Wren Abbott, an editorial intern at New York magazine and freelance writer, reviews the Gene Wilder talk for the 92Y Blog.

On Sunday night in the Kaufmann Concert Hall Ms. magazine founding editor Letty Cottin Pogrebin interviewed comic legend Gene Wilder, whose debut novel My French Whore came out earlier this month. Wilder has appeared in over 30 movies – he made his film debut in 1967 as an undertaker kidnapped by Bonnie and Clyde, played the eponymous chocolatier in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, fell in love with a sheep in Woody Allen’s Everything you Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), and in the role he says he’s most proud of, co-wrote and starred in Young Frankenstein.

Wilder’s new book, following the memoir he brought out last year, is a slight, curious tale about an American soldier in World War I who, captured by the Germans, survives by impersonating a famous American spy. It’s based on a screenplay that Wilder wrote 38 years ago when he was in Paris filming Start the Revolution Without Me. Although Wilder did serve in the military for a year (in the medical corps in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania), and his protagonist Paul Peachy is an amateur actor who, like Wilder, is from Milwaukee, My French Whore otherwise seems to have little basis in the author’s own experiences. As a result, the story has a fantastical quality, with Peachy spending most of the book luxuriating at the “magnificent castle” where the German army is accommodating him and falling in love with his French whore over roast duck and farmer’s cheese, occasionally taking time out to attend to matters of military intelligence.

In fact, what is most striking about Wilder when he’s not acting – in both his books and in his public persona – is his earnestness. He doesn’t use humor, as you might expect, to deflect sensitive subjects, but in his memoir and in his talk on Sunday, spoke frankly of the emotional landmarks in his life – his mother’s death from heart disease, his estrangement from adopted daughter Katie (Katharine Anastasia Wilder), losing his third wife Gilda Radner to cancer. According to Wilder, he isn’t a natural comic – “in life” he says “I was never funny” – but he has a gift for embodying an absurd character believably, to comic effect. What Wilder, a dutiful student of “method” pioneer Lee Strasberg, brought to comic roles was seriousness – thoughtful application of his actor’s training and instincts. What he strived for above all, he writes in his memoir, is believability.

When Wilder worked with Arthur Penn in Bonnie and Clyde, his big scene took place in the back seat of the outlaws’ car, where Gene Hackman, as Clyde’s brother Buck, tells a dumb joke that he finds uproariously funny, about a farmer spiking cow’s milk with brandy to administer it to his mother. Wilder’s idea was to not know the punchline until they were playing the scene for the first time, and when Hackman blurted out “Whatever you do – don’t sell that cow,” Wilder laughed until there were tears in his eyes. Penn was surprised and impressed – he’d never envisioned that scene as funny.

Wilder also had an important insight about the character Willy Wonka, and agreed to play the part only on the condition that he get to introduce the character in a certain way: appearing before the townspeople for the first time, Wonka hobbles out with a cane, pretends to stumble, and goes into an acrobatic forward somersault. On Sunday Wilder explained that the change was critical in setting up the character, because “from that point on, you don’t know whether I’m lying or telling the truth.”

Wilder made his name playing characters that hold something in reserve, like the mysterious Wonka, whose intentions are unclear up to the end of the movie, when he chooses Charlie as his successor at the factory. His memoir and his too-precious new novel suggest that Wilder’s imagination works best when hemmed in by a well-defined character. His acting is dependent on good writing – and in fact, that’s why he hasn’t acted in awhile – (he hasn’t appeared in a theatrical release since Another You in 1991). He said on Sunday that when he reads a good script “a bell goes off, and I know I have to do this.” The bell hasn’t gone off in awhile, but Wilder says he doesn’t miss acting. Once he started writing, he said, “it got into my vein, into an artery I think.”