Jigsaw Puzzle

“You don’t make any money doing off-Broadway theater, and you can’t support a family on $150 a week,” says Bell, who remains passionate about environmental causes (the National Resources Defense Council and the Audubon Society chief among them). “But at a certain point, I felt there was something unfinished for me in the theater. My mother was an actress, and acting was deep inside me.” So Bell quit his day job and got back on the boards, supporting himself with a variety of odd jobs (painting houses, washing dishes, parking cars) until the film director Alan Parker offered him a role as an FBI agent in Mississippi Burningand things finally began to click.

“All I can suggest for actors is if you don’t hang in, you’ll never know,” he says, reflecting back on it all. “No one should ever be embarrassed to be waiting tables. If you know why you’re doing it and it permits you to stay in the game, you could be a year away, six months away, 10 years away. For me, it was 15 years of hanging in before I ever really started to make a living. But there was some part of me that believed that somebody somewhere someday would see some value in me as a film actor, and that man was Alan Parker.”

Of Saw III, which neither Bell nor I had seen at the time of this interview, the actor promises a deepening of the relationship between Jigsaw/John and the former addict Amanda (Shawnee Smith), so grateful for her forced re-education in the original film that she has subsequently devoted herself to serving as Jigsaw’s apprentice. And of course, there will be buckets of blood. “He’s very physical in Saw III,” Bell adds. “You’ll be surprised that someone who’s as weak as that can go through what he goes through.”

As for the inevitable question of a Saw IV, Bell says he doesn’t worry about continuing to play Jigsaw, provided the filmmakers keep funneling new creative energy into the series. “As long as the movie is compelling and grabs you in a different way, introduces new thoughts, makes people think, that sort of stuff. It’s entertainment, but for me it’s also my craft, and so I try to embrace it in the deepest way that I can. I always try to make something as important as it can be for me. I have no control over the results — whether the editor edits it right, whether the producers cut my scenes out. All I have control over is how much I embrace the material and try to make it seem as if it’s happening for the first time.”