Actor, activist, provocateur: an interview with Tim Robbins.

• Author: Rampell, Ed
• Position: Interview

If Martin Sheen was America's "acting President," Tim Robbins is beginning to establish himself as "the acting Secretary of State." The activist/artist stars as America's top diplomat in the HBO series The Brink. As Walter Larson., Robbins's dovish diplomat tries to fend off the rabid hawks in President Julian Navarro's (Esai Morales) cabinet--along with an atomic Armageddon.

With its jaunty, Dr. Strangelove-like script, The Brink spoofs the game of chicken among nations that have nuclear weapons. But Robbins's Larson refuses to learn how to stop worrying and love the bomb. Jack Black co-stars as a low-level foreign service officer, John Larroquette plays the born-again U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, The Daily Show's Aasif Mandvi is a well-meaning Pakistani employee of the U.S. Embassy, and Robbins's fellow Hollywood lefty, Mimi Kennedy, portrays the CIA director. The series, on which Robbins is a producer, has been renewed for a second season.

Tim Robbins is at home with satire. He wrote, directed, and starred in the 1992 comedy Bob Roberts, about a conservative folksinger and politician. He also has a political mission, and a special concern about the criminal justice system. He co-starred in the 1994 prison drama The Shawshank Redemption. And in 1995, Robbins wrote and directed the anti-death penalty movie Dead Man Walking, which scored Oscar nominations for Sean Penn's acting, Bruce Springsteen's song, and Robbins's direction, while his then-partner Susan Sarandon won the Best Actress Academy Award for her depiction of the compassionate Sister Helen Prejean. Robbins himself won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for the 2003 crime drama Mystic River.

Robbins vocally denounced the Iraq War. Along with about too Hollywood progressives, he signed the 2002 petition "Artists United to Win Without War" opposing the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In 2003 he produced the agitprop play Embedded, one of the first anti-Iraq War productions. During the Bush years, he was also involved in a stage adaptation of George Orwell's 1984, accentuating Big Brother's torture as a metaphor for waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques" at Guantanamo and other U.S. black sites.

Robbins's dissent drew some blowback. He was vilified for his opposition to the Iraq War. His family received threats. And in 2003, the Associated Press reported that "the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, scrapped an event for the fifteenth anniversary of the popular baseball movie Bull Durham because of the anti-war stance of stars Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon."

Nevertheless, Robbins has...