than... Do you think that's the European versus... Yeah, I think it's European. I mean, I think Jeremy Dawson and Wes, they like food. Jeremy's the producer. But yeah, they are. It is better. It's fun. I love hanging out with them. But the social experience after work, sitting at a table with everybody talking and eating, and it's really nice.

17:48It's nice. It's like a family. Yeah. Well, especially the last one, we were quarantined together. We weren't even allowed to go into Madrid, which is, you know, we had to stay in Chinchong. Yeah. And there's not much to do in Chinchong. So, but the food is good. And yeah, and I've had great meals with Wes. But what about when you're directing? It's your decision, isn't it? To say what I'm going to do about food. Yeah, so my feature that I last did in New Orleans, which was right before COVID, we actually tried an experiment with a healthy catering company, but it didn't work out. No, I loved it.

18:23But the crew, you know, we were shooting in Louisiana. Yeah. And they, yeah, they like their meat, their pigs. Is it very male, the crew? I mean, it sounds like we're talking about men who want to eat. It's a lot of men, but yeah, it's not only men. But even the women, they wanted substance. They wanted substance. Fair enough. So that didn't go great. But I also, on my last thing I directed for this pilot, Dear Edward, I did the West French Hours, and the food wasn't great either. but we, you know, the days are shorter and the crew gets to go home earlier, but we don't break fully for lunch. But you get your box of lunch and then you break for 20 minutes and then we go.

19:07But it makes the day a lot faster. Can I ask a question? Yeah, I was just interested. Not that many successful actors end up being successful directors. What motivated that or enabled that? Well, to be honest, I would do these movies as an actor and then I would see them and I would be like, God, this is not very good. Not all of them, but I can do this. I want to do this because the script was great. I mean, there were other directors that I worked with where I would be like, oh my God, they're so good. I want to learn. So it was a combination. I kind of liked watching certain directors direct.

19:46Yeah, I don't know. And to be honest, like waiting for the job as an actor and just being an actor, It becomes all about you and how you look and you, you, you, you, as opposed to being a character in a painting. I wanted to paint the painting. But I love acting and I like bouncing back and forth as much as I possibly can.

20:18Did you know the River Cafe has a shop? It's full of our favorite foods and designs. We have cookbooks, linen napkins, kitchenware, tote bags with our signatures, glasses from Venice, chocolates from Turin. You can find us right next door to the River Cafe in London or online at shoptherivercafe.co.uk.

20:45Morning, Zoe. Got donuts. Jeff Bridges, why are you still living above our garage? Well, I dig the mattress, and I want to be in a T-Mobile commercial like you. Teach me, Sildana. Oh, no. I'm not really prepared. I couldn't possibly. At T-Mobile, get the new iPhone 17 Pro on them. It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system. Wow. Impressive. Let me try. T-Mobile is the best place to get iPhone 17 Pro because they've got the best network. Nice, Jeffrey. You heard them. T-Mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible traded in any condition.

21:25So, what are we having for lunch? Dude, my work here is done.

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22:29Plus, they're earth-friendly and trusted by over 200 ,000 happy customers. It's time to upgrade to a stress-free, mess-proof sofa. Visit washablesofas.com today and save. That's washablesofas.com. Offers are subject to change, and certain restrictions may apply. So, Fisher, here we are in your beautiful house with your beautiful photographs. Thank you, Brooklyn, Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Yeah, so tell me about Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Where are we? Well, it's an interesting neighborhood. I played on my high school softball team in the late 70s, and we played like four blocks away at a park called Fort Greene Park.

23:11and on two occasions after once winning and once losing, I was mugged after the game by local neighborhood kids. When we saw this house many, many, many moons later that was for sale, we were about to have our first child, Lexi Bloom and I. I first was a bit hesitant, but the neighborhood had changed quite a bit and as we were looking at the house, I opened the door and the back porch and I'm looking at it and there's a woman on the porch next door and she goes, Fisher, is that you? And I'm like, Rosie? And she goes, are you going to buy the house? And that's a terrible impersonation of Rosie Perez.

23:52But Rosie Perez is my next door neighbor. And she's like, the neighborhood's changed. You'll love it. I've been here forever. That's the worst Rosie Perez. I'm just, my accent's bad. But anyway, so here we are and we love the neighborhood. And did you live in Manhattan before? I actually had moved to Brooklyn in 2005 after 30-plus years in Manhattan. But I will say my neighborhood, and it's too bad we can't go to dinner tonight because there are like seven great restaurants now on DeKalb Avenue, which is around the corner, and it has become Restaurant Row of Fort Greene. Tell me about them. What are they?

24:31Well, the kind of landmark place, the first one that's – or the oldest one is called Roman's. and they change the menu every night. It's great. And now there's Evelina's, there's Miss Ada's, there's Sailor's that just opened, the woman who was the chef for the pig. She worked with me. Well. April worked with me for years. So April. Yeah, and I just got a message from her saying, hey, Ruthie, I'm opening a restaurant in Brooklyn. Okay, so it's around the corner. Yeah, oh, we have to go. So it's become, right, and it's become really Spotted Pig. That's the place. So anyway, yeah, it's becoming this neighborhood.

25:08So is it an Italian neighborhood here, or is it? No, it's just a hipster. I think it's more of a hipster thing. But no, this neighborhood is very, it's everything. It's a combination of everything. I don't know if I'm cool enough to live here. Yes, you are. I have to get way more. No, no, it's not cool anymore. We've probably screwed the neighborhood. What's cool? Another part of Brooklyn? Well, Williamsburg and Bushwick, I guess Bushwick is where all the hipsters are now. You know, it just keeps moving. But I like to spend many days, like today, I won't go into Manhattan. Many days, I don't go into Manhattan, you know.

25:42When did you do? Do you drive? Do you go? Well, I bicycle a lot. Oh, yeah? Electric bike. Do you bike over the Brooklyn Bridge? Yeah, I bicycle a lot. That must be beautiful. Yeah, it's nice. I had a Vespa for years. Yeah. Now I, yeah, use an electric. Be careful, though. I know. That's why I got rid of it. But also even biking. So you grew up near here. My mother was, we moved here with her to make it as a painter from Chicago. You were born in Chicago. Yeah, born in Chicago. And she was a painter. What year would that be? Well, she started in the 70s. She had a first loft in 71, 72. Do you know a painter named Marilyn Minter?

26:22She's made it pretty big. So Marilyn and my mother shared a space. We lived in a loft, and my mom was dating an actor, well, a maitre d', but he was trying to be an actor. Really a maitre d' and an actor. Yeah, she ended up working as the coach at his restaurant. Another restaurant? Yeah, it was called Charlie's. It was a very famous theater restaurant. Now it was called Sam's, or it's called Sam's. Still there. And we had trouble paying the payments. So the acting school that he studied in rented the loft and built a stage in our living room in the meatpacking. So I'd come home and there'd be acting class in my house, which is how I got into show business because I had a stage in our living room.