Jerry's an expert handicapper and a poker player to boot. What's your experience with gambling?
My real understanding of Jerry comes from actually going to poker halls and watching those dramatic swings of fortune: Some people have these huge, huge stacks of chips, and they just dwindle away. I would watch how difficult it was for them to separate those chips from their self-worth, so they keep coming back, in the hopes of becoming a winner again. It's all about your self-perception in the big scheme of life, which is why it's never enough, even when they do win. I've watched people get a big score, and their first thought is, "If I had bet more, I would have won more." The bottom line is that it's not even about the money, it's about the chase.
Which explains why Jerry keeps allowing this other poker player, Leo Chan, to goad him, even if it's a dangerous situation.
He's definitely got some intuition about how to push my buttons. You're not supposed to get rattled in poker; you're supposed to remain poker-faced! [Laughs.] But it becomes a very primal confrontation, because he's offending or insulting or threatening my masculinity on some level, and he's keyed in on the fact that my self-evaluation is pretty low. It's a good bet for him to rile me, because then he's got me working on a level where I'm not thinking rationally, and he can take it all, whereas the horses don't need anything from Jerry. He just sees them as these majestic animals who are born to run, born to race, and he sees the beauty of their stride, their gait. It's his degenerate nirvana, where he can shut out the rest of the world. For some people, it's golf; for Jerry, it's the track. That's when he's most lucid, when he's watching the horses.
Source: Full interview @ Vulture
Streaming Options
Sign Up for the SpoilerTV Newsletter where we talk all things TV!
Recommendations
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
