Photograph by Jim Wright

 

In the June issue (on newsstands now): Friday Night Lights’ Kyle Chandler offers up a little southern hospitality far from Hollywood’s bright glare, but keeps mum about his new film, Super 8; a renewed Jesse James on the taming of his inner demons since his incendiary split from Sandra Bullock; and Matthew Teague travels to Pakistan to piece together exactly what happened when CIA operative Raymond Davis shot two assailants at a crowded Lahore intersection in January.

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From Josh Eells’s The Last Solid Dude:

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A couple of years ago, Kyle Chandler — Emmy-nominated actor, fictional football coach, would-be movie star, dad, husband, and cougar-crush object — was taking a road trip from his home in Los Angeles to Austin, Texas, to film the fourth season of his TV show, Friday Night Lights. He’d made the drive a few times before, sometimes in his Porsche Boxster, once on his motorcycle. This time, he brought his wife. The two of them were happy to be on the road, enjoying a break from the grind of PTA obligations and L.A. traffic, when, somewhere in the desert between Palm Springs and El Paso, Kathryn Chandler turned to her husband with a question.

“Babe,” she said. “Are you happy where we’re at?”

“You gotta be kidding me,” answered Chandler, with a look of exasperation familiar to anyone who’s seen Friday Night Light’s Coach Eric Taylor deal with his guidance-counselor wife. “Are we really having this conversation right now?” But they were — and, to be honest, he wasn’t. By the time they pulled into Austin a few days later, the Chandlers had decided to put their Topanga home (which they’d “just finished remodeling”) on the market and move their two girls to the Lone Star State. “And now,” he says, “here we are.” 

It’s a gorgeous spring day in Central Texas, the sky a cloudless Dillon Panther blue. Chandler is on the patio of an Austin oyster bar, a cold drink sweating in his hand, sporty sunglasses hooked around his neck, his motorcycle helmet on the bench next to him. (He rode his Yamaha here.) Chandler is so completely Coach Taylor that you half expect him to be wearing a windbreaker, Oakleys, and a headset, but instead he’s country-casual in motorcycle boots and illicit Wranglers. (“No Wranglers” was one of Kathryn’s only rules about their new life in Texas.)

“It’s nice to meet someone and have them be exactly the guy you hoped they’d be,” says J.J. Abrams, who directed Chandler in this summer’s top-secret sci-fi action flick Super 8. And indeed, Chandler exudes solid regular dude–ness. Onscreen he specializes in the kind of competent good guys — athletes, cowboys, soldiers, cops — who handle their business and don’t make a big fuss, and he comports himself with the kind of decency and honor that men aspire to but rarely achieve. 

Chandler spent 21 years living in L.A., but it never really suited him. He’s too self-effacing, too genuinely earnest — all “yes, ma’am” and “no, ma’am” in his easy Georgia drawl. “Everything moves a little quicker in Los Angeles,” he says. (He never calls it L.A.) “A lot of times you don’t know your next-door neighbor.” He’s much happier in Austin. They’ve got a 33-acre spread half an hour southwest of town, where he can busy himself with the horses and donkeys or survey the fence line on his big orange tractor, which Kathryn calls “his happy place.” He’s a volunteer fireman. He hangs out at the Seed & Feed. Sometimes he gets on his bike and just cruises the Hill Country. 

For more from Kyle Chandler, check out our June issue, on newsstands now.

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From Allison Glock’s Jesse James Repents (Sort Of):

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It is just before lunch and Jesse James is getting his hair cut in the rear of the Austin Speed Shop garage. Amid the squeal of metal being cut and pounded into vintage bodywork, his friend and barbershop apprentice Mark Ford meticulously trims around James’s ear using an electric razor from the ’50s. James admires the tool. “You’ll never have to fix that,” he shouts approvingly over the din, as Ford inches his way down his neck.

The hair falls in tufts into James’s lap, which is covered by a Hefty bag he poked a hole through with his head. James watches the locks sail down, lifts a piece aloft, eyes it disbelievingly. It has been six months since his last cut. You can hardly blame him for falling behind on personal grooming. The man has had a rough year.

“At some point, my life just became a Roger Corman movie,” he says with exasperation, knitting his brow. “Jesse James and the Attack of the Seven-Foot SS Seductress!”

He is kidding, of course, something that itself is an accomplishment, a resurrection of a part of his personality he feared might have been buried forever by what he simply calls “the shitstorm.”

“I saw the shitstorm coming, the way soldiers see sandstorms rolling in across the desert. You see it headed right at you, and there is really nothing you can fucking do about it but stand there and wait for it to hit you, and hope you survive.”

He laughs, resignation hitching in his voice. “I survived.”

Read the full article in our June issue. But here are a few more quotes from James:

On owning up to his mistakes:
“I never shied away from anything I did. I took full responsibility. I cheated on my wife. Guess what? So do millions of other men.”

On his past decisions:
“I’m self-destructive. I made some seriously fucked-up choices.”

On not speaking out right away after being accused of infidelity:
“People assumed I was a dick because I didn’t defend myself.”

On going to rehab:
“I was an animal in a cage. I needed to escape before I cracked up or did something really stupid. I don’t know why I went. I just needed help.”

On attending L.A. functions with Sandra Bullock and making small talk:
“I’d just talk to them about NPR. ‘Did you hear Diane Rehm today?’ I tried to fit into that mold. I look back at who I was then, and I want to punch myself in the face.”

On being married:
“To be honest, it was unfair for me to even be in a relationship. I sabotaged everything. I was never 100 percent in.”

On rehab:
“I went in thinking, all these people in this place? They are really fucked up. I figured out pretty fast I was the fucked-up one. I realized I was addicted to anger. And it was going to be up to me to straighten my shit out.”

On going through therapy for anger management and depression:
“It was profound, what happened to me in Tucson. My life kind of started over. I hit the reset button. On everything.”

On Christians trying to save him:
“Christians are always hitting me up. They all want to save me. I get it. I’m evil. Someone left a note on my car once. It said, ‘Will you party in hell?’ Probably. Hell’s likely not that bad. It’s probably like Phoenix. You know how shit gets exaggerated.”

On being unapologetic for publicly expressing his love for Kat Von D:
“Back when I was listening every day to some new person say what a fuckup I was, I hit the wall. I had a day where I was literally wondering how much more of this I could take. And one person reached out. Guess who that was? Everyone else thought I was toxic. The fact that Kat is willing to be with me now? And get demonized in the tabloids for it? God, I really love her.”

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From Matthew Teague’s Black Ops and Blood Money:

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Hearing the American’s name whispered in his ear, the chief of police in Lahore, Pakistan, turns from his desk and nods toward a nondescript side door in his office. His desk sits surrounded by concentric rings of chairs, occupied by visitors hoping for a moment of Chief Aslam Tareen’s time. Lahore is a city of 10 million people, and justice demands constant attention. But before he’ll discuss the American — perhaps the most notorious American in Pakistan’s history — Tareen needs privacy. He leaves his desk and slips through the side door into a smaller, more secluded office. A bed is in the corner, along with a television, and an attendant brings a pair of slippers and sets them before the chief’s leather recliner. In Pakistan the truth is like a woman; it stays veiled in public, only fully revealing itself behind closed doors. And this particular subject is a treacherous one.

“Raymond Davis,” Tareen says, settling into his chair. “Spy.”

Davis operated in the darkest shadows of the war against terrorism. He worked for the CIA as an independent contractor, gathering information on the jihadist group behind some of the most cruel and spectacular attacks in recent years. The intelligence operation collapsed violently in January when two Pakistani men accosted Davis on a crowded street and he shot them both dead with a skill rarely seen outside spy novels. A botched attempt to rescue him in the -aftermath left a third man dead and Davis under arrest. 

The episode inflamed the Pakistani people and set up a tricky showdown between two governments. It also pierced the cloak covering a clandestine world, exposing a realm of surveillance and countersurveillance, suspicion and political exploitation. For the United States, the consequences were profound: Pakistan is the CIA’s most important arena, a hiding spot for Al Qaeda and home of a dangerous, rising terrorist militia called Lashkar-e-Taiba. But Davis’s eventual release cost America much more than the money that was paid to compensate victims’ families: Backroom deals have forced the withdrawal of CIA operatives from the heartland of terrorism.

In the days after the incident, Police Chief Tareen announced to an outraged public that the American had murdered young Pakistani men “in cold blood.” But now, in his private chamber, Tareen can’t disguise a tone of professional admiration.

He had questioned Davis himself, but “from day one to day 14, he would not talk,” he says. Two weeks of silence. And then?

“He was in solitary,” Tareen says. “He said he wanted something to read.” They gave him magazines.

“He was very well trained,” says the chief. “Very calm.”

But what about the incident, I ask — the one that brought on the greatest intelligence crisis in America’s history with Pakistan? What about the shooting?

Tareen smiles.

“The shooting was expert.”

For more on this inflammatory international incident, check out our June issue.

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PLUS:

• Five versatile red wines, best served cold. 
• Learn to run rapids like a pro.
• Travel beyond Machu Picchu with Mark Adams’s adventurous book excerpt.
• Choose from six of the best new tennis rackets, mercilessly tested by a former pro.
• Glorious yet unknown Yosemite spots, revealed.
• Are we ready for the next big earthquake?

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