Max Von Sydow, 82, tries something new

ORLANDO, Fla. -- "When you're young," Swedish screen legend Max Von Sydow says, "it's always 'I'll do it tomorrow.' But when you're older, now, it IS tomorrow. You have to be in a hurry."

If Von Sydow, now 82, was ever going to make a film that called for him to use only his expressive, time-worn face and not his voice, it is now. "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" gave him the chance. An actor who has starred in films in Swedish, English, Italian, German, French, Danish, Norwegian and Spanish, plays an old man who has given up speaking.

In "Extremely Loud," Von Sydow, who is up for Oscar's Best Supporting Actor, is "The Renter," a traumatized old man who befriends a talkative child who is trying to make sense of 9/11, when the boy's father was killed.

The film may star Sandra Bullock and Tom Hanks and be built around screen newcomer Thomas Horn, but Von Sydow stands out.

Entertainment Weekly praises Von Sydow for "giving a great acting lesson in wordless physical action."

When director Stephen Daldry ("The Hours,") first read the script, he thought of Von Sydow. "I was just happy to offer him a role ... where he didn't have to play a priest," Daldry jokes. Since "The Exorcist," Von Sydow has turned up in many films in a clerical collar. "I think he went for the part because for Max, he's playing against type here."

Famed for his work in the films of Ingmar Bergman since 1957's "The Seventh Seal," a veteran of classics by Woody Allen, and thrillers ("Three Days of the Condor," "Shutter Island"), he recently had been in a Hollywood rut.

"People in casting offices, production offices, put you in a box. They say 'He is good for religious parts. Or Nazi officers.' And they come back with ... the same thing, over and over. And then suddenly someone thinks of you in a totally new way, it's ... wonderful."

He took on a role co-starring with a precocious, untrained child actor and one that would remind him of what he didn't learn in the traditional Royal Dramatic Theatre" in Stockholm -- pantomime.

"So I acted this role as if he was speaking the lines -- the same expressions, gestures, emotions. If I had been speaking, I would have done the role exactly the same. No difference."